Two weeks ago, when I was in London with Paul, we went to Brighton for a day. On the way we stopped at Devil’s Dyke to admire the view. You can see really far from there. They do a lot of paragliding there, but when we were there it was too windy and the place was deserted. This is the view:

And they have devils there too….

After a short stop we continued to Brighton, and parked at the Marina. We wanted to see the white cliffs! Well, I really wanted to see them, as they are very famous and I had never seen them. From the Marina, there is a concrete walkway underneath the white cliffs, sometimes with a beach underneath, sometimes just rocks – and then the waves actually crashed over the walkway sometimes!

The chalk from the cliffs is really soft, and bits of it fall off – fun for writing with 🙂

We also played with the self exposure of the camera to get some touristy photos 😉

After a few kilometres, we came across a tiny cafe serving tea and (amazing!!) home made cakes. Mmmmm……

From the cafe, there were stairs to get on top of the cliffs and to the road. We walked on top for a while, the view was quite impressive! The mill is on a golf course, that’s why the grass is so green in that photo…

From there, we took a bus into Brighton town centre. This is the Royal Pavilion – it looks Indian and I thought it was built recently for tourists – but it’s actually from early 1800 and belonged to King George IV. A very pretty building! The gardens surrounding it are also really nice.

We walked through the narrow lanes for a while, a maze of tiny streets with little shops (a lot of them jewelry stores) – very cute. We ended up on the beach, to watch a very impressive sunset! The building structure you can see in the sea is the remainder of the West Pier, which was awating renovation since 1975 and since then was falling apart, until finally it burnt down in 2003.

They do have another pier though, a typical English one full of arcade games and fun fair rides. I walked around on my own for a bit, while Paul was parking the car. It was surreal to walk around alone, in the dark, nobody around, among closed fun fair rides – I felt like I was in some kind of computer game!

I really enjoyed our visit to Brighton! I always like visiting beach towns in low season when it’s deserted and has a special kind of atmosphere. Brighton gets really crowded in Summer, as it’s so close to London – must be a different experience then!

That’s all for now. I hope to upload more photos soon, I still have a lot of photos of London, and I also took some photos yesterday at the fireworks in Cambridge – though because of the low clouds and the smoke coming from the fireworks, only half of the show was visible!