Brighton

Last year we went to Brighton. I meant to write a post about it but I never got around to it. I still haven’t written a post about Oxford and that was multiple years ago now. I barely took any photos anyway.

We arrived on a Wednesday. Our first impression of Brighton was positive, because it was such an inclusive place that a homeless man was playing the piano in the train station. This image was shattered minutes later when the homeless man was evicted from the station and started screaming abuse at them.

I also couldn’t figure out how to get to the correct road from where we were because there was a surprise wall in the way. But eventually we managed to loop back around. We explored the shops in the North Laine area, where I bought some shoes from Vegetarian Shoes, despite the fact that they didn’t have my size, so now I have a very nice pair of shoes that are far too big and only fit if I am standing still. We also purchased some random bits (mostly out of sympathy) from The Captain Pig, which is a very small vegan shop, unfortunately placed not very far from a huge vegetarian shop. We also visited some bookshops and stuff.

So easy to browse.

I seem to recall we ate lunch at Wai Kika Moo Kau and neither of us liked our food and it was quite overpriced.

We walked down to our hotel, via CEX, because this is our holiday tradition. If we stay somewhere with a DVD player, then we buy some random thing to watch while we are there. We chose the classic movie… Journey To The Center Of The Earth starring Brendan Fraser.

We stayed at the Oriental, which was nice enough, although twin rooms always feel like an afterthought. Our view was directly on to someone else's balcony covered in cigarettes and what I hope was a container of alcohol but might have been urine. Needless to say, we kept the blind drawn as much as possible.

We went to have dinner at Beelzebab at The Hope and Ruin, but it turns out this is an absolutely dinky pub and half the tables were reserved for the live music. I’m not sure whether we were allowed to sit there or not, but the rest of the place was packed. I didn’t have a backup plan and we just miserably hovered about. In the end, we decided to buy the food and eat it while we walked to our concert. However, it took ages for the food to be ready and by this time, a table had become free, so even though we had ordered ‘to go’ we ate in. We rushed the food and it wasn’t very nice anyway, so that whole experience wasn’t great.

Then we went on to the Brighton Dome Concert Hall where one of the security guards harassed The Housemate. However, the show was really good, because we love The Divine Comedy.

Office Politics Tour

Then we went back to the hotel.

On the Thursday, we had a vegan breakfast at the hotel and then went down to Brighton Beach to admire it in the late autumn weather.

British Airways i360

West Pier

We visited the Upside Down House, which was actually super fun.

The housemate got a drink at The Flour Pot Bakery, which took forever, and possibly we bought some kind of pasties, I can't recall now, and we bought ice creams from V360, although I was really confused because they were actually closed for the winter and their vegan ice cream machine had been moved into someone else’s bit, which was advertising fish and chips.

We went for a walk on Brighton Palace Pier

It was windy.

and briefly looked around the Lanes but by this point, we were getting kind of bored and I didn’t have any specific shops in mind so then we just went on to the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery.

This is the only photo we took in the entire museum.

This was pretty disappointing and we were so worn out by this point that I don’t think either of us appreciated it.

So we headed back to the station, via Glazed for some vegan doughnuts. The Housemate got a nice vegan sausage roll at the station. And that is my brief tale of Brighton. We got home to our babies, who we had left alone over night for the first time.

I think that I was so stressed during the first part of the trip (The Housemate had no ID and I was afraid they would need it at the hotel) and then when dinner went wrong, and that bouncer got aggy for no reason, that I wasn’t really able to appreciate Brighton very much. Then we were so worn out on the second day and the museum was disappointing, and it’s all bloody uphill, and I missed my babies, that, aside from the show which was great, I didn’t really enjoy Brighton.

Which is a real shame, since it is so open and inclusive towards veganism and the LGBTQIA+ community and just people in general.

The Housemate liked it though.