Brighton

One of the places I wanted to visit when I came to England was Brighton.  It's a seaside community that was very popular in Jane Austin's day and still is.  Only one hour from London by train.  So as Lydia Bennett said to her family in Pride and Prejudice, "I want to go to Brighton."  And Mary was kind enough to say OK.

The first thing you notice about the place is that it is huge.  Rows and rows of houses on cliffs that overlook the sea or on hills that slope down to it.  People were everywhere on Friday, a bank holiday in England.  We later learned that there are about 500,000 permanent residents and many more who come for the day, the weekend or the week.

This is the street from the train station leading to the beach.  Note the street lamps.

The street closest to the beach is lined with very tall buildings in the "Regency" style.

The beach itself is filled with pebbles, so there were fewer people on the beach than there were on the.....(I can't say boardwalk, because it was concrete) beach walk.

(That's some kind of sculpture on the beach and the husk of an old pier out in the water.)

The first thing we did is find a restaurant for lunch.  My guidebook had recommended Jamie Oliver's Italian so we went there.  (Jamie is known as the Naked Chef and is a big celebrity here)

The food was good but nothing spectacular.

Then we took a bus tour of the city and got off at the Royal Pavilion, the handiwork of the Prince Regent, eldest son of King George III, the mad king and our nemesis during the Revolutionary war.  The Regent, who gave his name to the Regency period, was a "lover of fine food and women."  And he must have had a bit of his father's madness, because this is what he built in Brighton.

It looks a bit like Disneyland and a bit like the great palaces in India.  The weird thing is, on the inside it's all Chinese.  And over-the-top does not really give the place its due.  It defines the word gaudy.  For instance, in the banqueting hall, there is a one-ton chandelier that is held at the ceiling by the claws of a dragon.  And that is just one of the many dragons on the ceiling.  The music room has huge lotus-blossom lamps and apparently had carpeting that was so deep you could lose your shoes in it.  And all the colors of the rainbow in every room.  It was quite overwhelming.  Unfortunately, no photos were allowed.

We went back to the beach and had a diet coke while we watched people being hurled into the air on these contraptions that were like bungy cords.

We were right by the Brighton Pier which appears to be an amusement pier with roller coaster rides.

Of course, there were less violent rides on the beach as well.

The whole day seemed almost surrealistic--at the beach in England at the end of April and it was probably 75 degrees and there were loads and loads of people there.

At about 7PM, we made our way back to the train station for our one-hour trip back to the real world, or as close as we can get to it in Shoreditch.