Nyan Thomas L's Blog

We went to Margate a couple weeks back. What’s Margate, you ask, and why did we go there?

Margate is a seaside town about 90 minutes east of London. It was once a popular spot for seaside get-aways, but like most English seaside resort towns, nobody goes there for vacation any more. So what’s left is… not much, to be frank. It is definitely a faded town, without a whole lot going for it. They’ve tried in recent years to revamp it – the town dropped some 70 million pounds on a fancy glass-clad art museum along the waterfront, a lot of the buildings have been restored, there are some nice parks, and there are the usual festivals and whatnot. All well and good, but there still isn’t a lot of there there.

We don’t mean to be unduly harsh on poor Margate. There’s nothing at all *wrong* with the place. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re trying out a new modus operandi here at Nyan Thomas World Headquarters: every Sunday, we try to do a special event, usually an out-of-town trip to see a bit of the countryside, spend some family time together, try to keep the little guy from getting bored. We’ve only recently formalized this process, and here we share our first outing: a road trip, a couple weeks back, to the seaside town of Brighton.

Brighton is about an hour-plus south of London, on the southern shore of the island. It’s a charming little place, with lots of interesting activities and architecture. It’s also a seaside resort, so there’s also a grubby element of carnival rides, cheap seaside restaurants, and lots of touristas wandering about. In that sense, it reminds your blogger of New York’s Coney Island, and not in a good way. The ‘sand’ on the beach is large pebbles, almost small rocks, and the water is a murky green. And the day we were there was densely overcast, with horrible light that made photography quite tricky.

But don’t get us wrong: we really enjoyed it. There were, as mentioned, lots of interesting things going on, it was a gorgeous drive down there, the people were friendly, the town had a nice vibe to it… and there was a giant Ferris wheel right on the shore. Here’s our hero up above it all:

And some photos as well:

Read the rest of this entry »