EastEnders

No, not the long-running BBC soap opera (though I did get introduced to that on Friday night)...

Instead, we spent most of our Sunday north of the river, exploring the section of London once known as the East End. Famous as the home (at various points in its history) to London's Cockneys, criminals, working-class Jewish community, and avant-garde artists, it's now (surprise, surprise) a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood that made us fee like we'd never left Brooklyn! Hooray!

We began just west of the East End in "the City." The Barbican Centre is a housing/cultural development erected in the sixties in an area that had been heavily bombed during the Blitz. Home to an apartment complex as well as a cultural centre with film, theatre and visual arts (like Lincoln Center or BAM) it looks like a weird concrete jungle of bridges and walkways very cut off from the pedestrian life of the city.

For some reason, there was an outdoor art installation of a small wooden hut in the courtyard which you could enter and have tea in...

Look's like Bilbo Baggins's house in Lord of the Rings, no?

After this, we headed east and popped briefly into a Victorian Turkish Bath that had been renovated into a cool restaurant space.

From there, we crossed into Whitechapel, the true gateway to the East End, and visited its flagship artistic institution, the Whitechapel Art Gallery, which has been in the area since well before it was trendy (1901, to be exact) and now shows contemporary exhibitions in the line of the New Museum (we saw an Elizabeth Peyton show that had actually been on in New York earlier this year). It was interesting to learn that Picasso's "Guernica" had been brought into the gallery in 1939 as the backdrop for an anti-fascist rally during the Spanish Civil War.

We continued on to Brick Lane, the street associated with the South Asian immigrant community and one of the most popular areas to stop in for a curry.

Round the corner from Brick Lane is the Old Spitalfields Market, once a Victorian fruit and vegetable exchange, now re-developed into a glitzy conglomeration of stalls and boutiques, like Chelsea Market but much bigger.

The facades of the buildings retain their old English character, as evidenced by this coffeehouse where we stopped for afternoon tea.

Yes, folks, after more than ten days in London, we finally sat down for a true English "cream tea," replete with scones, clotted cream, and strawberry jam. Mmmmmm....

The northern end of Brick Lane appears to be home to East London's hipster community and on Sunday, the place is taken over by hip, artsy markets, filled with young people from all over Europe eating gourmet street food and buying silk-screened t-shirts and other cool curios. I felt at home. I don't know why. I had been feeling a bit disoriented in London over the past few days but discovering this part of the neighborhood made me feel like a fish thrown back in the pond. God bless bourgeois bohemia!

There was an American guitarist serenading the throngs.

This red London bus hat been fitted out as a beer and food stand.

Jazzing up your fashion (or your interior decoration) with peacock feathers appeared to be all the rage...

After sampling a chorizo sandwich and a chicken satay wrap, we strolled up to Shoreditch and saw how urban decay had yet again been transformed by the arrival of hip commercialism.

This was our first trip to the East End, but it's not likely to be our last!