Because Thursday had been such a day on the go we hadn't made any really significant plans for Friday. In fact, we had no plans at all.
For breakfast we went to a restaurant near the apartment that had been recommended by two of my friends plus the tour guide the other day. It was deserving of the recommendations!



Next up was some shopping - there were two of London's better chocolate shops nearby and with Easter coming it made sense to purchase some treats.
Later we headed out to the Whitechapel Art Gallery. This small gallery focuses on modern art. The Whitechapel Gallery was founded in 1901 to bring great art to the people of east London. The Gallery’s history is a history of firsts: in 1939 Picasso’s masterpiece, Guernica was displayed at the Whitechapel Gallery on its first and only visit to Britain; in 1958 the Gallery presented the first major show in Britain of American abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock; and in 1970 and 1971 the first shows of David Hockney, Gilbert & George and Richard Long were staged to great acclaim.

The major exhibit featured groups of artists and architects working together to envision the future. It was a modern iteration of a similar exhibit from 1956. Anther exhibit told the story of when the gallery held the first exhibition of Jackson Pollock's work outside of the US. There were also two video art installations.
After leaving the gallery we wandered Brick Lane - a street we had heard a lot about from everyone we spoke to who knows this area of London. It was easy to see why: eye-popping street art, street food markets, vintage finds and cutting edge designers, it’s everything that makes East London such a vibrant wonderful place, distilled into a thin cobbled street that’s seen more action over the last 100 years than possibly anywhere else in town. This street has seen waves of immigration which has caused it to develop such an interesting mix of things - at one time this was home to poor Jewish immigrants - hence the two dueling bagel shops sitting side by side at the end of the street. Now there is a large Muslim population giving rise to a mosque and middle eastern restaurants. In between there was a wave of Bangladeshi immigrants - this group gave the street its nickname 'curry lane'. The end result is a fascinating mix of everything.



Oh yes, along the way we found another chocolate spot.
The clothing market near us was in full swing. We wandered through but we weren't looking at the clothing instead we were looking for the food trucks that Paul had read about. There were about 20 and they served up just about an type of food that you could think of. We both got a chicken katsu wrap and headed back to the apartment to eat them.
It had been a lot of wandering around but we weren't done yet. After a nap we were talking about heading out for a drink and somehow that morphed into a visit to the National Gallery. The gallery is open late on Fridays so we headed there. We only saw about a third of the exhibits but it was a great bookend to the est of the art we had seen during the day.





One thing about London - there is always something to do and no matter how hard you try, it is difficult to do more than scratch the surface.