London Bridge melange

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We're here in a small hotel right near the London Bridge station, where you can catch a train, the tube, a bus, or part of the London Overground transportation line. Very convenient! But - very chaotic and noisy, too. Right outside our window there's a skyscraper going up, the already narrow sidewalks are made narrower still with construction scaffolding and barriers, The railway trestles pass over the streets, and beneath the spans, the Borough Market has been operating since roughly 1014 AD.

Here are vendors of all kinds of food, both fresh and prepared. You can buy a fresh peach, a basket of flowers, a a duck sandwich, a Pimm's cup or some Thai green curry.

Spanish ham - complete with pigs trotter

We watched a butcher shaving thin slices of cured ham off a pig's leg. We peeked at the charcuterie, and at the place that sells meat pies.

It's all so colorful and great to look at that it draws all kinds of sightseers and photographers - who often photograph one another!

We grabbed a sausage on a stick and sipped a cup of hard cider. The constant roar of trains overhead punctuates the environment.

The road beyond the market is a walk-street where workers and tourists cluster outside the Market Porter pub, its Victoriana shadowed by the giant new skyscraper known as "The Shard" that rises over this part of town.

In fact, the whole area is a fascinating mixture of very old and almost sci-fi new - and on a rainy, unseasonably gloomy July evening, it had a feel similar to that of the downtown Los Angeles depiction in "Blade Runner" - a multi-cultural, historically layered, always moving and always changing place that our modern cities have become. And have always been, if you think about it.