Assignment 5- East End

The east end of London is very diverse. It is also the main location for the majority of the Indian population. It is not one of the places you would call the nicest parts of London, as back in the day it was one of the poor locations of London and if you had money, you wouldn’t live there. The overall appearance of the east end and central London, where we live, is drastically different as well. In central London there are several tall buildings, and the normal size for a building would be over six stories I’d say, but in the east end, there aren’t the tall buildings and most of them are maybe two or three stories.

The part I enjoyed most about this walk, was Brick Lane. Brick Lane is something that I have never experienced before, but it was fun to walk through. The street is lined with different restaurants and pubs, most of them serving Indian food of some sort. Just standing at the end of the street, you could see somebody standing outside the door of nearly every establishment, which at first seemed a bit strange as you don’t see that in the states too often. Moving down the street, those people standing outside the establishments would start trying to get you to come inside and get food there by offering different deals like fifty percent off food or three free pints. There were even times when people standing outside another establishment would start yelling at you from across the street as you were talking to another person shouting out their offer to you trying to get you away from them and to come over to theirs. They were quite competitive people, and seemed as if everybody was offering some number of free pints to Americans walking down the street.

Eventually I got to the actual market on Brick Lane and really enjoyed that. Everything smelled so good. The opening of it was full of different food stands, once again mostly of the Indian variety. I ended up getting a pancake, but it’s different from a pancake in the states. It was definitely a sweeter kind of food with nutella and bananas on the inside of it. It was well worth the purchase. Once getting past all of the food stands, there were stands selling everything from clothing to jewelry. That part wasn’t as interesting to me as the food part, but it was still fun to walk through and see the different things that were being sold. After going through Brick Lane, we found a nice little pub and just sat down and relaxed for a while. There aren’t too many pubs in the area, which is another difference from the center of London as there are pubs everywhere, sometimes a couple on the same block.