MIKE AND JESS' TRAVEL DIARY

After 18 hours of traveling, we arrived in Covent Garden, London. We checked our bags into the Hub by Premier hotel and slowly walked to the Brick Lane Sunday markets, stopping regularly for photos of the buildings and statues we passed. The Brick Lane area is best known for Indian food and is where Tikka Masala was born. As the story goes, it started off as an Indian dish but because the English were not much fans of spice, a ton of cream was added to the dish to make it to their taste, and it became wildly popular! The sidewalks were empty until we hit the markets where now the streets were packed with people and once in a while, a car would come along trying to creep through the sea of people.

We first hit the Upmarket food market which had culinary representation including Indonesian, Singapore street food, Dutch pancakes, Thai noodles, Indian curries, Mexican street tacos, you name it. We decided upon some Singapore noodles, Indian curry, and a bowl of 12 different Indian-influenced dishes ladled on top of each other. This bowl started with vegetarian side dishes like biryani rice, chickpea curry, feta and olives, and like 6 more I can’t remember. Then, it was topped with the meat curry of our choice (spicy option for us, obviously) and cilantro naan. This whole monstrosity was only 9 British pounds. Crazy.