The past week has flown by! I went to work last week Tuesday-Thursday because Chelsea and I were in Amsterdam on Monday. My whole week was thrown off; we never got a chance to catch up on sleep until Saturday morning! I'm so used to having Thursday to myself. I started to input all of the spring and summer 2010 styles onto the Braintree website. By doing that I was also able to streamline all of the color names and other information like that on all the order forms and the sketchbooks, making sure everything was the same so as not to confuse the customers, the factories or ourselves!!! I also had to take down some sold out styles from the a retail website that sells Braintree but that we (the company) have to input all of our own data (pictures, everything). Braintree is doing really well, they are sold out of a lot of styles for Autumn/Winter. The company seems to be growing at a good rate which is really good!
Thursday night, Chelsea, Bridget and I decided to check out the fireworks that were celebrating Guy Fawkes Night. "Remember, remember the 5th of November..." ring a bell? Ever see V for Vendetta? Guy Fawkes Night celebrates Guy Fawkes and his groups' failure to blow up Parliament. Its the biggest celebration of someone's failure EVER. Fireworks are set off all over the place for over a week. November 5th is the night his plan was supposed to take place until he was caught and failed! We wandered around, heard lots of fireworks. We ended up eating at Pizza Express along the Thames. After dinner we wandered back towards our flat and decided to check out a road we'd never been down before. It has big office buildings with all these neon lights all over the place. We ending up finding a cute little square (The Square) of stores. A nice paper/stationary store called Paperchase, a cute boutique, chocolate shop, and an organic restaurant/take out place.
Friday we watched "This is England" in class. It was mostly based on the director/writer's life. The main character is a young boy, about 12, who lost his father in the Falklands War. He's a loner and is bullied a lot of school. He befriends a group of skinheads and soon joins them. By the end he realizes what he's become and finds his way back. It was a really good moving. After we talked to Alan (our independent study professor). We told him about our trip to Belgium and Amsterdam. He gave us more places to go. One sounds really interesting, its called Cockpit Arts. Its a company that financially supports small designers. One of the stores Braintree sells to is supported by Cockpit Arms. Saturday Chelsea and I found the store at the Greenwich Market! It was so cute, really nice screen printed tees and tanks. After class, we had lunch and wandered back to The Square to do some browsing. The paper store was so cute! Lots of really nice things. We went to the organic restaurant and had some coffee and tea to warm up; its starting to get chilly here!!!
Saturday we FINALLY got to sleep in. It was so nice. When we decided to get up we got the bus to Greenwich, about 40 minutes ride outside the city. It was like we were in a different world! There was a drive through McDonald's and KFC and a Pizza Hut in a Pizza Hut building!!!! We were like where are we???? When we got to our stop we popped in a cute boutique called Coco-James that was featuring up-incoming designers. Then we headed over to the market place.
The market was AWESOME!!!! It was full of handmade things-sweaters, handbags, jewelry, headbands,t-shirts. There were stalls of really good looking food too, Ethiopian, Nigerian, an olive bar, sushi, fudge, hot apple cider. The cider was very tasty!!! The store supported by Cockpit Arms (Emma Nissim) was in the market. It was adorable. The store was a compact space filled with trunks, an old bike, and lots of cute, antique looking items, like someone's attic. The racks had one of each style hanging and the trunks were filled with the backstock. The store sells its own namesake brand and Braintree clothing. Emma Nissim is an eco-friendly brand like Braintree.
After we ate lunch we headed over to the Royal Observatory and National Maritime Museum, home of the Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), otherwise known as the Prime Meridian. We stood in two hemispheres at once! The Observatory had a laser marking the Prime Meridian too which was pretty cool because you could see it go out into the city. The view of the city from there was amazing too. We headed back into the city just in time to grab some dinner. Eya, Bridget, Chelsea and I went to Wagamama's, an Asian food chain. It was really good. For dessert I tried the Wasabi Chocolate Cake-delicious!!! Aubrey, our GE coordinator, recommended it. After dinner we filled in our calendar with our London "To-Do's" because our time is running out!!! FAST!!!
Sunday we slept in again (our little vacation took a lot out of us!). We had no plans for that day so Bridget, Chelsea and I decided to just head out and wander around from there. We went up to Camden Town and popped into the 99p store (the version of the dollar store). From there we went to King's Cross and checked out where Chelsea had stayed and hung out the first time she went to London. More wandering ensued from there until we found a 3 story Paperchase!!! I think we were in there for at least an hour, so much stuff to look at.
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