By 4PM we were absolutely ravenous (we had been searching for a restaurant for hours, but had been unable to find one that wasn’t full-to-the-brim with marketgoers), and stopped into Pizza East, an industrial-style pizza and antipasti restaurant in East London. 

Giggling like twelve-year-olds outside a naughtily-named bar near Spitalfields. Can you spot the creative Photoshop? 

This bar, incidentally, was named for Richard Bentley, a prosperous 18th-century merchant who some say was the inspiration for Dickens’ Miss Havisham. Bentley was a neat, well-dressed man in his youth, but following the death of his fiancee refused to clean himself or his home/warehouse/shop, which soon became notorious for its disrepair (any letter addressed to “The Dirty Warehouse” was automatically directed to Bentley). Fortunately, the present-day bar retains the original site’s “atmosphere” only in the form of artifacts safely stowed away in a glass display case. 

Parisa and I on the way to Spitalfields Market…at 2PM, because none of us woke up until noon, totally by accident. Watching X Factor and eating Persian food is exhausting work, it seems. And see how I’m wearing sunglasses? That’s because it was sunny! Kind of. 

Spitalfields is a covered market with antiques, fashion & crafts stalls. I toyed with the idea of purchasing a vintage metal “S” (like this one) to hang on our door, but ended up buying a pair of cheap sunglasses (knockoffs of these Ray-Bans in white) that are probably too weird for me to ever wear and a postcard for my grandmother. 

Talbots scarf.