Happy Baishakhi Mela. Today was Bengali new year - the first day of year 1413. I don’t know wether those last two digits are unlucky, but certainly Brick Lane seemed to be happy about seeing the new year in. I went down there this morning to watch the processions and wander through the markets. The whole place was buzzing and very friendly, and there was so much unfamiliar food on offer.

At one point a wedding procession came through, with the beautifully-dressed bride and groom and their entourage riding in a succession of people-pulled carriages. Behind them a huge orange lion, twelve feet tall roared as it cycled down the street with drummers on its back, and behind it came the flag wavers that bring up the rear in any procession.

It was a fantastic mix of colours and smells and, probably flavours, although I resisted all the tempting eats. When it had all passed by, I walked over to St Pauls to pick up some geocaches. Three very interesting ones today, the first of which was tucked under a gravestone in a small park near the Museum of London. I’d never seen that garden before, but it’s very nice, and you’d never believe it was right in the middle of the city. It was quite easy to find, because there were really very few places you could hide a cache of any great size there without it being too obvious.

There were another two close by: one on the side of the BT HQ, and another just down below the Millennium Bridge.

I’d arranged to meet with Nik after that, so skipped the fourth one until we’d wandered up to Covent Garden for fruit shakes, and then back down across the river to four anonymous looking benches outside the London Studios. One, the clues assured us, had a small box gaffer-raped to the underside, inside of which we would find a small log and a pen to fill it in. It would just be a matter of bending down as though we were tying a shoelace to find it.

Well, it was fairly obvious from the clues which bench we needed, but not only was the cache missing, one of the slats was, too, making it very uncomfortable to sit on. We tried two other possible benches but they, too, were devoid of treasure, so it looks like this one has been found by the uninitiated and carted off.

We stayed on the last bench we tried of the next hour or so, chatting and watching the skyline slowly dim as the sun went down. It was cool, but not unpleasantly cold, and was very relaxing, watching the world go by. A good way to end the weekend.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 14th, 2006 at 10:57 pm and is filed under Geocaching, Journal, London. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.