Chinese New Year.

we decided to take a trip uptown to Chinatown and see what the year of the Horse would bring, seeing as its Chinese new year. Also we would take in the Kings road to see what they had to offer in our first uptown junk tour of the new year.

First of all we had to get there, and we may do the whole thing via Oyster card in future as a one day travelcard is now £8.90 and oyster has a daily cap.  And there would be more unpleasantness in store for me.

Unthinkingly I didn't charge my camera so didn't get too many shots and almost none at all of the new year festivities. I'll post some of what I did at the end as it was worth it but you can curse my stupidity for most of this stuff.

Continuing on with my journey, I made it to Sloane Square station without much hassle, pro tip if you want to get back to the West End from here take the next stop to Victoria and change for the Victoria Line and go to  Green Park. You can either exit from there and walk or have the choice of Jubilee or Piccadilly Lines to take you to Bond Street or Leicester Square.

Kings Road then, mostly its unsufferably posh. They have a Waitrose and a Marks & Spencer and a load of boutique shops where if you have to ask the price you can't afford it. I had memories that they had an HMV but nobody makes CDs anymore so it went bust (more on this later).  They had a nice little art gallery specializing in dog prints and watercolours.  I suspect they had other stuff but they wanted £300 for a dog made out of what seems like a bent paper clip stuck on canvas, they had a nice shaggy dog painting but most of the stuff there I could do just as well.

Putting aside all thoughts of dogs, we decided to check out a small mall on the other side of the street, and came across what seems to be a ghetto for the regular high street.  It didn't have a Poundland but it did have a massive branch of the YMCA charity shop (over two floors people) and a mobile phone accessory shop. we got a book in YMCA which is possibly the most inaccurate work on exotic flowers, not only weirdly translated from Italian, but having different pictures on occasion the globe thistle Echinops is represented by a photo of a Chrysanthemum.

Confident that I had seen enough of the Kings road and its utter cunts in sports cars (too noisy), I decided to explore the west end.

Making my way through to Piccadilly we found that the Japan Centre had moved from Regents Street to a place on Shaftsbury avenue.  It seems much smaller now and is entirely upstairs.  Their magazine choice seems smaller too, no Famitsu to pick up but they did have some pricey artbooks on Persona 4 Animation.
we got a nice blueberry Capri Sun jelly drink that was like drinking the jam bit from a Muller Fruit Corner.

Anyway we made our way to the Trocadero and was amazed that they had a small arcade there in the basement.  Its not a patch on the old Leisure Casino (now fruit machine only) but it rivals the original Troc for arcade games.  I.E. it has a load of big showy ride style arcade cabs like Deadstone pirates and Time Crisis, if you like that sort of thing then go ahead. There was some good stuff there, they had a few coin pushers such as X Quacker where I won a manky keyring, and Willie Wheels a driving game aimed at under 5's judging by the size of the cab.

The time I made my way out it was time to hit China town and see what they had to offer by way of entertainment and I wasn't disappointed.  They had the streets closed off and lion dancers complete with drum group at the back and by that time my camera decided to die on me so from this point on there are no photos.

It was crowded and noisy what with the drums, but the lion dancing was amazing as they snaked their way down through the streets and up to the various stores. They had a black lion as well as a yellow lion dancing and the percussion was rather cool.  Seeing enough I decided to look down Oxford street and go through the massively respectable Old Compton Street (the Gay part of town is always well presented) home.

Could have seen Michael Rosen talk about the holocaust at the socialist bookshop but to be honest I'd rather see a nice YTP of him instead. He's got a twitter account here if you want to talk to him, keep it civil and not quote bits of old poops especially stuff like Babyshitter.  Oh yeah HMV is closed, that massive flagship store on Oxford street is now boarded up and looks rather forlorn, no one bought their CDs at massive mark up so now all we have is the Charity shops keeping physical media alive. With that in mind and a short trip to Phonica for a nice compilation on CD we decided to call it a day and go home.

  photos to follow.

Willie Wheels, Incidentally that steering wheel is knee high.

Setting up for lion dancing.

LCD Malfunction at the troc.