Since my visit was packed, I didn’t really have time to write daily. Therefore today I will be recounting how we spent our second day in London. As mentioned in the previous post, we were staying at the Travelodge London City Airport Hotel. The plan for the second day of our visit was to go, with my friend, to the Natural & Organic Products Europe fair at the Excel London, which is only an 8 minute walk away from our hotel.
Since there weren’t any food outlets in the area which we knew of, that we can have breakfast from, for that day, my boyfriend and I decided to spend £7.95 and take unlimited breakfast from the hotel. Lucky for me, I could have a vegetarian breakfast as they served Linda McCartney’s Sausages as a vegetarian alternative to meat sausages.
After breakfast, at around 9:30am we left to the Excel. This was my first time visiting a business fair outside Malta, and the first thing I noticed is how big the Excel was. Walking through it felt like walking through an airport.
Finally we managed to find the hall where the Natural & Organic Products Europe fair was being held. The fair was nice, however I found that like in any other fair, a lot of stalls were exhibiting the same product types and some stalls were exhibiting the same brands although they are not the same distributor.
However I enjoyed it, especially since I got a goodie bag from the Vegan Society and goodies from some stalls, which I will probably show you in a future post or video. From all the products that I’ve seen, the products that interested me were the bamboo sustainable sanitary towels which I have samples of, all the vegan cheese that I’ve tried which convinced me a bit more on trying to follow a vegan diet, the tooth whitening charcoal toothpaste which I have a sample of, and the slow juicer which we ended up buying. <3
There was another product that attracted my attention, however it’s a product that I won’t be interested to try or buy. This is Jimini’s insect snacks and bars. At first I thought they are snacks in the shape of insects but when the employee on the stand explained that they are cooked insects, I couldn’t believe my ears. My boyfriend tried out the grasshopper bar taster and he said it’s good. I would probably have tried them if I wouldn’t have noticed that they contain insects, but now that I know I wouldn’t.
The juicer that we bought is from Juico Juicers and for just £90 (€100), I got a juicer which will help me juice every fruit, veg and leafy greens, and make my own nut milks, tofu and ice creams. Also with the juicer I got a free set of 3 ceramic knifes that retail for £59.99 (€78) 😀
As soon as we bought the juicer, my boyfriend and I went back to the hotel to try to fit it in the luggage. We had to leave the box behind us as to fit it we had to unbox it. However I kept all the documents it contained just in case we need them in the future.
We then decided to do a bit of sightseeing and get dinner from London city center, so from DLR’s London City Airport station, we went towards Tower Gateway station where we took facade pictures of the London Bridge and the Tower of London. Then we walked and looked for a restaurant. There were a lot to choose from, and we were always filtering food outlets by price and the availability of vegetarian options. STRADA was the choice for the afternoon.
From STRADA, we decided to take advantage of their Set Menu where I ordered the Tomato Bruschetta and the Pizza Fiorentina. They were both delicious, however I didn’t give them 5 stars on TripAdvisor only because they didn’t mention in their menu that the pizza consists of also Parmesan, which makes it not vegetarian friendly.
Since there was still daylight, I suggested that we go quickly to Westminster from Tower Hill station. There we took facade pictures of the House of Parliament and the Big Ben. We walked a bit towards the river and we realised that we are not far away from the London Eye and the London Dungeon, which were both in next day’s plan.
Was going to suggest a quick trip to Baker Street to look for Madame Tussauds, however it was starting to get dark so we traveled back to the hotel for a beer, or in my case ale. 😀
DISCLAIMER: I wasn’t asked or paid to write this post.
