Farewell to London Town

The last day in London was seriously gorgeous. I got to the book fair really early specifically so I could get one of the LBF's official totes before they ran out, but then didn't have anything to do until the one seminar I wanted to go to at one. Happily Laura and Rachel headed up to meet me. 

We went out for a really tasty brunch (I was hungry pretty much the entire time I was at the book fair - wandering around all day for like, seven days made me really hungry).

Then I went to this talk, which was pretty much my favourite of the conference. The twitter recap is, again, on my tumblr (bottom up for chronological order).

They had these big screens downstairs that were showing tweets about LBF - I didn't get a pic, but people kept coming up to me saying they had seen one of my tweets on these screens (in this pic you can see half a tweet mentioning me though - thanking me for live-tweeting the YA seminar).

Laura went to catch her train, but Jonny and Rachel both had time to kill, so we headed over to Hyde Park to enjoy the sunshine.

Hyde Park is one of the largest parks in London, and one of the Royal Parks of London, famous for its Speakers' Corner.

I noticed quite a few Muslim women around London this time - there were quite a few women out in burqas with their kids in the park. Part of the reason I love London is definitely its diversity - I feel at times that I have spend all my life moving from one majority-white place to another.

Such a nice day. We stopped and hung out on the grass for quite a while...

...before heading into Kensington in search for Frozen Yogurt.

Success!!

We then headed over to Berkeley Square in search of an art installation Connie had told me about called The Sun.

Dale Chihuly unveiled The Sun in London’s Berkeley Square to the world’s press on the 3 April 2014. The 5.5 Metre installation consists of 1,573 hand-blown glass elements, weighs 2,000 Kilos and is illuminated each night.

The Sun has been on view in many prestigious museums and gardens around the world including the New York Botanical Garden (2006), de Young Museum (2008), the Salk Institute for Biological Studies (2010) and the Montreal Museum of Fine Art (2013).

It was very, very beautiful, and definitely worth the detour.

After that, we went to Starbucks for a bit, before splitting up for me to catch my train at seven.

LBF & Camden Lock

The second day of LBF was just as fun as the first, starting with an excellent talk on BookTube, which gave me some really good pointers for my own youtube channel (beware of cussing if you decide to watch my videos). Again, I'm not gonna go into too much detail, as you can again find the complete twitter recount over on my tumblr (again, read from the bottom up). 

Hachette had a balcony! Also, another bonus of this trip: I learned to pronounce Hachette properly, and not like a painfully oblivious anglophile.

This was the first year that the gaming industry had been invited into the book fair, so I ended up going to quite a few talks on that, as they were really interesting, including a Q&A with Rihanna Pratchett,  who writes for video games and also happens to be Terry Pratchett's daughter.

I got quite a few totes at the London book fair - you can see a couple more of them in my video recap of the LBF - but this one was definitely my favourite, from Laurence King Publishing.

There was a meet-and-greet at the Publishing Scotland stand at the end of the day at which I spectacularly failed to network at, and which Laura, Alix, Rachel, Kate, and I eventually ditched in order to find some food - we decided to head over to Camden Lock for some cheap street food.

I really like the neighbourhood of Camden - apparently its really tourist-y, but it also seemed to be where all the weird people hung out, so I liked being there.

Plus all the buildings are decorated.

Kate and I decided to go for vegetarian curry - all that? Cost me £3. YUM.

Super beat up motorcycle seats...

After that we decided to get crepes for dessert because it was crepe happy hour, so they were a quid off (yeah, no, we would have got them anyways).

YUM. 

This trip has resulted in a lot more people being aware of just how much I am not kidding when I talk about how crazy my hair is - as seen in this lovely before-and-after shot.