London

There were a couple of reasons I was looking forward to visiting London. Similar to visiting New York for the first time, I felt this great sense of anticipation, of finally getting to visit another of the world's great metropolises (metropoli?)--cities you know so much about before even setting foot within their limits. I was also looking forward to catching up with Jacqueline, an old friend from Montreal now based in London ( and who welcomed me into her East London pad.) Oh, and there were those meetings with my professors at the University of London.

But the most important was the food.

Nine months in Bilbao had seen me eat my weight in delicious Basque cuisine--steak, cod, rich sauces, ham and pintxos--but I longed for spice. Mexican salsas, Thai chilis, Jamaican jerk, curries from all over the Indian subcontinent--I wanted spicy heat of all kinds. I wanted to this one weekend to be the kind of international food mosaic that makes up the normal diet of young inner city dwellers in a large, multicultural city. In London like in Montreal, cheap, quick, late-night or take-out food is synonymous with "something new and flavourful from somewhere other than here", and every grocery trip to your neighbourhood immigrant-run corner market sees you throwing something new and unfamiliar into the cart.

And boy, did I get what I wanted. Spice, flavour, and treats simply not to be found in a smaller city like Bilbao: curries, roti, sushi, soupe tonkinoise, bubble tea, organic rhubarb/apple juice... In fact, most of my weekend was spent wandering around the different neighbouhoods and revelling in all the things London is but Bilbao isn't: huge, overflowing, teeming with people from every country imaginable, exhilarating in the sheer variety of types of people and personalities on the streets, in the shops, in the Underground.

Speakers' Corner, Hyde Park

International food market, Brick Lane, East London

Columbia Road Flower Market, East London