Over the weekend I escaped London for the day and went down to the seaside. Well, to the English Channel, which is kind of like the seaside. We went to Brighton, to be exact. I had seen the channel before, last year while living in Dunkerque, France. It’s amazing how different it is from this side. I was further west on a wider part of the channel, but even so the two cities could not have been more different. For all my photos from the day go over to the set on flickr.
The day started early and ended late, just the way a day out of town should. It was full of photography and laughter and sun. Oh, and shopping. Shoe shopping to be exact. I finally found a pair of boots to keep my feet cozy, warm, and dry this winter. And they are cute. But I digress. Brighton. Brighton is more or less straight south of London to the coast about an hour and a half on the train and also known as London by the sea. It’s busy and there seems to be enough to do. The pebble beach is perfect for sitting on and staring out at the sea. There is greenery throughout the town and on sunny days like last Sunday the colors in this town really pop.
Even though it looks warm due to the saturation of sun, it was cool, on the verge of cold. Maybe 13ºC (55ºF) and the clear, clean air didn’t hold any heat. But it was crisp and gorgeous as we walked down the hill from the train station to the beach. I had accompanied a friend and a bunch of her course mates instead of hanging with my ICCE crowd. All these girls are on a photography course so the lot of us spent the first hour and a half with our face buried in our cameras, discussing this and that about photography. It was so relaxing to be on a trip with other people who get as camera happy as I do… you don’t have your friends staring at you and waiting for you to finish taking a picture of that rock or this wall for the zillionth time, because they’re doing the same thing. We took lunch at a little place on the beach where in I had some quintessentially British food – fish and chips with mushy peas. We then continued our wandering and went down to the pier, in to town for shopping, more wandering. At the end of the day, as the sun was setting we speed walked back to the beach and took pictures of the sunset while trying to make it back to the train station for our train. After a super fast walk up the hill we made it onto the train with 2 minutes to spare. phew.
All in all, I absolutely loved being back on the beach, though, again, the sun was on the wrong side of town when it set. I need to make it out to the west coast here, see if sunsets over the Atlantic are as good as the ones over the Pacific… we’ll see.
