notes

The weather’s great. I spent yesterday’s afternoon in Hyde Park, with my friend. We had a nice walk along the Serpentine and we spent some time in Serpentine Gallery Pavilion – the black barn-like building with a stunning plant explosion in the middle – by Piet Oudolf (world-famous Dutch gardener). The bike ride to get there was nice too (a bit too hot though… but i’m not going to complain, we are not getting a lot of too hot here).

Johan and I spent last weekend in New Forest – the nature reserve, just 1,5 h from London. It’s a place where ponies, donkeys and cows (cows of a very furry, ginger type, with enormous horns) just walk freely around the place (including towns as well). We stayed just outside Brockenhurst, at a very quiet Graceland Farm. They had donkeys there. The donkeys are the saddest animals ever. They are cute as well.
We rent a tandem, which we used to get around forest for 2 days. It was fun! Yes, I was at the back seat. It was the first time in my life I was biking with my eyes closed (not all the time, no).
They had mushrooms there! I was very happy to find Red-capped scaber stalks (huh, a long name for a kozak) in a big quantity.
We visited Isle of Wight, very briefly. We liked it a lot, I think we’ll come back there for a longer visit – it looks like a very good place for biking.

We went to London International Animation Festival recently. There was a “Focus on Poland” event, with Polish animations, obviously, which I mostly liked. It would be nice though, to see something funny and heart-warming, for a change… But, animations were good (besides being depressing). I liked this one and this one. We also saw one of the international programs, and “the best of”.  Well, I liked this one.
We’ll have another film treat in October: BFI London Film Festival. I’m very happy they will show Martin Sulik film.

We went to Canterbury recently, you can get there in 1 hour, by a fast train. We went also to Dover to see the white cliffs. And we went for a walk in the country (Chartham). They like to walk here, in UK. There is a lot of guides on the internet, and the walking trails are well maintained.
Canterbury is a very quiet and very old. Bit boring after a while. But it has nice places, like La Trappiste Bar, where we spent a lot of time. They have a vegetarian breakfast there (we weren’t able to get up for 7.30 breakfast in our B&B).
The long (4-days long) weekend was really nice, it was raining only on the last day, so we came back home in the afternoon (after a nice breakfast in La Trappiste).