A Yankee In London

Last Post

2010-02-24T23:09:00.002Z

So - I haven't updated this blog in months, and sadly this will be the last post. It's not that I'm no longer a Yankee, but I'm no longer in London. The Beautiful Competition and I left for home when our two-year contracts were up, and we're now back in Sunny Seattle. Follow further updates on http://www.piratelog.blogspot.com.

Scotch and All That

2009-09-20T13:20:00.004+01:00

It's not often that I get to travel for a client - and by travel I mean to go a place I haven't been before and spend some quality travel-time there getting to know it. One of my new clients is Johnnie Walker, and thanks to them I got to spend some quality time in Scotland learning about Scotch (literally, everything about it from the distilling to the bottling) and Johnnie Walker in particular. I came away with a vastly-increased knowledge of Scotch, and got to stay in a castle and see a bit of Scotland to boot.

I haven't been to Scotland in ten years and that was as a student backpacker, so it was nice to stay in a good bed and do some things I didn't get to do the first time around. And it really did teach me a lot about Scotch, which if you've followed my other blog for any length of time you know is a bit of a hobby of mine - and I'm afraid is about to become much more of a hobby.

Some pics are below, including me in a kilt. Aye laddie!

City Break: Amsterdam

2009-09-03T11:23:00.002+01:00

Last weekend was the final bank holiday weekend of the year in the UK, which meant it was the perfect time to fulfil a travel goal that has been high on my list for some time: Amsterdam! Which I have to admit is something that appeals to me less and less the more time goes by (read: the older I get.) So it was high time to take advantage and go.

Amsterdam’s reputation comes largely from its extremely liberal attitude towards, well, almost everything. The city is a miracle of what liberalism can accomplish: bikes everywhere vastly reducing traffic and pollution, power supplied by windmills along the coast, and an extremely tolerant atmosphere that even leaves London behind. The legalized marijuana and prostitution is simply just an extension of this overall attitude that is extremely refreshing.

The goal of our trip was very simple: relaxation. We weren’t out to run from tourist spot to tourist spot, we just wanted to take a nice deep breath and chill out in the middle of a very stressful work/move time. I started reading High Life, British Air’s inflight magazine, on the trip over and by the time we set down a mere 45 minutes later I was already much more laid back.

We spent the first night getting to know the area around our hotel, which was thankfully right in the middle of the city center, so we were never far from anything and could easily walk to everything we wanted to see and do. The high value of the Euro against the Pound was the only unfortunate part; the prices in Amsterdam were some of the highest we’d seen in Euros anywhere.

But it didn’t interfere with our fun. We found a great Mexican restaurant (itself enough of a rarity in Europe), had some Dutch pancakes, and simply sat and watched the world go by. We hit the Anne Frank Haus, where Anne and her family hid during World War 2, as sobering an experience as I’ve had. Amsterdam features two great art museums, the Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh Museum, which we hit up as well to round out our cultural experience.

The city itself has an excellent vibe that’s difficult to describe. The leaning buildings, some five stories high, loom over the brick streets and wide canals and everything seems ultra-modern but relatively unchanged since it was built in the 1600s and 1700s (at least in the city center, outside it becomes far more modern.) Yeah, we walked through the Red Light District and it’s as sleazy as you might expect. The two main churches in town became victims of Calvinist reform and were stripped of anything ostentatious, leaving their base architecture to admire without any of the distracting trappings. There was also a really fascinating Catholic Church – Our Lord in the Attic – which is named because it was indeed in the attic of a house after the Catholics were forced underground (or high aboveground in this case.) Not something you see every holiday.

The trip was a great time and I’m glad we did it when we did. We’ve got a few more lined up in the future, some higher priorities than others. Hopefully we’ll get a few good blog posts out of it too.

And here's the slideshow:

Greece: What Can I Say?

2009-07-23T16:50:00.003+01:00

'What can I say?' is an excellent existential declaration of resignation. It is second only to the Russian declaration that translates (roughly) to: 'how could it be any other way?' These phrases are often used to describe something commonplace but troublesome, or in this case something for which words can add very little value.

'What can I say?' is how I feel about my trip to Greece. Keep in mind this was almost two months ago so clearly saying something wasn't top-of-mind, but I want to chronicle this trip here so when the book is published at the end of our wanders abroad there won't be a giant missing chapter.

We decided to take a week at an all-inclusive resort on the island of Kos, which (for us) was a bit of a splurge: beaches, pools, and all the free food and booze you can eat and drink. Basically, heaven. The ocean was cold but apart from that there's very little you can do to complain about an all-inclusive vacation in a resort. In fact we only left once, to go to Kos town, and that was just fine.

We did manage to spend a couple of days in Athens beforehand seeing the Acropolis and walking the city a bit. Athens is possibly one of the coolest cities I've been to in Europe, not only for the food (ranging from touristy to excellent) but just the overall vibe of the city: it felt like a place people lived rather than something that was gussied up for the sake of appearances. To be honest we were almost too tired to appreciate it: the vacation was an opportunity to recharge, and our time as tourists was just a prelude to laying on the beach and doing absolutely nothing.

Maybe that makes me a bad traveller. It's certainly different from the backpacking days in hostels. But all you can drink on the beach is a pretty strong argument for working a dayjob.

What can I say?

Interregnum

2009-07-13T13:36:00.002+01:00

An interregnum (plural interregna or interregnums) is a period of discontinuity of a government, organization, or social order.

Which is to say, my life right now. In London and otherwise. Which accounts for the absolute lack of posts on this blog in more than two months. So if you're still out there, I apologize profusely.

Things have been happening. We went to Greece. The photographic evidence is all over my Flickr stream, and if the code worked correctly I embedded it below. I'm not going to post about it because apart from Athens (which was great) and the beach (which was great and relaxing) there wasn't much to our trip to Greece. It was designed to relax, and relax it did.

My parents came for a visit. That's a massive blog post in and of itself, which I'll try to write up over the next week.

I saw Alan Moore and Michael Moorcock speak about the mythology of London at the British Library, a conversation which sparked my creative juices like nothing else has done since moving here. That's also another post I'll get around to in a bit.

The post title refers to the current reign of not-knowing in my life. Similar to how I felt before moving to London and not having a definite job, I'm now faced with an uncertain future on many fronts. There are a lot of giant question marks in my life right now. There are future goals but the road towards them is an uncertain and for me untravelled one.

I can't give details right now, but I will as I'm permitted. Nothing sinister mind you apart from the unknown. Although to bastardize Lovecraft - sometimes the fear of that is all the more sinister you need.

The London Trilogy

2009-05-03T13:07:00.003+01:00

Once upon a time when I lived in New York, I had the distinct pleasure of reading Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy, a series of detective novels set in the City and exploring the various kinds of identity and existential issues that might strike a person living there. It is unfortunate that I can point to no book or series of books and say 'this! This is The London Trilogy. I am tempted to point to Peter Ackroyd, cite novels such as Hawksmoor and say 'this is the British Paul Auster!' but that would be unfair to Ackroyd's own immense prowess as a writer - he is simply Peter Ackroyd, no comparison necessary.

The themes within Hawksmoor are eerily similar to those in The New York Trilogy, and walk hand-in-hand with themes in other books I've read recently: The Master and Margarita, which is likely the second-best novel I've ever read after 100 Years of Solitude, and The Satanic Verses, which I've not yet finished but is majestic and glorious in its portrayal of the placeless place that is the expatriate's Ell Oh En Dee Oh En.

But there is no London Trilogy per se just as there is no version of Woody Allen here to assign the city a theme tune (Rhapsody in Blue for New York, of course) and film us all in glorious black-and-white. The startling thing is that we don't need an Allen or a Trilogy. We're doing quite well on our own thank you, as Mr. Ackroyd and Mr. Rushdie and how many countless other writers have proven.

It is the very essence of unnaturalness that so many people are shoved into such a small space and I suspect it is this unnatural state of affairs that lead us to examine our identifies when confronted with so many other individuals at the same time. The millions of years of evolution that lead us here did nothing to prepare us for our Londons and our New Yorks, and for the question-answer hunt that we embrace when we move here and become aware of the glorious and lush tapestry of these lives around us.

I offer a new metaphor: London is a loom upon which we can weave our own patterns into the massive and unknowable cloth of life around us.

On Magic

2009-04-29T17:29:00.000+01:00

I don’t take much stock in ley lines, the supposed alignments between ancient sites (and in some modern mythology, where the planet’s energy, magnetic or otherwise, is stronger.) I can say with some authority that certain parts of London hold a kind of energy, of which I make no claim that it is spiritual or magnetic or otherwise.

But consider the layers of history and emotion here, and that twenty million people are packed inside the M25, and it’s not difficult to imagine that a person could feel this energy in some regard. Certain streets that are dark even in summer’s broad daylight, or areas that constantly feel like a party – whatever that might mean.

It’s easy to imagine London as a giant network or jigsaw puzzle of areas like this, little regions held together by sinew-streets that bind the city and its inhabitants like a spiderweb. Even underground just passing through certain stations allows you to pick up a brief but tangible piece of what lies Above.

When people say London is magic, I will agree for this reason alone.

Finally: A Group I Want To Join

2009-04-26T18:33:00.004+01:00

Avast mateys. It not be a secret that I enjoy all things pirate-y, so it be with great pleasure that I discovered the London Pirate Festival today. The London Pirate Festival 'tis a three-day celebration of the pirate life, coinciding with Talk Like A Pirate day, the one day it be acceptable to let me pirate nature roam free.

The event schedule be sketchy for this year, but last year's events included a rum tasting and monkeyn' about on the Golden Hind, which that scurvy dog Drake was kind enough to lend.

Who knows where we be settin' sail this year? But strike me down and call me a one-eyed parrot if I not be attendin!

Wales Watching

2009-04-19T16:04:00.004+01:00

Wow have I been bad about updating this blog. I offer two excuses: work has been busy, and perhaps bigger - I've been immersed in a pair of personal writing projects. We also haven't been doing much 'around London' stuff.

But - we did make it out to Wales over the Easter weekend, a nice four days on the Cambrian Coast. The trains there were FUBAR'd for several reasons: death on the tracks at Euston, then delays that caused us to get in far later than we wanted. But we had two solid days of sun and hiking; we stayed in a little B&B in Harlech, which is, as they say, "way out there." Very little tourist infrastructure, but that's fine. Snowdonia National Park was right there so of course we got some hiking in.

The 'tourist' highlight was Harlech Castle, one of the famous 'iron ring' of castles built by King Edward ('Braveheart') I to subjugate Wales. Several of Edward's castles are exceptionally well preserved, including Harlech, which may be one of the easiest to get to because of the train line into town. The castle is a World Heritage Site and is remarkably well-preserved, despite having fallen in several sieges and its curtain wall being mostly destroyed by cannon fire.

There's something to be said for leaving the tourist track a bit, even if it becomes inconvenient (especially when you don't have a car.) There's a certain authenticity that comes with staying in places that aren't designed to shuffle tourist dollars through, most notably in people's attitudes. Tourists are something you deal with, and it's almost a kind of false hospitality in a tourist town because you're there to Spend Money. In places like Harlech, you're there because you want to be there and the locals recognize it. They may be surprised, but it's a more genuine- authentic - feeling.

Kind of refreshing really.

Pics follow.

Forgot Paris

2009-03-22T07:34:00.003Z

Not forgot really, just too damn busy to blog at the moment.

Paris was beautiful. Gorgeous. And I mean beautiful in the truest sense of the term, that the city planners and architects and residents took or take pleasure and pride in making things of an aesthetically pleasing nature simply because they can. Because it looks good.

Paris is also a place of expectation, especially if you're not from there. Are Parisians rude? No, no more so than people in any other large city. Are French people arrogant? Maybe, but no more so than anyone else I've encountered. The stereotypes are worthless. A gaggle of mimes isn't going to assault an American the second you step off the Eurostar. And a waiter isn't going to insult your wife in French (sorry Chevy.) Unless you do something to insult him or her first, I suppose.

It is undeniably romantic and there is more to see there than you could hope to see in four days. I probably could have spent the entire time in the Louvre and still not seen the entire thing.

Pictures are on my Paris set on my Flickr page, or helpfully embedded here.

A Night at the Symphony

2009-03-07T19:21:00.002Z

On Friday night we went to the London Symphony Orchestra's performance of Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto and Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony. A double-dose of Russian romanticism, if you will. It was the first LSO performance I'd heard that wasn't on a CD and the musical selection and the venue were both damn near perfect.

It's hard to describe what a sublime pleasure it is to hear a professional orchestra play amazing music in a venue that's as acoustically perfect as you could want. It may be as close as you can possibly come to an original performance directed by the composer himself; and it doesn't hurt to have such great musical selections, either. Rachmaninoff is a fucking genius and his third concerto is like listening to a 45-minute story about love and loss and madness.

And I get to go again in a few weeks!

Why So Serious: A Commuting Tip

2009-03-04T11:18:00.004Z

Like many Londoners, I both love and hate various aspects of the public transport here. I love how efficient it is (most of the time), the helpfulness of the staff, the general cleanliness of the trains and buses (again, most of the time) and the fact that I can get just about anywhere in the city within an hour.

I don't like how crowded it can get, especially during rush hour. The Victoria line is my worst offender. It's not only packed solid but air circulation is abysmal, meaning the line is not only crowded but stuffy and beyond claustrophobic. It is at its worst in the morning when everyone from North London is packed into the trains, and I intentionally avoid it by taking the Picadilly line and changing to the Victoria at the last possible moment, even though it probably adds about 5 minutes to my trip.

This morning though I found an excellent solution to the overcrowding problem. Like all amazing scientific breakthroughs this came about by accident but I'm going to use it anytime I don't want my face shoved in some Russian's stinky armpit between Holloway Road and Green Park.

1. Find a comedy CD that you haven't heard in a couple of years. Say, Lewis Black or Dave Attell.
2. Put the comedy CD on your iPod or portable music device and crank it when you're on the Tube.
3. Look like a normal commuter, dour-faced and avoiding eye contact with everyone, closely examining either the adverts or the floor.
4. Laugh to yourself at the jokes only you can hear.
5. Laugh out loud when appropriate. But continue to avoid eye contact and otherwise act normally.
6. Watch as the people around you slowly move so you have a nice little 3-foot circle all to yourself.
7. Enjoy your commute.

Coming Attractions

2009-03-04T07:11:00.002Z

We've been booking some holidays and planning out the rest of the year. Here's what we've got so far:

Confirmed: Long weekend in Paris, long weekend in Amsterdam (heh), long hiking weekend in Wales.

Strongly considering: Beach holiday in Egypt, a couple of weeks in Italy.

Would still like to do: Long weekend in remote Scotland, something else.

Any suggestions? If this is indeed our last year in the UK, we want to make it a memorable one!

Pamcakes (AKA Shrove Tuesday)

2009-02-24T18:45:00.003Z

I had a post written about Shrove Tuesday and pancakes and how it was a distinctly British custom when I had the good sense to ask my mother whether she knew about 'pancake Tuesday.' Turns out yes, she did, and in fact it is celebrated in many places in America with large Catholic and Anglican populations.

I was raised Catholic - and I mean, went to church every Sunday and went to CCD and everything until I moved out - and I somehow had no knowledge of Shrove Tuesday. I knew about Mardi Gras of course, but not a day where you pour your leftover butter and eggs into pancake batter to make pancakes.

So anyway, I celebrated Shrove Tuesday today by going to McDonald's and eating some pancakes for breakfast. I need to apologize to my UK-based readers: sorry guys, but most of the pancakes here are not up to this American's snuff. Pancakes should be massive, the size of your head if possible, and a half-inch thick at minimum. They should be drowning in real maple syrup and have a light coating of butter on each 'cake.

What you guys have - and I respect this - is closer to a crepe. That's fine, it's just that we don't see eye-to-eye on this particular issue.

Someday, when I want to get rich, I'm going open an IHOP branch here in London.

Oh yeah: I'm giving up something for Lent, but I'm not going to tell you what it is in case I crash and burn miserably.

Neighborhood Love

2009-02-15T14:58:00.004Z

The other day while driving to St. Pancras station I passed a building on North Road I've never seen before: a white clock tower set far back from the road. So on my way to another destination today (which I never reached) I decided to check it out. Here's the tower:

The tower stands in the middle of Caledonian Park, surrounded by council estates and a few ageing buildings. Turns out this was the site of the Caledonian Market, opened by Prince Albert in 1855 and built on the site of Copenhagen House, a tea room and 'pleasure garden' (no, not like that) [update: actually, it may have been exactly like that - thanks MiddleWay!] that was on the site since the 1600s. The market is long gone, having departed after World War 2. It was originally a livestock market as it was on the terminus of the Great Northern Railway, and there were several pubs in the area named after livestock. I passed by one, The Lamb hotel, which has been (recently, it appears) boarded up for refurbishment.

The park is a nice and fairly hidden slice of forest and grass, for Islington anyway. The clocks still seemed to be keeping perfect time. The tower was nifty and these little mysteries are part of the reason I love London so much: how else can you find out that a park by your house was a 17th-century tea room that became a cattle market?

Waiter, There's A Toad In My Hole

2009-02-14T18:33:00.003Z

In my continued quest to learn more about my new home and its various gastro delights, I took the opportunity to experiment a bit while the Beautiful Competition is out of town by making Toad in the Hole, a dish that sounds like some kind of vague innuendo. There is some debate about what Toad in the Hole actually is: I used the UK definition to mean 'sausages cooked in Yorkshire pudding.' Which, for my fellow Yanks, is not actually pudding, it's a kind of roll or bread made from something very similar to pancake batter.

I went with BitchBuzz's Toad in the Hole recipe altering it slightly: I used a pre-made Yorkshire Pudding batter, and I think I screwed up the measurements a bit and made more than I should have. But it's not hard: brown the sausages by baking them for 25 minutes, then pour your batter in the pan and bake it for another 25 minutes. Bam. Toad in the Hole. Serve with mash(ed potatoes) and some gravy - I used a pre-made beef gravy - and pair it with something British. I opted for a medium dry Somerset cider for its sweetness.

Learnings: I don't think I left it in long enough - it's supposed to look a lot more brown than it ended up being and it's not 'crispy' as much as it is 'vaguely pancake-like.' Also, I'm going to mix some salt in with the batter because it's pretty bland without it.

My next British cooking adventure - whenever that might be - will feature partridge, because I want to cook something that's basically a pigeon.

London Twestival

2009-02-12T12:59:00.003Z

It was the original, it spawned a worldwide Twestival movement and tonight it's back. I'm heading out to Shoreditch with other bloggers, social media people, social media bloggers, online miscreants and a while list of people I've never met in person to meet up and talk all things Internet - and for charity!

I love these kinds of events: the London Bloggers Meetup is something I look forward to every month, even when I can't make it for whatever reason. Twestival's going to be like a massive version of that and if last time is any kind of comparison it will be a hell of a party.

I'll be the tall Yank in a Hellboy t-shirt. Hope to see you all there!

Toot Toot! Here Comes the Censor-ship!

2009-02-08T20:53:00.003Z

I don't watch a lot of television as a rule, but the other day I had The Simpsons on in the background. The episode was the 9th season classic "The Cartridge Family," where Homer buys a gun to protect his family. In typical Homer fashion he gets a little extreme: shooting the TV to turn it off, shooting the lights to turn them off, shooting a can of beer to open it, and so forth. Marge ends up taking the kids and leaving after Homer fails to get rid of the gun. The end of the episode has Homer handing her the gun and saying he can't get rid of it himself, so he asks her to do it for him.

She goes to put the gun in a trash can, sees her reflection in the can's shiny lid, likes what she sees - and decides to keep the gun, placing it in her purse and walking out.

At least, that's how I remember it ending.

The version that airs here, Marge opens the can - and the show (awkwardly) cuts to her walking out of the room.

What. The. Hell.

It is clearly intentional censorship; I've noticed pieces of it before - for example, the episode of Futurama where Bender becomes Santa Claus, there's a scene of a kid writing about how his dead grandfather is starting to smell, and the camera cuts to a dead old man's body - but the cut was missing from the version I saw, sanitizing the joke slightly. That kind of censorship I can at least understand. But "The Cartridge Family" kind took it to a whole different level.

It changed the entire meaning of the episode. Marge's decision to keep the gun after being so adamantly against is a powerful statement about the allure of owning a firearm, and is one of the more morally ambiguous statements in any Simpsons episode. (In fact, I remember not liking the episode the first time I saw it for that very reason - ah, youth.) Removing the scene completely also removes that moral ambiguity. And I cannot think of a legitimate reason why it would be cut apart from a censor deciding to change what the artist created. There are no laws (that I know of) restricting showing guns - Homer clearly had one and shot at household items all throughout the same show. Crime dramas are available on nearly every channel. No, this was insidious and intentional censorship to alter the meaning of the episode itself, and it is disturbing on many levels.

I've noticed a trend in the UK to simply put your trust in the government. They will do the right thing for you, they have your best interests at heart, they exist for the welfare of the people. Right? No. This is a clear example of why that isn't the case. People don't need to be protected from art or satire. People don't need to be told what to think, or worse, have their thinking manipulated through some nameless government (or commercial - this was on a commercial network) scrub imagines they know what's best for everyone.

To put it in Yankee terms: Fuck. That. Noise.

Seeing such a blatant display of censorship, especially of a thought-provoking piece of satire, very much ruined my faith in old broadcast media here. Not that my faith was terribly high in the first place, but I have to think: if they're willing to cut a few seconds out of The Simpsons to change the meaning of the episode so that people may not consider why gun ownership isn't as simple as a buffoon shooting at a beer can or throwing a gat in the garbage, then what else is being changed?

It's not a pleasant thought.

Little Green Street

2009-02-01T18:02:00.002Z

We're kind of museumed out (we hit the Natural History Museum last weekend, which I meant to write about but never did) so were looking for something a little different to do this weekend. Along came Diamond Geezer's post about Little Green Street, one of those little hidden London gems you hear about and say 'hey, I should go see that sometime' and never get to. It is, in DG's words:

a rather special Georgian terrace called Little Green Street. It's a very short road, only about ten families live here. It's very old, dating back more than 250 years to the early 18th century. It's pretty much intact, untouched by the Blitz and modern development. It's rather photogenic, indeed you can imagine the BBC shooting a costume drama here (so long as they painted over the yellow lines and covered the bollards). It's Grade II listed, as you might hope and expect. It's cobbled, and you don't get a lot of cobbles in Camden. It's also very narrow, less than three metres wide.Cool, but worth a weekend trip? Well yes. I first heard of Little Green Street a few months ago when its story hit another blog (although I can't recall which one, and my Google Reader is being persnickety.) Little Green Street is facing what so many other slices of historic London face - progress. Little Green Street is the only access to an old slice of road that also has an old slice of undeveloped property, where a developer would like to put in some houses.

The problem is that Little Green Street is so narrow that the construction equipment wouldn't leave room for people to walk as it drove down the street, or it would require that the houses be knocked down (they're Grade II listed so I doubt that would happen.) The residents have their own website and blog explaining their ongoing struggle with the Camden council to save Little Green Street, and there is a massive banner with their website facing Highgate Road.

The street itself is one of those blink-and-you-miss-it little alleyways London has so many of, and there is definitely a different and quiet vibe there despite the massive council estates right next door and the busy street on the other side. I wish the residents all the best luck in fighting the development; the PR does seem to be on their side, which is good.

For us, it was close enough to make a Saturday jaunt - between our flat and Hampstead Heath, so only about 20 minutes away. It also offered a good excuse to check out nearby Kentish Town, which turned out to be a really hip and vibrant community - surprising, since it was known just a few years ago as being rife with gang warfare and drugs. It's practically a model of urban renewal in London and we both had neighborhood envy just from walking around. We found a nice pub, had a pint and just talked away the afternoon. Then walked back to Camden Town to catch the bus home.

A Little Housecleaning

2009-01-26T19:59:00.002Z

Just adding a couple of links to the sidebar. It's not often I find two cool London blogs in one day, but thanks to Jaz's writeup on Londonist, I found The Cabbie's Capital, by a black cab driver, and Jane's London, by a girl who likes to take kickass pictures of unusual things and may live somewhere near me, judging by the number of pictures of things on Holloway Road.

London Underground Station or Fictional Fantasy Location?

2009-01-26T17:28:00.004Z

Congrats! You're about 100% knowledgable of fantasy worlds and/or London Tube stations.

I certainly hope you made this score without cheating, because no one likes a cheat. I'll assume you didn't and congratulate both your nerd knowledge and / or your knowledge of London's geography. Show this score to someone so they're proud of you.

London Underground Station or Fictional Fantasy Location?
Take More Quizzes

A little unfair since I made the quiz, but hey, have fun with it!!

Iceland: Cold. Dark. Beautiful.

2009-01-19T22:24:00.004Z

If you're looking for a good weekend travel break right now, there's probably few better than Iceland. Lastminute.com did me an excellent deal for three nights and a flight, and the exchange rate is extremely favorable while inflation hasn't caught up. Which doesn't exactly make Iceland cheap, but it's no worse than London and in some cases much better.

But enough of the advertising piece. I've always wanted to visit Iceland, which fits very well into my travel MO of 'remote places,' 'islands' and 'cold places.' Iceland fits two and a half of those three - it's not all that remote, only two and half hours from London - but for the price, I couldn't pass it up.

I arrived on Thursday around 4 in the afternoon and found Reykjavik to be more light and less cold than I imagined. The sun set around the same time as it does in London, so I figured the reports about daylight hours might be slightly exagerrated.

What I didn't realize is that it would be about 18 hours until I saw it again.

I checked into the hotel, grabbed my gloves and hat and set out to explore Reykjavik. I had a spotty WiFi connection in the hotel and a vague idea of where the one well-reviewed and inexpensive restaurant WikiTravel recommended: the Sægreifinn (Seabaron), whose Lobster soup is world-famous (it made the New York Times' restaurant guide in 2006) and who serve whale kebabs. I ordered both.

Whale tastes like beef that's been soaked in fish. Fishy beef. Nothing special, except that hey, you're eating whale. The lobster soup was amazing. Icelandic lobsters are smaller than their American cousins, slightly larger than jumbo shrimps, and taste about halfway between the two creatures. Not quite as buttery as a lobster, and not quite as, um, shrimpy as a shrimp. But they're perfect in the soup. So yes, Sægreifinn is highly recommended.

I walked around town for a while in the dark, stopped for a Viking beer - because hey, why wouldn't you - and made my way back for a good night's sleep.

Next morning I realize just how dark things are in Iceland. I woke up around 8.30 and it was still pitch black out. By 9.30, when I was showered and dressed and ready to go, it was a little light - enough to turn everything a strange and beautiful blue color, like you're trapped in a French avant-garde film.

Speaking of the shower, I should mention that hot water in Iceland works a little differently than you might expect. A lot differently. It's all geothermal, and there are hot water mains that carry pure hot water directly from the planet itself into a shower. It comes out smelling like sulfur and can get extremely hot if you're not paying attention. Here's myself, giving you a little demonstration of how it works:

By the time the sun was up, I was walking along the harbor. The economic crisis that made Iceland such an attractive place to travel was obvious only here, where the hulks of half-constructed buildings squatted, some of which might never be finished.

It didn't take long to explore most of Reykjavik; there are only about 180,000 people in the metro area, and the city is not like other European capitals in that it was only a small collection of houses until the 1850s. The national cathedral is little bigger than an English country church. The National Museum though has an amazing exhibit on the colonization of Iceland and its transition from a collection of farms and viking holdings to one of the most modernized, green nations on the planet with the highest standard of living and health care possible. By the time I made it back towards my hotel and the Hallgrímskirkja. The church was covered in scaffolding, like every other famous landmark you want to see, and I opted out of the ride to the top of the tower for the free walk around the church instead.

That evening, it was too cloudy for the Aurora so I turned in reasonably early to rest up for my tour into the countryside. A Nissan Patriot with 44" tires rolled up at 9, we picked up two other Americans and headed out of the city. Here's something interesting about Iceland: once you get outside of Reykjavik, especially if you aren't in another one of the (very small) towns, there is a lot of wide open space. The snow was blowing as hard as I've seen in any midwestern snowstorm, visibility damn near nil, and I asked our guide if we were driving through farmland. "No, this is wasteland," he said. Wide-open plains of volcanic rock and not a hell of a lot else.

We saw Þingvellir National Park, where the planet is literally coming apart at the rift between the North American and European tectonic plates. It was also the location of the first democratically-elected parliament in the world and home of Iceland's largest freshwater lake. Then on to Geysir, the geyser for which all other geysers are named. And Gullfoss, Europe's largest waterfall, a mass of churning glacial water.

Then it was up to the snowfields, where the other two in our group went snowmobiling (not my cup of tea) and the guide let me drive the Patriot around on 4m of packed snow; now I can say I've driven in extreme winter conditions.

Here's what it looked like up there:

That night, it was once again too cloudy to see the Aurora.

And the next morning I was on my way home.

This trip wasn't one about profound cultural experiences, or profound personal experiences; it left me more with a feeling of having been slightly farther off the map then I've been before, and a desire to go even further when I can. Iceland seems like one of the last places you can do that and still be a reasonably comfortable tourist. Much farther and you're into adventure territory. Not that I would have a problem with that.

It was also a hell of a way to kick off what will likely be my last year in London, travel-wise. Liz and I vowed to travel more this year and take full advantage of what we could, and this trip was the beginning of that: good exchange rates, proper timing, and just getting out there and doing it.

Gonna be a great year.

Cold War Modern Revisited

2009-01-11T13:59:00.004Z

The Beautiful Competition and I headed to the V&A yesterday for the last weekend of the Cold War Modern exhibition, which I visited on my own last year. It was definitely worth seeing again (and if you're in London and reading this, you have about three hours to see it today! Hurry!) Bigger crowds and less room, same great stuff.

I managed to take something else away that I had not previously: a much greater understanding and appreciation for the Cold War from a European perspective. I grew up with the American-side jingoism of course, Big Bad Commies that have to be defeated, better dead than Red, and the shadow the mushroom clouds cast over everything - although to be fair, my parents probably had it ten times worse. By the time I was aware of what was going on, Glasnost and Perestroika and McDonald's in Red Square were turning the USSR into Russia and the American military-industrial complex would soon have to find a new enemy.

But from a European perspective, things were far less black-and-white. To put the Cold War into context, I realized, you have to think about the end of World War 2 and what Europe looked like; when the Americans were done, they came home to smiling wives and cookie-cutter houses in the suburbs. When the Europeans were done, they looked around at a continent largely ravaged by the war; entire cities levelled in some instances, and lives completely disrupted in others. The competition between the USA and the USSR was not so much about defeating bad guys, but about which system of government would prevent such a thing from happening again: the freedom of an open market, or the control of a strong central government? And it was a question various people answered in various ways, sometimes as puppets or pawns of the superpowers, sometimes fighting proxy battles of their own, sometimes willingly but many times not, and sometimes divided by age or class or religion.

It was certainly an eye-opening experience, and one of the things I truly value about my time here; these realizations are much harder if not impossible to come by when you're not living in the places where these things happened.

Septic

2009-01-08T14:34:00.000Z

Perhaps my proudest day as a Londoner so far was when my countrymen told me what this term means in relationship to Americans.

That's trust, daddy-o!

I <3 The National Portrait Gallery

2009-01-03T20:11:00.002Z

It's not exactly the most glam museum in London, but the National Portrait Gallery is still one of my favorite places to kill a couple of hours in an afternoon, especially when it's bitter cold outside and you're looking for something to do on the cheap. It's a slog through the tourist crowds to get there (the NPG is the National Gallery's caboose, right between Leicester Square and Trafalgar Square) and the gallery is smallish - you can do the whole thing in the aforementioned couple of hours if you want - but what a gallery.

It's like walking through the Head Museum in Futurama, except that the heads are paintings and they don't talk. OK, it's only remotely similar to the head museum. But for people who enjoy a good romp through history's halls, it's like being with the characters from your favorite book. Richard III? Henry VIII? Charles II? All there. The symbolism in some of the earlier paintings is like a Where's Waldo for history buffs.

The NPG is one of the little unsung heroes of my city. And I do love it.

Home to Go Home

2009-01-01T16:21:00.005Z

It's amazing how business-efficient you can be when you're seeing friends and family, and that's how I'd describe my first trip back to America since moving over here: efficient. The Beautiful Competition and I were gone thirteen days, the longest we've left our cats alone since we moved, and certainly the longest trip we've taken since coming here.

Almost immediately after arriving in Tulsa I turned around and flew to Denver for a day to see my grandparents, who seem to be hanging in there. It was great just to spend some time with them (especially without any other family members), play cards, tell stories, and so forth; I even heard a couple from my grandfather I hadn't heard before. Then it was on a plane to Kansas City for Angela and John's wedding. They normally hang in Seattle but KC is where Angela's family lives and John's family isn't far, so it made a good central meeting point. Crabby, Roger and Roger's girlfriend were there as well so it was an excellent opportunity to hang out with at least some of the old crew and get to know new crew members. The wedding was perfect; not overwhelming like some weddings can be, and about intimacy and love, as weddings should be.

Then it was a frazzling late-night and early-morning drive back to Tulsa for the holiday fun. We did our usual two Christmases, one on Christmas eve with my family, the other on Christmas day with the Beautiful Competition's much-larger family. I also met my brother's new fiancée and quickly learned she's going to make a great member of the family.

The stay was just about the perfect length; family vacations, especially ones where you have to see everyone with business-efficiency, are never relaxing but this one was exceptionally low-key and almost 100% stress-free.

I expected that this trip home would solidify for me the tentative plan to come back in a year's time, and I did in fact feel like I should be heading 'home' to Seattle rather than 'home' to London. But the strangest thing happened on the cab ride from Paddington to our flat - I realized that London itself was very much becoming like home, where things no longer seem strange and unfamiliar here but are instead very much recognizable for me on many levels. Which is to say that London, oddly enough, feels like a new home.

This is my city as much as it is anyone else's now, I reckon. And if there's anything that 2009 will bring, and any kind of London-related resolution for me, it is this: so far I've had a relationship with London first as a tourist, then as a working resident. Now, the Beautiful Competition and I both agreed that it's time to treat London more as a lover, something we do in fact like and even adore from time to time, temperamental as it can be. As with anything, we'll get out of London what we put into her, and we've put quite a bit in this last year in the way of time and energy - so it's time we started taking a little more out.

Here's to a great 2009 in our home.

Merry Christmas!

2008-12-25T15:16:00.002Z

I'm currently getting re-acquainted with my home country. Food portions are huge. It's almost agoraphobic how spread out things are. And I'm still not quite used to hearing American accents around me exclusively.

Before a post of real substance - Merry Christmas!

On Umbrellas

2008-12-13T14:17:00.004Z

London is an umbrella city. Compared to say Seattle, where it also rains a prodigious amount but no one carried an umbrella. In fact, the easiest way to pick out a new Seattleite or a visitor is by their umbrella when it's raining. London has no such pretensions about its foul weather; when things get wet, the umbrellas come out and if you don't have one, you might as well resign yourself to the fact that you're going to look like a drowned rat if you're outside.

In fact, if you have the opportunity to be caught in a sudden rainstorm in London, watch how quickly Londoners can produce their umbrellas - many of them the size of old satellite TV dishes - from their coats, pockets, shoes, or wherever else they might keep them. It's almost like a flash-mob, the sound of dozens or hundreds of umbrellas "shoosh"-ing open around you. And don't you feel dumb for not having one!

Before I moved here, I bought a really ~~nice~~ expensive umbrella. The very first time it was exposed to London rain and wind, the damn thing imploded as though the weight of the rain here was simply too much and it decided suicide was preferable to a lifetime of repelling London wet. I then bought a cheaper but much nicer umbrella from a place in a back street by my office, which I absolutely loved. It was big, automatic, cost me 15 quid and best of all had a hook on the end.

A hook on the end of your umbrella is possibly one of the coolest things you can have. It is infinitely useful. It's clearly a handle so you can adjust your umbrella without moving uncomfortably bending your wrist. Moreover you can use a closed hook-handled umbrella just as if you were carrying your own hook: to open doors, to grab onto railings on the Tube, to reach hard-to-reach objects and pick them up, to slide down clotheslines and to scratch your back. There aren't many ways you wouldn't use the hook!

Alas, I left my awesome hooked umbrella at my office and someone else must have recognized how awesome it was because it is gone. So this morning I ran to Boots and purchased an inexpensive substitute umbrella.

Oops.

The thing is barely bigger than a dinner platter. It's so small that it looks like I mugged a small child and took his umbrella. The aluminium (that's pronounced Al-Lou-Minn-Ee-Umm here) is so thin and sharp that folding it up is like grabbing a bag of razor blades. As I discovered on my way back to my flat, It will either keep my face, my shoulders, or my back dry, or any combination of the two, but not all three at the same time.

And no hook. That should have been my clue.

On Monday I'll spring for another hook-handled umbrella. Until then, I hope it stops raining.

Photo: Shelter by unrelaxeddad on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

London Bloggers Meetup and Wine Tasting

2008-12-10T06:41:00.006Z

Last night, myself and about sixty other bloggers attended the London Bloggers Meetup. This one was held at Ember in Farringdon, so it was good to get out of my usual haunts. The gang was all mostly all there, and it was great to catch up with Epicurienne and Jaz and Chris and Rob, who I'm intentionally not linking because I'll link him in a minute.

Rob gave a great talk on wine and social media, and how the wine industry is hundreds of brands all jockeying for position in a very crowded space where often the only differentiators to most consumers are prices - so social media gives wine and wineries the opportunity to give their brands the personality and connection required to set them apart from the rest. Rob runs a blog called The Wine Conversation where he blogs mostly about wine culture, and does so well; it's worth reading for his extremely knowledgeable perspective if nothing else. But hey, there's wine too!

We then had the opportunity to sample a selection of six wines, of which I partook in three. The first was an incredible 2004 Syrah from Cortes de Cima in Portugal. It was rich and flavorful, the kind of wine you want with a nice big multi-course meal or on a Sunday afternoon when it's raining.

More subtle was the ~~Vivanco Viura/Malvasia 2007~~ Dinastia Vivanco Crianza 2004, everything I expect from a Rioja red: just a little sweet, like you can't quite tell if there are some fruity or even vaguely spicy undertones. Not as heavy as the Syrah but still packs enough robustness to satisfy.

Here's Rob's presentation to us. Sorry I didn't have a better camera for pictures; next time I'll take a good camera along so I won't have to rely on the Blackberry's built-in pinhole.

Wine Conversation 081209

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: media social)

The best part of the evening though was hanging out with friends from outside of the office; I realized on the way home that I've intentionally been avoiding getting too close to people here as friends, and I need to change that. Which means more blogging meet-ups in the future!

Update: Rob writes in the comments that the Rioja was the Dinastia Vivanco Crianza 2004, oops! Fixed above. My fault for not taking better notes.

One Year Later...

2008-12-08T13:08:00.002Z

Apparently it was yesterday according to this post but I had it in my mind it was today. Oh well.

One year (and one day) ago I was stumbling around Heathrow and then Holborn, shaking off the sleep and adjusting my internal clock to my new home.

And what I said in the linked post still holds true: it's good to be back. Wouldn't have traded this last year for the world, and the coming year will be even better!

A Taste of Home

2008-12-06T17:01:00.003Z

My friend Angela back in Sunny Seattle sent a birthday package that was stuffed with a few pieces of home as well - that best of all gifts for the ex-pat, the care package. The things inside need not be expensive, just things you can't find here. For example, White Cheddar Cheez-Its. Or Fat Free Hidden Valley Ranch salad dressing. Other great items include Dial soap and real Q-Tips, but I digress.

Angela sent the Cheez-Its, a gift similar to white gold. The Beautiful Competition and I have been enjoying them all afternoon. And yes, that is one of my birthday presents in the middle - a plush zombie complete with removable velcro-attached limbs - and a velcro-attached brain in its hand. Pure awesomeness.

Giving Thanks

2008-12-02T13:33:00.003Z

On Sunday, Elizabeth and I had our first Thanksgiving in London. A few days late, but who's counting?

Rather than a turkey, we made a chicken.

Rather than friends or family, we ate with our cats who are both friends and family. Of sorts.

Rather than watching football, we watched football crowds from Emirates stadium file past our flat.

It is times like this when I feel the most homesick, that I have to remind myself of the adventure and the opportunity of being here. The good news is that my passport should arrive back soon and I'll be free to travel abroad again, and Elizabeth and I are planning where our adventures will take us next year, and perhaps more importantly what comes next after this adventure.

Going Down to Durham Town

2008-11-20T21:49:00.003Z

If I had a list of favorite places on Earth, it would look something like this:

Universal Studios

Any place where 5 or more of my friends have gathered

Granville in Fall

Venice

Durham

I can't explain why Durham despite a lot of my coworkers asking me 'why the hell Durham?' For most people, it's a stop on the train line between London and Edinburgh, or at the very least the last stop before Newcastle and one of those towns north of York. It's got a cathedral sure, but what else?

I'd be lying if I didn't say that the cathedral was a huge draw for me personally. A massive Norman edifice and the most well-preserved Norman cathedral in the country (in the world, likely) it shows the transition in architecture from Norman / Romanesque - the style that copied what the Romans built - to Early Gothic, the style that replaced it and is most commonly associated with European cathedrals. You can quite literally see the seeds of the transition in the building itself, as the early parts of the cathedral are pure Romanesque while the last parts have the barest beginnings of Early English Gothic architecture, where the techniques that would create the masterpieces of Canterbury, Notre Dame and Rheims were first tested.

Durham is a small college town and certainly has that feel; it's an English market town with its own high street, surrounded by coal country and has suffered with the rest of the North in this regard. But it's still a small college town and therefore has a certain vibrancy about it as well. The weather was perfect on this visit (I've been twice before): crisp without freezing, leaves still on the trees in a rainbow of colors and no rain at all.

I managed to wrangle a private tour of the cathedral which was great, and the reason (excuse) for our visit was to see Yorkshire folk singer Kate Rusby, whose amazing voice and kicking original songs I've kind of fallen in love with since Simon introduced me to her soon after I moved here. Here's a (professionally recorded) video of her live in Leeds:

The best part about Durham was simply getting away so easily and enjoying a great weekend together where we could just walk around in the gorgeous Autumn weather, enjoy a pint and put our cares away for a while. I have a feeling I might have to get back one last time before I go back to America.

Bonus: Kate's cover of The Kinks' Village Green Preservation Society (with stills from Jam and Jerusalem, the show for which she covered it):

Going North

2008-11-14T12:45:00.001Z

On my way up to one of my favorite cities in the UK for a nice weekend away and a cool concert tomorrow night.

More with pictures later!

Remember, Remember

2008-11-12T10:58:00.004Z

Yesterday was Remembrance Day in the UK, which we celebrate in America as Veteran's Day. In America it's celebrated as a day where you remember veterans of all wars, and there are parades but no one really pays a lot of attention. Any why is it on November 11th? I admit, I couldn't have told you until yesterday.

Here Remembrance Day is Armistice Day - the day that the Great War (World War I) officially came to an end. America kind of sat that one out until the victor was clear, but it devastated Europe in a completely unprecedented manner. We were taught the dates and details: Archduke Ferdinand, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Red Baron, trench warfare. But it was always something that happened at a distance - a great distance. Here it was something that happened, well, Here. Right here. Every small town I've been to in the UK, even the tiny ones like Kettlewell, have a Great War memorial for the WWI dead.

They added names on after World War II.

I also noted there is still room for more names on many of the memorials.

Yesterday I saw something I've never seen before. The entire nation observes two minutes of silence at 11 AM on Armistice Day, to mark the exact time when the war ended. I've seen moments of silence before and typically people just kind of carry on with their business. Not here. Our entire office stopped doing what they were doing and we all watched the ceremony on the television, when one of the last three Great War vets in the UK laid a wreath on the memorial. Someone mentioned later he was 112 years old. He looked like he was about to cry. No one in our office said or did anything other than watching the television to see this happen, and our two minutes of silence lasted about five minutes in total.

It was sobering to see how deeply the Great War still affects people here. As the 'first modern war' it could (arguably) be said that it had the greatest impact on the 20th century because of the new technologies employed and the sheer mechanical savagery of killing others, and not only did it have a profound impact on European political structures but also on the attitudes of the people here. When people accuse the French of being dirty peaceniks, maybe the reason for that is that they have seen more than their fair share of some of the worst slaughter ever visited on other human beings.

It's certainly a stark contrast to America, that's for sure.

I'm still not 100% certain what yesterday meant to me, but it was one of those singular experiences that I will remember for a long time to come - which, I suppose, is the point.

Also, I have to point out Diamond Geezer's side-by-side poem from yesterday - it's quietly profound in its own right.

Happy Birthday to Meeeee....

2008-11-02T11:52:00.004Z

Here's one to add to the 'achievements unlocked whilst in London' file: last weekend I turned 30 years young. Therefore, everything I blog after that is suspect and cannot be trusted. Young people: do not trust me!

All ageing jokes aside, I had a most excellent birthday. The Beautiful Competition booked a surprise trip outside of the Big Smoke, although not that far: just into Kent, a small town called Whitstable, renowned for its seafood and laid-back attitude. We spent a couple of nights and did exactly nothing except for walking along the coast, eating scallops (oysters are not my thing) and enjoying local cheeses and ciders. The perfect, low-key way to get a year older.

I have to say that the people in Whitstable are probably the nicest I've found in the entire country (so far.) I'm not sure if it's because the town is off the normal tourist trail or what, but almost everyone we spoke to wanted to know where we were from, if we were backpacking, what we thought of the town, and seemed genuinely interested in chatting rather than the normal, tired faux-niceness you get in a lot of towns that make their living off of tourism. It was a refreshing change from some of the other places we've been. Maybe it was nothing more than we're acclimating a bit more and it's just natural to be here now, I don't know.

I want to call out especially the very nice family that ran The Cheese Box, who not only clearly love their job of finding and selling locally-sourced cheeses (the best I had was called 'Rachael's Goat,' so called because it came from - yes - Rachael's Goat) but let us linger around the shop, sampling this and that and recommending more deliciousness.

I cannot say where I procured it (I was, quite literally, sworn to secrecy by the person who gave me the bottle), but I did have some extremely good local farmhouse cider as well called 'Appley Ever After.' 'A Kent cider, barely,' I was told, although because of the location of the brewer and not the quality of the cider. I'm not a huge cider fan, but this stuff was amazing. Unfiltered and cloudy like a quality farmhouse cider, strong enough to knock out a rhino in large enough doses, and the absolute perfect balance of sweetness and tartness. Google doesn't turn up any websites for it online, but if you are down that way and happen to see some stocked somewhere, try it.

All of the pictures from Whitstable are on my Flickr stream.

Oh, and I get to go back to Yorkshire in a couple of weeks for a concert - and to visit one of my favorite small towns in the UK. Durham!

How We Do It In America

2008-10-30T10:09:00.004Z

My absentee ballot is due to be delivered to my office today so I can fill it out and Fed Ex it back to America. My coworkers wanted to know how we vote in America - online? Tick a box? Punch out a hole?

I told them we take our guns and shoot holes in the boxes next to the candidate we want to indicate our support for that candidate.

I mean, duh.

Foxy!

2008-10-28T19:56:00.004Z

Sometimes strange things happen in London. On my way home, I was looking out the window and noticed a large cat pacing the bus, which is unusual in and of itself because cats don't normally run down the sidewalk past London double-deckers. A careful look revealed it wasn't a cat at all, but a fox! In the middle of the city! In Islington!

I tried to whip out the Flip but by the time I got it out, the bus had gone ahead. Then fate intervened: the bus broke down and they ordered us off. The fox was down a side street watching.

So I chased him a bit with the Flip and got this. He doesn't really show up until the end, and you can see him run from behind the car to the yard. For some reason I sound like a girl in half of this video, I think the sound recording was a little screwy.

Here he is, the London fox!

Update: Apparently foxes are common in London, kind of like raccoons in the US. Shows I'm still a bit of an American Newbie. Thanks to autolycus in the comments section (and my bemused coworkers) for pointing this out.

ARE YOU A-READY FOR SOME FOOTBALL?

2008-10-26T15:00:00.003Z

No, not that European 'football' where the guys run all over the field kicking at a round white-and-black round ball before someone yells GOALLLLLLLLLLLLL!!!! GOALGOALGOALGOAL!!!! I'm talking good old-fashioned beer-swilling, cheerleader-high-kicking, helmet-smashing, butt slapping (hey, I don't make this up), marching-band-playing, Friday night lights shining AMERICAN FOOTBALL. HOO-RAH!

Which really means absolutely nothing to me except that on the way back from Whitstable today (post forthcoming) I saw a gaggle of lads on the train wearing 49ers and Bills jerseys and hats, and there were similarly-clad lads all over London, in train stations, on the buses and on the streets. I saw the Pats, the Jets, the Seahawks (!) and the Bears (WTF?) but no one was sporting a Chargers or a Saints jersey that I could see - which is funny since those are the teams playing at Wembley in about an hour and 50 minutes in the second NFL UK game.

Honestly, A for effort all around: it seems that NFL fever has firmly swept London regardless of the various team jerseys. In fact, I'm not sure it matters which teams are playing (the 'Aint's? Do they even count as a team?) but there is a bit of excitement in the air as Wembley Stadium is turned into a gridiron.

It's funny that the NFL UK notw has a website and logo, because I have a feeling this is here to stay. What's next - London's own NFL team?

Hey, that might be kind of cool...

What's That Behind You? Oh, That's The Shadow Government

2008-10-23T18:17:00.003+01:00

Tis the season to think about politics, and I wanted to share my thoughts on one of the stranger elements of the UK political landscape that I've encountered. This is probably just my American ignorance, but when I hear the term 'shadow government' I think of the well-manicured man from the X-Files sitting in a room with his cronies, making decisions that affect not only America but the entire human race with the help of secret alien overlords.

In the UK, a 'shadow government' is the government that follows - shadows - the current government around. It is often the largest opposition party (yeah, they have more than one political party here, what a concept!) and they have positions that correspond with the government-in-power: Shadow Secretary of Defence, Shadow Prime Minister, Shadow Intern, etc. So they follow the current government and from what I can gather they act as oversight, kind of keeping an eye on government affairs, and they are available to take over at a moment's notice.

This last bit is important because as I found out with the London mayoral elections earlier this year, governments pretty much change right after an election. And by 'right after,' I mean 'within a few hours after the votes are counted.' None of this two months Lame Duck business they do in America; if a General Election were called and the vote was tomorrow and David Cameron took over, he'd step into office on Saturday. Pretty efficient!

It's interesting because there just isn't anything like it in America, and it's one of those things that, in the UK, people don't think is at all strange.

Now try explaining the Electoral College to them over here!!

A Pair of Exhibitions

2008-10-19T17:16:00.003+01:00

Hey, a real content post! I haven't been idle; far from it. I hit Warwick while Chad was here, have yet to upload the pictures to Flickr, and last weekend the Beautiful Competition and I did Hampstead Heath. No picture from that since I forgot my camera. Doh.

Today I felt the urge to get out of the flat since I spent most of yesterday avoiding bright lights and loud sounds. The B.C. took off in search of shoes and tops, so I headed toward the Victoria and Albert museum, one of the awesome free museums London offers its residents (and visitors.) The 'V&A,' as it's known to the hip insiders, is a museum of design - but that mission is interpreted in many different ways, from clothing to sculpture to various forms of art and invention throughout history. It sounds a little helter-skelter but it is extremely well-organized and the rooms often pair pieces together you might not at first pair; one sculpture hall was devoted entirely to different interpretations of the human form, including modern statues, ancient Greek and Roman works, and funeral effigies.

My main purpose in visiting was their pay-to-see exhibition "Cold War Modern: Design 1945-1970." Chad lucked into a preview day by sheer coincidence when he visited, and it sounded really awesome - and guess what, it was. Cold War Modern covers the influence the cold war had on design from post-WW2 to the late 1960s, and it is as comprehensive and extensive as you'd want such a thing to be. They have all-plastic cars, visions of utopias and dystopias, propaganda posters, Dr. Strangelove and 2001 playing on loops, photographs from the Prague Spring, computers, sculptures, paintings, plans for bomb shelters and more.

This is far more than 'turn on, tune in, drop out.' After my less-than-stellar experience at the Hadrian exhibit, I was a little skeptical, but the V&A really did right by themselves with this one. I even dropped a few quid in the gift shop, something I'm not prone to do at museums much anymore. When you walk in, you are quite literally greeted by the most famous symbol of the cold war: a full-sized replica of Sputnik in flight just over your head, forcing you to look up and feel it broadcasting down on you and the rest of the world. You then meander through a labyrinth of images and objects, and you leave feeling slightly overwhelmed but a lot more enlightened.

I should note that the cold war is a major area of personal interest for me, specifically a lot of the design aesthetic of it, so my review of the exhibit may be colored by personal enthusiasm.

I was only a stone's throw from Harrods and another exhibition, Comic Timing. I was vaguely aware of it from a blog post, but a review on Londonist reminded me to go check it out, so I figured 'hey, I'm close enough!' and walked down. I'd never been to Harrods before and in some ways it was not dissimilar from the V&A. Imagine if Las Vegas put on museum of modern design and you could buy anything from any exhibit, except for the tacky faux-Egyptian architecture; the extremely tacky Princess Diana fountain; or the throngs of tourists photographing either. That's Harrods.

I had to ask someone how to find Comic Timing, which turned out to be housed between two escalators near the menswear. The exhibit itself was impressive; a wide range of Alan Moore stuff, some Judge Dredd and Judge Death, Tank Girl, a few indie artists I didn't recognize (and a few I did), and even some older stuff. It was strange seeing comic art outside of an artist's portfolio at a convention, but refreshing seeing it hanging on walls with interpretive plaques.

My only disappointment was that for the half-hour I browsed through the exhibit, not a single other person stopped to look at the art. Unless they stopped in the few minutes I was out of sight of the main entrance to the area. It wasn't easy to find and unless you were specifically looking for it, you wouldn't have found it, so the passers-by were few. But I expected to see someone else there, especially on a weekend with questionable weather. There were plenty of people taking pictures of the Egyptian escalator though (yes, an escalator.) Go figure.

Definitely a good time. I'll start updating this blog more; I've got things to say and may finally have time to say them!

10 Things You'll Never Hear On The Street In London

2008-10-13T09:43:00.002+01:00

1. "I need to find a more stylish track suit."
2. "That English girl has a really nice ass!"
3. "Caffe Nero brews a killer Americano."
4. "Isn't this weather great?"
5. "Who wants to go to Ladbrokes?!"
6. "Can I get you anything else?" (specifically from waitstaff)
7. "We can fit 50 more people on this bus no problem."
8. "I sure miss the days of drinking on the Tube."
9. "No, that dress isn't too short."
10. "Hey, don't puke there!"

More of the Minotaur

2008-09-30T16:17:00.001+01:00

Last weekend I was making my way home. I'd had a couple of pints but nothing too serious and wasn't really paying attention to where I was going. Soon enough, I found the buildings closing in behind me, herding me forward, walling off my escape. And then I heard him.

He came around a corner tall and terrible, a bestial behemoth of pure hate. I nearly retched at the wet dog smell of London after a rain, the unwashed aroma of human bodies and decaying feces and urine. He growled, his voice the sum total of every muttering homeless person, act of defiance and oppression against and by authority, screeching sirens and blasting jackhammers.

"I knew I'd find you eventually," he says. Without warning, his massive fist connects to my mouth and I fall against the ground spitting out the pieces of my front teeth. Every nightmare of losing my teeth comes back, and more as his hoof lands on my shoulder. I hear bones cracking and try futilely to raise my arm.

"Stand and fight me," he says, this living symbol. His legs are made of pound coins mortared by blood and tears, his hands are the muddy Thames sludge built up over thousands of years. A Roman statue and even a piece of my own hair make up his right arm. His rippling body is covered with a vagrant's rags.

"No need to make it worse," the minotaur growls. I nod assent, stand, and his fist flies at me again. I catch it in my hand, and realize I've formed a fist of my own. A token show of self-defense.

It connects with the mirror, glass shatters and I'm left cradling my jaw in the darkness.

Vote The Rock

2008-09-28T14:45:00.006+01:00

It's an interesting time to be an American abroad. The election has been on the forefront of many people's minds over here, and for good reason. While Americans typically couldn't care less (or just don't know about or only vaguely understand) the rest of the world, the rest of the world cares a whole lot about America because its economic and military actions have massive repercussions outside of America. To my American readers that may come as a surprise, and to my European readers it will come as a surprise that it is a surprise to my American readers. But to make a long and somewhat convoluted story short, people here care a great deal about the upcoming American presidential elections and they're very interested to know what us Americans abroad think about it. Conversations about it typically start like this:

"So, what do you think of the elections?" This is really a different question. What they mean to ask is "who do you want to win/vote for?"

"Well, things are looking pretty close." This is my way of politely putting them off or making them ask what they really want to ask.

"So who do you want to win?" Translation: "don't make me hit you, tell me if I should continue talking to you or not?"

"Anyone but McCain. I'm behind Obama."

Which is true. There's far more nuance in my answer; I supported Obama from the beginning, but now that the campaign has really started to heat up, I think that Hillary would have made a better president. Actually I always believed that, but I figured (incorrectly, in retrospect) that she probably would have been unelectable. But 'anyone but McCain' is a good answer. 'Anyone but another Republican administration' would be more accurate.

This is the answer people want to hear. Understand American readers that politics outside of the US - anywhere in the world outside of the US - operates from a different perspective. The Tories, the UK's 'Conservative' party, have announced support for Obama. In the UK, Obama would be somewhere to the center or slightly to the right on the political spectrum. Even more so in other European countries. Americans have an incredibly skewed notion of what 'liberalism' means, in no small part because American conservatism has been hijacked and all but destroyed by the radical right. The notion of a vice presidential candidate that is opposed to sex education in public schools or opposes abortion even in cases of rape or incest would be more associated with the fascist (real fascist, mind you) British National Party than a major political party, let alone a major candidate for public office.

It is no mistake that when polled, members of 22 countries wanted Barack Obama to win by a 4 to 1 margin. This is because to the rest of the world, the Republicans and their various beliefs seem more like something out of Iran or third-world African dictatorships than the leaders of a country that can cause such massive repercussions. The UK is nervously eyeing its own economy because it is so intrinsically linked to the American economy, and make no mistake - it was Bush and Neocon-Republican policies that lead to the American economy tottering on the brink. I'm not sure if I'm going to come home to a real-life Mad Max movie when I fly back over Christmas. I'm not sure American Airlines will still be around to fly me home.

So this entire ranty little post grew out of Seth's suggestion that I write about my experiences registering to vote. It's actually really easy to register to vote here, and after watching YouTube videos of Palin like this one:

She is a complete laughingstock, even in the US:

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Frankly Palin scares the shit out of me. As Jack Cafferty says, one 72-year-old man's heartbeat away from the presidency? Jesus Christ (this one is the one you want to watch by the way, if you only watch one):

So rather than allow people who think dinosaurs and cavemen lived together to steal yet another election and put someone whose idea of 'foreign policy experience' is taking Track and Bristol to the International House of Pancakes, I registered to vote.

The Overseas Vote Foundation is a nonprofit organization that exists to help US citizens abroad make sure our voices are heard (there are 50,000 Americans here in London alone.) They have automated the entire process; you simply fill out an online form, print it out, pop it in an envelope and mail it off. The biggest obstacle for me was the mailroom at my office. The conversation went like this:

"I'd like to send this letter to the US."

"Is that work-related?"

"Not exactly."

"We can't send personal letters from the mailroom, no way, no how."

"It's my voter registration form. I'm voting for Obama."

"Here, let me stamp it and put it in a basket for you."

I should receive my ballot in a couple of weeks. Easy-peasy. I was actually a little surprised that the State Department is relatively unhelpful about the entire process; so luckily Overseas Vote Foundation has stepped up where the government itself failed.

If you're an American abroad and reading this, register today. Please. Click this link. This link right here. Now. Click. Register. Vote.

Even if you want to vote for that other guy and the pit bull.

Friends and the North

2008-09-20T08:54:00.003+01:00

I'd be kidding myself if I said that moving to London was easy. The hardest part of any move isn't the logistics, adjusting to a new place, or even the culture shock. It's leaving friends.

I've known Crabby longer than I've known any of my main circle of friends except for the Beautiful Competition. He was in my wedding and roomed with us in Seattle and he's almost like family to us. He just left after a weeklong visit, having departed the flat at 6 this morning to make it to Gatwick by 7.30, and I'm sitting on the floor typing this not trying to wake anyone up. In another week I'll be making a similar post about Chad, who's currently crashed on our couch.

The travel part of this story is actually pretty funny: last weekend we were supposed to go to Paris, but there was a fire in the Channel Tunnel and our train was canceled. Plane ticket prices went sky high and our options quickly became 'find something in the UK,' so we got cheap train tickets to Yorkshire and went hiking in the North York Moors National Park. It was a great relaxing long weekend away, and while I'm really sad I didn't get to see Paris it was kind of cool hiking around the countryside with Crabby, who is himself quite the outdoorsman and has climbed, among other things, Mt. Adams.

As always, you can find pictures of the trip on my Flickr stream.

We had a great time with Crabby and will no doubt have a great time with Chad, but it threw into very sharp relief for us how much we really miss our lives back in Seattle. We had agreed London was going to be a temporary state of affairs and it's now starting to look more and more like that will definitely be the case, and that we'll return to Seattle when we're done here. My own goals are shifting. My life needs to be about maximizing the time I have here and taking advantage of every opportunity even moreso than before, to enjoy these months and all that London has to offer. Because when I go back to Seattle and we head out to the North Cascades for some camping, or we're sitting around the gaming table or having people over for a Sunday picnic, I want a good story or two to tell when we're spending time with the people we care about most.

(And yes, family readers, that goes for you too!!)

Hadrian!! (Rhymes with Adrian!! from Rocky)

2008-09-12T11:47:00.003+01:00

It is an undisputed fact that the British Museum is one of the best museums in the world, not only because it houses pretty much the entire history of the human race under its roof but also because it is absolutely free unless you're going to see a special exhibition. It was just such an exhibition that the Beautiful Competition and I ponied up for last weekend with our pals Simon and Sarah: Hadrian: Empire and Conflict.

It was my first special exhibition at the Museum and was, for the most part, tasteful, educational and interesting. Hadrian was one of the 'good' Roman emperors; he recognized his official responsibilities and left the Empire a better place, helped rebuild Rome (the Pantheon was Hadrian's idea, which served as a model of the Reading Room at the British Museum where the exhibition is held); he pursued a conservative foreign policy building his famous Wall to define the Empire's borders and started abandoning Roman holdings in Dacia and Mesopotamia to consolidate the Empire's power and not overextend it.

Hadrian was also responsible for suppressing the last Jewish revolt in Judea and the creation of the province of Syria-Palestine and the Diaspora that scattered the Jews across the Empire. He had a variety of young male lovers, including one who died by falling in the Nile on a state visit to Egypt. He understood the power of imagery and the most interesting part of the exhibition was the variety of statues depicting Hadrian in a range of different garbs, from warrior to Greek philosopher to god incarnate. It's a wonderful example of ancient public relations and communications and 'brand management': by appearing in a guise that made the most sense to the people in a particular area, Hadrian could be a chameleon whose leadership was accepted in an Empire as multicultural as any today. In that regard, he was brilliant.

The exhibition was interesting but left you feeling a little lacking in content; there was very little in the way of context for most of the exhibit, and although you learn a few interesting tidbits the brilliance of exhibitions like this is that the have the ability to help contextualize history a little more. For example, in the part of the exhibit about the revolt in Judea, I wanted more of the exhibit to contextualize it not only in the history of that time, but in what came before and after in that part of the world. History for me is always a series of relationships that evolve over time, fluid and seamless; it is never isolated events, which is how it was (incorrectly) presented to me in school and how this seemed to present itself.

Hey, it's still worth the money though, especially if you're interested in the period. The model of Hadrian's villa is unbelievably awesome.

From Hell Chapter Four Walking and Riding Tour

2008-09-07T19:49:00.003+01:00

Introduction

Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's From Hell is one of my favorite pieces of literature. It is many things: a meditation on symbolism, an exploration of Victorian values, a love letter to the city of London, and a close look at how we interpret and extract meaning from history and current events. It's also a damn good story by a damn fine storyteller and a damn fine artist. Eddie Campbell's raw black-and-white illustrations are the perfect images of London to me; they capture the city in a way no photograph or memory ever will.

In Chapter Four, the main character Dr. William Gull and his assistant Netley take a tour through London where Gull explains the city's pagan roots and identity through history, myth and symbol. Before beginning his symbolic 'ritual' Gull himself takes a symbolic journey through London, almost a ritual itself, as a way of connecting with the city and what Gull sees as destiny. He tells Netley 'Our story's written... inked in blood long dry, engraved in [London's] stone.'

This walking (and busing) tour recreates Gull and Netley's journey through London as much as is physically possible so that you too can see the symbolic city and see the stories engraved on London's stones.

Background

This tour is designed to take either one very long day (if you're lucky) or two days if you split the tour up over a weekend. Tourists and London residents alike should find something of interest here. Gull and Netley's route through London has been recreated as closely as is physically possible; some streets run one way the wrong way, some streets are no longer accessible, and some run underground.

You could in theory hire a taxi or drive your own car, but it would either be prohibitively expensive or just plain annoying. There are no more coaches as Netley drove, but London's double-decker buses do offer a decent alternative. When possible, climb to the second floor of the bus and sit at the very front, looking out the front windows. They'll give you an excellent view of the city as you travel and are probably the closest thing to a Victorian coach you can have without dropping an extraordinary amount of money. Like so:

And don't cheat and use the Tube: this tour is designed so you can see the city and get a feel for it in its entirety, including its size and shape. It's impossible to do that underground!

I have tried to make the route as clear as possible, but be aware that street closures, bus route changes, bad weather and other regular London occurrences can and do happen all the time. Before starting out check the Transport for London website. Also highly recommended is your own London A-Z book (available from almost any newsagent) and, of course, a copy of From Hell.

I recommend starting as early in the morning as possible; 6.30 or 7.00 am is not out of the question, especially if you plan to do the entire tour in one day. Because buses run less frequently on Sundays, you're better off doing the tour on a Saturday – or a weekday, if time allows. Be sure to eat a good breakfast:

If you're familiar with London and its bus system, you can probably skip the next part and go right to the tour.

Practical Considerations

In the book, Gull and Netley take the better part of a day to complete their journey. I believe it's possible to do this entire tour in one day, but it's probably very difficult and it is doubtful that you could finish in enough time to get into St. Paul's Cathedral, the final stop on the tour, which admits its last visitors at 4 pm each day. If you truncate the tour slightly by dropping London Fields and Herne's Hill from your itinerary, it would be much more possible to complete in a day (but a little inauthentic.)

In the notes to From Hell, Alan Moore explains that he drove the route in a car and it is 'quite possible to visit all the point of Gull and Netley's journey in a single day.' That may be, but this is designed to be a walking and busing tour so you won't be nearly as mobile. If you need to split up your tour, I suggest doing so around Earl's Court, as this makes an excellent natural dividing point.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I should note that it took me three days to complete the tour but probably could have finished it in two – or even one, if I'd started earlier and hadn't screwed up a couple of parts and been the victim of a massive sewer replacement project that closed down half of Oxford Street. So it goes in London.

London's bus system is plagued with infrequent (or too-frequent) buses, strange routes and rude teenagers blaring horrible hip-hop from low-quality mobile phone speakers. That being said, it's probably one of the best bus systems in the world, covering most of an extremely large and complex city and almost always offering you a method to get from point A to point B with minimal fuss. All bus systems are intimidating at first, but London's can be even more so especially if you're not familiar with it.

Each stop has a list of which buses stop there and where those buses go. Use this to help determine which bus you need to take. Some stops, especially on main thoroughfares and near major intersections, have lists of destinations and which buses take you there. These are accompanied by maps of the area showing you which buses make stops at which locations – stops will often have a white number or letter in a red circle above the sign (for example, XA or R.) I've listed all the routes you'll need for this tour, but if for some reason you need to get somewhere else or a route is diverted or changed, the system is fairly intuitive to use.

The easiest way to get around on the buses is to get an Oyster card (Transport for London's RFID-enabled prepay system) which you simply 'touch in' on a yellow pad each time you board a bus. Either get a weekend pass or a week pass, which will allow you unlimited travel on the bus system (and the Tube.) Don't worry about Tube zones on the bus routes. Otherwise, you'll be on and off the buses enough that you'll spend at least 15 pounds or so, so a weekend pass will save you money. Oyster cards are available at any Underground station and at some newsagents.

To flag down a bus, simply wave at it and try to make eye contact with the driver. To get off, hit the 'stop' button on the rails to request the next stop. If you're unsure where a stop is – and this can be one of the most frustrating parts of riding the bus, especially in an unfamiliar part of town – then ask another passenger or the driver for help. Remember that the drivers can't talk to you when the bus is moving!

London is a big city but it has (statistically speaking, anyway) one of the lowest crime rates of any major metropolitan area. Some of the areas you'll pass through on this tour are lower-income parts of town and can be a little rough around the edges, especially after dark, but none of them are especially dangerous. Still, keep your wits about you and keep your eyes on your belongings, and don't flash things like cameras around unnecessarily.

Also remember that many of Hawksmoor's churches are still active, working religious communities. If you happen to arrive during an event or service, be respectful.

Above all – have fun and enjoy yourself! You're going to see some of the most interesting things in London and get a great cross-section of the city. Now come Netley. Let's to our work.

74 Brook Street

The house of one Dr. William Gull, physician extraordinary to Queen Victoria and the main character in From Hell, is at number 74 Brook Street. The nearest Tube station is Bond Street. From the Tube station (or Oxford Street), head south down Davies Street and take a right on Brook Street; number 74 will be on your right.

Currently the building suffers from what many historical landmarks in London suffer: scaffolding and reconstruction work. Number 74 will be under wraps until 2009 (according to the work order posted out front), but it still makes a good start to the tour so you can get a feel for the still well-to-do area from which Gull and Netley began.

In From Hell, Gull is Jack the Ripper, who commits the Ripper crimes because he's trying to complete a ritual that will take away the rising power of women (for the complete explanation, read the book.) The theory comes from a book called Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution by Stephen Knight. Alan Moore states that he doesn't believe Gull was the Ripper, although it does make for a good story.

Historically Gull was a gifted physician who described the condition now known as hyperthyroidism. His entire biography, published in 1896, is available online.

Number 74 is on a quiet street in Mayfair, one of the most expensive places to live in the world (it is the most expensive property on the British version of Monopoly as well.) It contrasts well with many of the low-income areas Gull and Netley traversed on their tour, many of which have not changed much in the last 110 years.

Before you leave, check out houses # 23 and 25 just down the road, where Jimi Hendrix and George Handel lived (although not at the same time.)

Return to Oxford Street via Davies Street and catch the Number 8 bus to Chancery Lane. The bus stop is right in front of House of Fraser, a quick walk down Oxford Street. Change at Chancery Lane Tube, walking up Gray's Inn Road to catch the Number 17 or 45 which takes you to King's Cross station (the 45 actually terminates there, so it's the last stop on the bus.) Walk in front of the station to Pancras Road on the west side, turn right and walk past St. Pancras Station. You'll come to:

Battle Bridge Road

Battle Bridge Road is the legendary location of the battle between Queen Boudica of the Iceni and the occupying Roman forces where Boudica's army was annihilated and the Queen herself killed, following her revolt against the Romans and her subsequent burning of Londinium to the ground (not the last time that would happen.) There is no real historical evidence for this, nor is there any evidence to support another myth that Boudica is buried beneath platform 9 or 10 at King's Cross Station. It also happens to be the location for Harry Potter's Platform 9 ¾.

Battle Bridge Road is currently behind a locked gate and due to be buried under the expanded King's Cross Station, so if you're lucky enough to get a look, enjoy it while you can. I had to confirm with a Black Cab driver waiting in the queue for King's Cross Station that it was, in fact, Battle Bridge Road. His response: 'it used to be.' The last of the Victorian slums that Gull remarked upon is still visible a short walk to the north, past the giant rusting petroleum tank. Note progress and expansion and the way it is burying historical pieces of London, just as it has done for centuries. Instead of fires and bombs, this time it's pure economics, a force that can be just as destructive.

When you're ready to move on, head back to the station and walk to Pentonville Road. From here, catch bus 73 or bus 476 to Ball's Pond Road, where you'll switch (check the stop maps – it will tell you where to go) to bus 277 or bus 38. Take this bus to the Greenwood Road stop (you might have to ask someone where this is, or pay attention), cross Graham Road and walk down Greenwood Road to reach:

London Fields, Hackney

Today, London Fields is a park in the middle of Hackney. In Gull's time, it was still used as pastureland by some of the poor in the slums around Hackney, although it is worth noting that cricket has been played here since 1802. It was originally used as a pasture as early as 1540 (or earlier, but 1540 is the first recorded use under this name.)

As Gull notes, Hackney was once Hakons Ea (or Haca's ey, meaning 'marshland'), a Saxon settlement. The settlement was not located at the Fields, however. There are some hills on the south side of the Fields that are clearly manmade though, so imagine them to be Saxon burial grounds or fortifications if you want. I did.

Walk south through London Fields and take the southwestern exit. Cross Landsdowne Drive to Shrubland Road and bear right to see Albion Drive, upon which Gull and Netley stopped (although now it is not in view of the Fields, as it may have been in Victorian times.) Then go back to Landsdowne Drive and walk south around the Fields to Broadway. There's a fun market here on Saturdays if you happen to come through at that time; it's an interesting shopping street on other days as well. Walk south on Broadway to Goldsmith's Row, crossing Regent's Canal, and walk all the way to Hackney Road. Cross Hackney Road and take a left, catching the number 55 bus at the Warner Place stop. Take this all the way to Old Street Station. You'll be walking for a while from here. Once off the bus, walk south on City Road until you come to:

Bunhill Fields and Blake's Grave

Bunhill Fields was once called Bone Hill Fields, the name originating from its use as a burial site since Saxon times. It contains many notable graves but nowadays is also a hangout for drug dealers and kids from the surrounding council estates. Blake's grave is the small one about halfway through in the shadow of the obelisk from Daniel Defoe's memorial. The position of the graves in From Hell isn't quite accurate, but I can fully understand Eddie Campbell's artistic license in rotating Blake's grave a bit. Blake's memorial is typically covered with change (leave some if you'd like), strangely untouched by the locals.

Gull notes that Blake was a 'prophet' and 'a throwback from beyond the Age of Reason, from a time of magic thinking when the Gods yet walked with men.' I'm no Blake scholar and I leave the details of his work to those who have studied him far more than I, but this quiet section of London does make for a good area in which to take a few moments and reflect on an age of magic now disappeared. The power here is almost palpable.

When you're done, walk through the cemetery to the other exit and turn right to go back to Old Street, then hang a left and keep walking. You'll see its steeple before you get there, and believe me when you see it you'll understand why Gull makes such a big deal of the obelisk on top of:

St. Luke's Old Street

St. Luke's is the first of Nicholas Hawksmoor's churches we'll visit on this tour, although note that Hawksmoor only designed the tower and its awesome obelisk steeple. Like many others it was heavily damaged during the Blitz but recently reopened after renovations and is apparently a popular spot for concerts. The church will likely be locked when you arrive but the churchyard is open, allowing you to walk around and get a taste of this unique church.

Hawksmoor's white stone churches are striking in their starkness compared with the typically dull surroundings of London, even moreso on a cloudy English day when they still manage to be bright as though lit from an unseen source.

The obelisk steeple is remarkable and remarkably intact. It's a nice contrast to the next Hawksmoor church on our list, so keep it in mind. When you're finished, head back to Old Street and walk to Goswell Road. Take a right, then a left on Sebastian Street to:

Northampton Square

There isn't much to see here. The Masons play a major (fictional) role in From Hell, but nowadays it's just a typical mix of flats and small businesses.

When you've had your fill, walk through the square to the southwest exit and leave via Wycliff Street. Take a left when you get to St. John Street, which takes you back to Old Street, which turns into Clerkenwell right around here. You can walk this next part or catch the number 55 bus. If you catch the bus, get off before Southampton, walk north on Southampton and turn left on Vernon Place (it's Theobald's Road on the right side of the intersection), cross to the north side of the street and walk to:

St. George's Bloomsbury

Where St. Luke's has a massive sun god's symbol as a steeple, St. George's Bloomsbury is a Greek temple uprooted and planted firmly in the middle of London. The tower was modeled after the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, and the front based on the Temple of Bacchus in Baalbek, Lebanon. The church is in a fairly poor state of repair on the outside (but better than it was, if you read Moore's notes in the appendix to From Hell.)

The massive columns are something completely out of time. You may be able to get into the church for a tour – there was a wedding going on when I was there – and note that the crypt is currently To Let if you're interested in starting a business in a church's graveyard.

When you're done enjoying St. George's Bloomsbury, walk down Bloomsbury Way where it turns into New Oxford Street, cross Tottenham Court Road and catch your old friend the 55 bus to Oxford Circus. Switch to the #10 bus to Kensington High Street – ride it past the V&A and get off when you reach:

Earl's Court

Earl's Court is a fairly large section of town, but the main drag is Earl's Court Road. You'll pass most of the tourist hotels on the way here, and Earl's Court Road today is a bunch of Chinese and Indian restaurants of dubious quality with a smattering of decent to 'meh' pubs. If you want a lunch of Pie (as Gull and Netley ate – although Kidney Pie is a rarity these days), the Blackbird Pub should have one for you.

Earl's Court was once Billingswell, as Gull notes, or 'Belinos' Well' after the sun god-King Belinos, son of King Lud. Lud himself is named later in Ludgate, just outside of St. Paul's Cathedral – the pagan origins of many of London's areas are still there, if a little tarnished by modernism and the passage of time.

It's also worth noting that the Lord Ranelagh Pub in Earl's Court had one of London's first 'public' drag queen shows in the early 1960s, and is considered to have played a role in gay liberation in the UK.

Once you've seen Earl's Court and had a nice lunch, grab the C1 bus anywhere along Earl's Court Road and ride it to Victoria Bus Station. Switch at Victoria to the #11 bus; take it through Victoria and get off at Southampton Road. Cross the street, where you'll see a passthrough to Victoria Embankment (look for the sign.) Walk down this street and through a tiny park; there's a Zebra crossing about 20 meters to your right that literally drops you in front of:

Cleopatra's Needle

Another landmark covered in scaffolding, another sun god's symbol. Its twins are in Paris and in Central Park in New York, but they came from Heliopolis during the reign of Thutmose III around 1450 BC, making them about 3500 years old.

It actually has nothing to do with Cleopatra and you can read the story of bringing the Needle to London on the plaques on the base, or in From Hell. For being 3500 years old it's in a remarkable state of repair. Check out the steps leading directly into the Thames, which must have seemed like a great idea on paper but tend to catch all kinds of horrible floatsam.

When you've had your fill, cross the street and walk along the Embankment to Waterloo Bridge. Look for the steps up on your left, then cross the bridge (on the east side, your left as you're crossing the river.)

Near the end of the bridge, you'll catch the #1 bus to Elephant & Castle. At the same stop or the one about 15 meters away, catch the 68 or 468 towards Herne Hill – the stop you want is Brockwell Park, after you come down Herne Hill proper. You'll pass through Brixton, synonymous with London's hip-hop scene, and into the far more suburban areas of Herne Hill. You'll almost think you're in Kent, because crowded flats give way to houses with front yards.

Note this route deviates a bit from Gull and Netley's route (it doesn't pass Bedlam or Lambeth Palace, or Hercules Road), only because there is no bus that travels that way that goes anywhere near where we want to end up and it would literally take hours to walk.

Once off the bus take in:

Herne Hill

Herne Hill is named for Herne, a horned god who lead the wild hunt, known in many Celtic and Neolithic cultures. Herne is actually a ghost in Windsor Forest, mentioned in Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor, who may have been a historical huntsman who worked for Richard II; connecting Herne to the Horned God is a fairly recent development and seems to only have been done in Victorian times.

The corner of Herne Hill Road and Half Moon Lane looks much as it does in the book, and the building to the left of the bridge on page 24 of Chapter 4 is the Half Moon Pub, a good place for a pint if you're starting to feel thirsty.

Feel free to take a walk through the park if you have the time, otherwise go to Half Moon Road across the street from the pub and catch the #37 bus to Peckham. Switch to the #78 bus at Hanover Park (in front of a giant Morrisons.) Ride the #78 all the way to Tower Bridge Road, getting off at Druid Street. Walk a few meters further down Tower Bridge Road and on your left will be:

St. John's Horsleydown

Which isn't a church anymore at all, but is now the London City Mission building. Only the base of St. John's survives, which is a shame since the only part of it that was Hawksmoor's was the steeple, which was destroyed during the Blitz. You can walk around the base and see how it was integrated into the office building that now sits on top of it, and still make out some of the memorial stones embedded in it and the gravestones that have been stacked up on the far side of the churchyard.

When you're done, go back to Tower Bridge Road and walk towards the Thames, turning left on Tooley Street. You'll be on foot for a while again. Walk down to London Bridge and take a right, walking across the bride and taking in the excellent views of the Tower and Tower Bridge.

On the far side, bear right around the outside of Monument station brings you face to face with:

Monument

Another obelisk. It will be under repairs until mid-2009 at least, so you probably won't get to see much that isn't covered in curtains and scaffolding. The Monument was designed by Christopher Wren to commemorate the Great Fire of London in 1666, which started just a few meters away. Sadly the view that Gull and Netley had in From Hell is now blocked by office buildings, so you'll have to take it in from street level.

Just north of the Monument catch Eastcheap street going east and walk towards the thing that every tourist in the world will be around:

Tower of London

The Tower was originally built – or at least part of it was – by William the Conqueror in 1078. Conquering Bill used it as a palace and fortress when London desperately needed both, but after the advent of artillery and the overcrowded city the royalty moved on, leaving the Tower more for administrative purposes (and prison purposes.)

Nowadays it is the single-most-expensive tourist destination in London; if you've never been inside it's worth a trip, but make a day out of it rather than trying to squeeze it into this tour. That way you'll get your money's worth at least. Note the large section of Roman wall just outside of Tower Hill station as you walk along the north part of the Tower, then bend around the north side of a junction of streets making for East Smithfield Street. This eventually turns into The Highway (Ratcliff Highway to Gull and Netley) where pirates were hanged (and, until the turn of the last century, was the part of Wapping notorious for brothels and rough pubs.)

Continue along past the Mint until you get to the redundantly-named Cannon Street Road.

Your object is right in front of you, the shell of:

St. George's In The East

A direct hit with a bomb during the Blitz destroyed the interior of this Hawksmoor church, leaving only the shell. It's an impressive structure from the outside, and if Hawksmoor's plans had been followed it might have been the greatest of his churches. The turrets look like something out of an H.P. Lovecraft story, alien and almost sinister. You can walk through the churchyard and get a taste of what the church looks like from several angles; if the doors are open, check out the interior, a 1960s brick building – almost like a church-within-a-church, which is basically what it is. The contrast is extraordinary.

After you're finished, turn right up Cannon Street Road and continue until you reach Commercial Street. On Commercial, turn right and walk a short distance to the next bus stop where you can catch the 15, 115 or 135 to Limehouse Town Hall. Cross Commercial and turn down Newell Street. The entrance you're looking for is just past the rectory on your left, where you'll see through the gates:

St. Anne's Limehouse

Another glorious Hawksmoor church. The churchyard here contains some very interesting graves. The giant pyramid here was originally supposed to be placed on top of the tower, another of Hawksmoor's pagan-inspired ideas. Definitely check out the cool cupola over the door which looks vaguely like a small Doric temple.

You can walk around and get a good taste for the church from several different angles. The trees obscure most of the views of the full building, but it's an enjoyable quiet area all the same. Note how the busy traffic on Commercial seems to fade into the background here.

When you're done, head back to Commercial and grab the #15 bus at the stop right outside the locked churchyard gate. Take it all the way to Liverpool Street Station. Cross Bishopsgate and head north (left) to Brushfield Street on your right – there's a massive glass office on your left and coffee houses on your right. Your next destination is right in front of you. Walk past Spitalfields Market and all the little shops (or better yet, stop and enjoy some of them – there are some great little shops in this part of town.) Then continue on to:

Christ Church, Spitalfields

This is the church that features so prominently in the story, partly because the Ripper's victims were all found in Whitechapel in the streets around here. Christ Church should be open, so feel free to step inside and have a look around.

In the last 10 years the church has undergone some major restoration work to Hawksmoor's original plans – even before the Blitz it had been heavily modified and had fallen into terrible disrepair – so its interior probably looks as close to Hawksmoor's original designs as can be achieved. Parts of it are still in pieces, but the views from the balconies are worth climbing up the stairs for. They also let you take pictures inside (unlike some other churches – I'm looking at you, St. Paul's Cathedral!) and they have some good (free) pamphlets about Hawksmoor if you're interested.

You're almost done, and you might be feeling a bit parched at this point, so why not stop in the pub across the street – the Ten Bells. This is the pub where the Ripper's victims drank (both historically and in the book), and it looks as though it hasn't been maintained since those times. In actuality, most of the interior is new except for the decorative tiling, which is straight out of the Ripper's time.

The topless dancers from Alan Moore's notes are gone now, replaced by the no-longer-illicit thrill of drinking absinthe and a variety of lagers. You can also get a latte here now, a sign of changing times if there ever was one. Be sure to make a stop in the bathroom; note the mounted vintage newspapers about the Ripper on the way down and marvel at the sheer amount of graffiti on the walls. Leave your own personal note if you want, they don't seem to mind.

When you're done, return to Bishopsgate and head south. Turn right on Cornhill and walk to Bank tube station; take advantage of the underpass so you don't have to dodge traffic and follow the signs of Poultry or Cheapside. Emerge, take Poultry until it turns into Cheapside and keep walking until you see a massive dome on your left that belongs to:

St. Paul's Cathedral

The last stop on our tour. If it's before 4.00 pm you can get in and walk around, but be aware that it costs 10 pounds and you can't take pictures. St. Paul's is well worth a visit but you might be a little tired to climb the three-hundred-some steps to the top of the dome (and some of the best views in London). It's interesting to note how many iterations Wren's designs went through before they settled on this one; it's also worth looking at the pictures of the previous Gothic cathedral, which replaced the Saxon one on the same site. The Gothic building's spire must have been massive.

The Solomon's Stone that Gull shows Netley is just as Moore describes it, in the far right-hand corner of the Cathedral on the right just after you walk in. It's not recessed in a niche as Eddie Campbell drew it, but is just mounted on a plaque on the wall and looks suspiciously unlike an actual stone from the Temple of Solomon – but hey, it's cool anyway.

There should be chairs set up around the great design under the dome where Gull and Netley mapped out their journey, and you can go back and mark points on your A-Z if you want roughly where they did. Looking up at the domes, you can almost imagine the chains there, still chaining the gods to London:

You can marvel at one of the greatest Renaissance buildings in the world, one of the few European Cathedrals build by Protestants instead of Catholics, and an amazing and heavy piece of architecture. If you've been in a Gothic cathedral, note how different the Baroque building feels in terms of strength instead of grace; a completely different kind of grandeur.

And congratulate yourself, because you just followed Gull and Netley's path around London! If you were marking your A-Z check to see if you made a pentagram. You'll find it's pretty darn close to the illustrations at the end of Chapter Four.

As you went I hope you remembered to look for the stories engraved in stone. A pagan place barely tamed; an ancient city a victim of entropy, covered in scaffolding to stave off the wear of time; Victorian slums once inhabited by immigrants knocked down and replaced with council estates inhabited by subsequent waves of immigrants just as Whitechapel was in Gull's time; peeling paint and trees growing from roofs followed by multimillion-pound mansions.

That is London: the city is the story, a much-told tale that continues to unfurl in the lives of millions of people just as it has every day since it was founded two thousand years ago. Gull's London, Netley's London, Moore's London, Campbell's London, the Ripper's London, his victims' London, my London, your London. Make your own mark upon the stone, because it's a story shared by all.

I hope you enjoyed the tour, and if you walked and rode it I'd love to hear what you thought. I intentionally didn't create maps to go along with the tour partially because it's very easy to find everything and follow directions, and partially because part of the magic of this tour is to mark your own maps in your own ways and check off your points at the end. If you find that anything major has changed in the directions, let me know and I'll update the post above.

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Want to see all the pictures with further commentary? They're on Flickr.

Note: Images from From Hell used for research and comparison purposes only.

Getting Sporty At Lord's

2008-09-05T09:55:00.004+01:00

Well, I can say I have now fulfilled a dream of mine: to play at Lord's Cricket Ground. Of course I was playing dodgeball. Yeah, dodgeball, like in that movie. How did I end up playing in a major dodgeball tournament with teams from all over the UK competing at the legendary home of cricket? Good question. Life is funny sometimes.

I came in to work on Monday recharged from my holiday and sorting through my email when one of our directors sent around a question asking if anyone wanted to play in a dodgeball event. The Mail on Sunday (a newspaper) and Everyman (a cancer charity) organized a dodgeball tournament. At Lord's Cricket Ground. How many chances in life do you have to do that? So of course I said, 'hell yes!'

We arrived early and went right to the bar in true British fashion. The team started getting soused (I laid off, having come from a raucaus company party the night before) and we went to practice. Dodgeball is great fun because it's easy to pick up: the rules are simple, it doesn't take a hell of a lot of athletic prowess, and games go quick, so noobs like us could take part without a problem. Of course there are teams who play regularly and (maybe?) professionally - the Leicester City Ligers were there representing, among others. And the costumes aren't a joke either: there were teams dressed as ninjas, in pajamas, and in viking hats.

I'd love to say that in the spirit of true underdogs we rose to the top and won the tournament, but alas we had our proverbial asses handed to us in pretty short order. We were, in the parlance of this generation, pwned. By the team in PJs. So yeah. But it was a great time. Here's a video of what a game looks like (the single game we won), and pictures are on my Flickr stream.

Getting Out Of The Smoke and Into The Country

2008-08-31T12:35:00.005+01:00

There comes a time in every Londoner's life when that person thinks "Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ, this is a giant, energetic, polluted metropolis full of miserable assholes and if I don't get out of here I might just snap the next time the clerk asks me if I have an Advantage card." That time was nigh so the Beautiful Competition and I packed our bags, booked a train and got as far away from the Big Smoke as we could go, by heading straight west. Cornwall. St. Ives.

Cornwall is an unusual place. Historically speaking, it remained Celtic longer than the rest of Britain, and after the Romans left it remained "Romanized" long after the Saxons set up shop in the eastern part of the island. In fact, after the Roman pull-out, the last remaining operable seaports were out in Cornwall. It's farm and fish country, then it became mining country, and now it's artistic and tourist country. Yellow sand beaches, overpriced restaurants and even the occasional sunny day. So we, along with thousands of other tourists, descended and made the most of nine days out of the City.

We did so with no agenda in mind; this was a holiday designed to relax. It was our replacement for a 'let's go to the beach and drink those little drinks with umbrellas in them served to us by dark-skinned natives' holiday that would have been way too expensive. We got sunburns and I even swam in the ocean a bit (although, I admit, I was gasping at how cold it was) and took a very 'whatever' approach to things.

The first couple of days were 'sit on the beach, putter around town and relax' days. St. Ives is a fairly famous art colony, with its own Tate gallery (!) and a long tradition of landscape and modernist art. The landscape is rocky and rugged, with high granite cliffs dropping into jagged tidal pools where seals bask. It has inspired literary types of all kinds: the Godrevy ligthhouse in St. Ives Bay inspired one Ms. Virgina Woolf to write To The Lighthouse, and the nearby town of Zennor was where D. H. Lawrence composed much of Women In Love. It's not hard to see why: it's a wild land, and its rural nature and tourist draw has allowed it to avoid some of the economic pitfalls that other places in England have experienced. Which isn't to say that stuff didn't exist, just that the vibe was a little less intense.

A massive hiking trail circles the entirety of the area - the South West Coastal Trail - and we did a piece of it, walking into Zennor from St. Ives through fields of heather and over rocks the size of tractor-trailers. Logged a good 9.44 miles on the GPS, and got some amazing pictures.

We planned a trip to the Isles of Scilly, the westernmost point in England some 28 miles off the coast, but ended up scrubbing it the morning of because the helicopters weren't flying due to the mist and fog. Welcome to England! So we saw most of Penzance (the town of the pirates fame) and ended up bussing out to St. Michael's Mount, an island-fortress that is only accessible at low tide, by foot anyway. As we discovered, when the tide comes in and you need to take the ferry back, it costs money! Piracy is alive and well in Cornwall!

The trip was well worth it; we both ended up sunburned, relaxed, happy and destressed. Coming back to London was hard; on our way back from breakfast this morning, Liz remarked that London still smelled badly when it was wet. I agreed; it's like a dog in that it's alright most of the time, but it's really kind of stinky and when it gets wet it only gets worse. So it's good to get out and relax.

On a more personal level, I got a ton of writing done and did some pretty strong thinking about a lot of things - my future, priorities, and so forth. But I'll save that for the Puppet Show.

Pictures here.

Unexpected Pleasures

2008-08-21T11:02:00.003+01:00

Here's a list of some things I love about London that I didn't know about, didn't expect to like or took me by surprise:

Not having a car. I enjoy driving (well, most of the time) and I absolutely loved my Prius. It was painful to give it up. But I've adjusted well to not having a car, and all that implies: you can't pick up Ikea furniture without getting a cab or home delivery, you have to limit yourself to small runs at the grocery store, and sometimes you get lost walking around. But you see so much more from the street than you do from a car. I love it.
Fresh food. Fresh ingredients just taste better. Not so many preservatives means better tasting food, believe it or not.
Living in the big city and being around so many diverse groups has not actually confirmed my stereotypes and prejudices. In many cases it has challenged them. Seeing people of different races, creeds and nationalities struggling every day for the same things I struggle for humanizes them. I take back things I said before about living in the city: this experience is not something you can get in strip-mall suburban America.
I've mentioned it before: there are some women who think an American accent is sexy. Who'da thunk it?
Things like this.
I kind of enjoy carrying an umbrella around with me almost all the time now.
Reading on mass transit. I've read more since I arrived here, mostly on the tube and on the bus on the way to and from work, than I have in the last two or three years combined.
Great acts of kindness. This is probably a blog post in and of itself, but I've seen complete strangers being extraordinarily kind to each other. So many people living on top of each other requires some sort of unwritten social contract, and it's amazing what I've seen - people helping women with strollers onto busses, people helping elderly people who have fallen down. Clerks just generally being friendly and helpful. Returning someone's wallet or Oyster card after they left it in the store, or it fell out of their pocket. I've seen people being complete assholes of course, but I'm always floored by how kind people here are, often to complete strangers. Even if a drunk stumbles into you, you don't yell, you just say 'steady on mate' and help him on his way. After all - someday that very well could be you.
Monmouth Coffee Company. Who knew some of the best coffee in the world is roasted in London?
I'm playing less games, but doing more social sorts of things. This can only be a good thing.
Photography. Who knew I'd take so many pictures here?
My muse. I'm writing more than I have in years. Since college. Since ever, really.
Contrary to what Republicans would have you believe, socialized health care does not suck. In fact, it fucking rocks.

This has been a great experience and I really do love it here.

Not Gone...

2008-08-18T13:08:00.002+01:00

Just busy.

Actually I've spent the last two weekends doing my From Hell Chapter 4 tour, which has taken far longer than I expected. If you want a little preview, the photos are on Flickr.

He's At It Again

2008-08-07T11:54:00.001+01:00

On the way to the bank, a tourist stopped me and asked me where Westminster Abbey was. I helpfully pointed to it (the big, white Gothic building just down the street) and she thanked me, then asked if the streets here 'move around' because it seemed very easy to get lost.

I laughed and said it sure seems like it, but I know better.

He's out there, moving streets around.

You hear me, minotaur? I'm on to you!

Roman London: The Walk

2008-07-24T09:28:00.003+01:00

I picked up a copy of historian Stephen Inwood's Historic London: An Explorer's Companion not long after arriving here and have used it sporadically for recommendations on historic pubs and other one-off things to do. The first section is a walk through Roman-era London, which I finally managed to pull off last weekend based on a combination of favorable weather and a desire to get out of the flat and do something.

The walk covers The City, the oldest parts of London that used to be encircled by the city's wall. Originally the Romans built London (Londinium) as a strategic center because the Thames is a natural harbor. It was essentially a supply point for their efforts further inland; it wasn't the capital of the province and was only important as a waypoint. But like many waypoints (say, Chicago) it eventually became important in its own right.

We started at the Tower of London, not a tower at all but the fortress where the King used to reside when he wasn't traipsing around somewhere else. We didn't pony up to go in – it's stupid expensive and we did it the last time we were here – but it's always interesting to see because it's one of the few examples of a completely intact medieval building in the city. Not completely completely intact as various changes have been made throughout the ages, but it's close.

The object of my interest is just north of the Tower, literally right outside the Tower Hill Tube station. There's a massive section of the old city wall there, although only the bottom three meters or so are Roman; the rest were added in the middle ages. It makes a good basis to start the walk. From there, we wound north, taking in various sections of wall. One is in the courtyard of a five-star hotel; another is in the basement of an office complex, visible through the windows.

This represents London the city in ways that nothing else could: ancient architecture, as old as the settlement itself, that has been completely subsumed by the new around it. Built around, knocked down when it wasn't needed anymore, and developed upon. That is London, and it's amazing to think of all the layers of history one on top of the other.

We headed north to the appropriately-named London Wall (a street), and jogged west, following bits of the wall as we went. We passed the not-so-PC streets Jewry Street and Saracen's Head Court (!) along the way, enjoying the City on a quiet Saturday afternoon.

Unlike many other European cities I've visited, London follows its American counterparts in that its business and financial areas close down on evenings and the weekends. In some parts of the City, you can walk several blocks without finding an open pub or coffee place, or without seeing another person. It can actually get a little creepy because the city just seems so empty, moreso when you compare it to areas like Camden where things are hopping all the time.

We ended our trip at the Guildhall, another fine example of surviving medieval architecture, although one that was rebuilt extensively after the Blitz and the Great Fire. Again, this is London: a city that has been razed both naturally and unnaturally throughout the ages. It's almost Biblical the way some disaster or another occasionally comes along to cleanse the city of some of its old floatsam, burying ancient buildings in piles of rubble. But at the same time it was this destruction that lead to the discovery of much of what is known about Roman London: the Blitz uncovered many of the sections of wall that were previously lost, and revealed other things like the postern gate outside of the Tower and the amphitheatre now housed in the Guildhall Gallery.

These are the times when I love London the most, when I feel the most connected to the city itself. Being here is like living in history, breathing the dust and pieces of so many people who walked here before and left their mark on the town. It's easy to lose sight of this because I go to work every day, but it's important to get out every once in a while and not take for granted that I live in one of the greatest cities on the planet.

Check out the Flickr photos.

The Minotaur

2008-07-21T13:46:00.004+01:00

Last Wednesday I stopped at Great Portland Street Tube Station, on the Circle Line, and waited for it to clear out. It was late and the trains were running with big gaps between them, so I had the station to myself for a while. I sat on the bench at the far end of the platform and stared into the black dusty void of the tunnel.

After several minutes I heard a growl from the darkness. I knew who it was, of course: the minotaur. You catch glimpses of him every now and then, but more often than not you can hear him growling from the darkness, or occasionally snorting and charging. This is his city after all, the manmade contraption meant to contain him and those sacrificed to him.

He emerged from the tunnel slowly, his horns slightly sooty from the filth in the air. He sat on the bench next to me, causing it to creak slightly under his immense weight. For a few moments neither of us said anything. Then he asked:

'You seem unhappy lately. Are you alright?'

'Of course,' I said. 'Although I certainly appreciate your concern.'

'It's easy to lose perspective here,' the minotaur sighed, leaning back, resting his head on the brick. 'It happens to me from time to time. But I need to be concerned. This is my city, and the people in it are under my care.'

'Is that why you’re trying to kill me?'

'That's just my day job. Night job. Well, job. I mean, do you think I want to? No. But the sacrifices, they’re always willing. It's not like anyone forces them to be here.'

'You don’t have to do kill them, do you? They just kind of... grind themselves down.'

'Yeah. It's just a job though. Pays the bills. Allows me to travel.'

I look over at him. His bovine snout snorts slightly each time he exhales, his coal-black eyes stare straight forward, ignoring me. His muscled and bare chest, human if not for the light coat of black fur and leathery skin, is crisscrossed with tiny scars from millions of battles. I remind myself that he’s older than time and will be around long after I'm gone.

After a few moments I ask: 'Is it time to fight now?'

'Might as well get to it,' he says.

We stand, and square off. The first blow is mine. The rest are his. In the end, it doesn't matter; this is his city, after all.

Photo credit: Minotaur a by Stephen Rees on Flickr.

To Canterbury We Wende

2008-07-08T21:55:00.002+01:00

Whan that July, with his shoures crappy
The droghte of dust hath perced to the roote
And bathed every Jason in wanderlust,
Of which vertu engendred is the truste;
Whan Elizabeth eek with her sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge Ja-son
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne, (WTF?)
And smale foweles maken melodye, (birds)
That slepen al the nyght with open eye-
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen Jason and Liz to goon on pilgrimages
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende!

So this last weekend to get the hell out of London we took a pilgrimage (slow train ride) to Canterbury, home of Canterbury Cathedral, the shrine of Thomas a Beckett, England's best-known Martyr, and destination for pilgrims since medieval times, when Chaucer wrote his famous tales. We didn't tell stories on the way - we had our usual Sunday chat instead - and didn't see much of Canterbury apart from the high street and Cathedral, but I'm told there isn't a hell of a lot to Canterbury apart from those two things so I think we did alright. The Cathedral is probably my favorite in the UK aside from Durham, as it's an amazing Gothic construction, impossibly huge and beautiful in a way no other Cathedral is. Even with all the Cathedrals we've seen here and across Europe, there's something about Canterbury that's different. It's one of the few that feels warm on the inside, whether it's from the lighting or the choice of stone. It feel like what I've always believed God's house would be like. It's a strange, homely feeling at once historical and immediately present.

I admit that I'm biased to Canterbury based on my first experience there almost ten years ago, but returning this time with just a little time before it closed and the rain alternating between annoying sprinkle and outright downpour it still held its magic. There's very few things I can say that about, especially after so much time has passed. It was a strangely refreshing trip, even if it was just for a few hours. And just what we needed to get out of the city.

Flickr set here.

This Is The Day Of Our Independence Day (What?)

2008-07-04T12:26:00.004+01:00

It's strange celebrating the 4th in London, considering I'm surrounded by the very people that ~~my forefathers~~ some rich white guys 120 years before my ancestors even arrived in America fought against. When I got to the office, several people wished me Happy Independence Day, to which I responded by flipping them the bird and saying 'screw you, Redcoat!'

There are no fireworks today for me, but we are going on a team outing at work where we're going to play baseball in St. James' Park. I have official scoresheets, just like I used to use in Little League, and ten copies of 'Take Me Out To The Ballgame' which we'll be singing during the 7th Inning Stretch.

This is going to be a lot of fun.

The Best Way to Learn

2008-06-30T19:40:00.003+01:00

They say the best way to learn is to involve yourself in something, so to learn the sport of cricket I invested in a 10-pound copy of Brian Lara Cricket 2007 for the old Xbox 360. Actually go out and play cricket? Perish the thought. A video game of cricket? Heck yeah!

Cricket seems like a great game in theory, much like baseball is a great game. It's the kind of game you enjoy watching live, having a chat with your friends and a beer and some unhealthy food and sitting out in the sun and generally enjoying yourself. Cricket seems like this (except a game can take five days). Plus it's subtle. It seems like a sport of subtlety. Kind of like the Go of sports, if you will. Complex and incomprehensible to the observer.

I haven't taken it out of its wrapper yet, but I'm looking forward to some quality time learning how to play the most mysterious of sports.

Islington's Finest

2008-06-25T15:41:00.003+01:00

I debated whether to post this but I will want a record of it later, so here goes.

Last night I roll back to the flat about 7:15. We're on the third floor of our complex, and the stairs are outside although covered by a roof. I'm taking the steps two at a time, glad to be home and eager to play some Lego Indiana Jones.

Sitting on the top step of the final flight of stairs is a homeless guy. This isn't a terribly uncommon sight, there are a couple of them who hang out in our stairwell from time to time although it's very intermittant and they always seem to leave afer a few minutes. But this isn't one of those guys, and he's just kind of sitting there with a hood pulled over his face, kind of leaning forward and sleeping. I say 'excuse me' as I step around him, no response. I ask him if he's alright. No response.

I go inside, lock the door, and call the police. It's a non-emergency - more than anything I'd just rather have the cops come and let this guy know that our stairwell is not a good place to crash - so they say they'll send someone as soon as they can. That was about 7:20.

At 10:30, Liz comes home. The guy hasn't moved. In fact, he looks pretty much exactly like he did before. The cops call and apologize for not showing up yet. They tell me they'll be on their way. Our security gate is locked, and our door is double-locked, just in case.

Around 11, I hear our two female neighbors come home. I assume they are OK because their security gate closes; it's a distinctive sound. I check and he's still out there, hasn't moved.

I've got yet another cold (go London air quality) so I wake up at around 4:00 AM and can't get back to sleep. I check and our friend is still outside. I give the police another call, and tell the operator that he hasn't moved a bit and I'm a little worried he might not be OK.

The operator asks if he's still breathing.

I tell her I guess so, I didn't go out and check.

She asks me to go out and check.

Now think about that for a moment. The police are asking me to go at the very minimum wake someone up who doesn't have any other place to stay. Add to that he may have a mental illness, be on some kind of illegal substance, or both. And they want me to check his vitals.

Isn't that why the police exist? So I don't actually have to check the vitals on some guy who's camped out on my porch?

I go back to bed and by the time I'm up at 7 AM, he's gone. When I'm in the shower the cops show up 12 hours after they were initially called, and say that they'll let the night patrol know to check the complex. Fair enough.

Obviously the guy was OK (he got out of there somehow), but the whole experience was a little surreal. I know the cops have better things to do than chase homeless people out of stairwells, but 12 hours is a little ludicrous. As was, I feel, the request that I go outside and check to see if the guy's OK.

Welcome to the big city I guess.

Solstice at the 'Henge

2008-06-21T16:45:00.004+01:00

My coworker Simon suggested a trip to Stonehenge for the Summer Solstice, which is cool because it's a massive gathering of some 25,000 neo-Pagans, hippies, New Age travelers, partygoers and people looking for a good time, punks, Goths, and people who just want to see what's going on. It's also one of the four days each year when the National Trust allows people to walk up to the stones, touch them, stand among them and experience them as people used to do. It's often taken for granted but until early last century Stonehenge was actually in danger of collapsing and being damaged; previous landowners used to let tourists chip pieces off rocks and some of the lintels had collapsed.

When you go as a tourist today you're confined to a paved, circular track that sits about a hundred feet away from the circle. In other words, you never get close enough to actually get a real sense of why Stonehenge is so significant. It's one thing to hear a guided tour tell you about it from a hundred feet away; it's quite another to stand between massive stone pillars with a stone lintel over your head and try to fathom why neolithic people would have dragged the things 40 miles at a time when there were no such thing as iron weapons and armor. Why? How? The thing is no one knows. It's still not entirely certain why Stonehenge was built. It seems to have been a sacred site used for a variety of reasons and by a variety of people, but why was it created originally? We don't know.

We set out from work at 4:00 on Friday, narrowly missing an all-office meeting, and took the train out to Salisbury where we caught the bus service to Stonehenge. We arrived at the monument around 8:30 and still had a couple of hours of daylight to get oriented. The center of the stones was the center of the action, with people gathered dancing, drumming, playing music, smoking and hanging out all around. The rain was intermittent but picked up towards the end of the night, but even the minor misery of the rain and cold didn't really dampen our spirits.

The night passed with dancing, walking around, talking, drinking and just enjoying the overall energy of the gathering. I'm certainly no pagan or even a religious person, but there is definitely a feeling of energetic togetherness when so many people are gathered and engaged in an activity like that. I will also admit that the stones themselves surprised me; they felt far warmer than I expected. The odd part? They were warm in patches. Other parts felt exactly like cold stones you'd expect to find in the middle of a rain-swept plain.

I honestly can't remember the last time I pulled an all-nighter, but I came through this one with flying colors (and slept the entire train ride back to London, then crashed when we got to the flat.) But it was an incredible experience. I'm still trying to sort what to make of it, but there is something remarkable about a lot of people getting together for a party like that, drinking, smoking, having fun and not hurting themselves or anyone else. That was what surprised me the most: no instances of violence or anything I would have associated with a bunch of people getting together and turning the censors off. In fact, I saw total strangers taking care of other people who needed an extra shoulder or two on the walk back to the bus.

If you're interested, here's my Twitter stream from the evening, as I was live-tweeting the entire thing.

I think I may have to go back next year, or find another Solstice celebration. It was a great time.

Update: Simonski has an incredible picture from the event on his Flickr.

British Humo(u)r

2008-06-15T19:36:00.001+01:00

Overheard in the pub:

Q: Why did Diana cross the road?
A: She wasn't wearing her seat belt.

Welp.

A Few Simple Reminders

2008-06-10T20:52:00.001+01:00

1. Over here, you're the one with the accent.
2. Sometimes, girls will think your accent is sexy or cute.
3. Sometimes, they will tell you this.
4. When they do, be flattered. Don't say 'I didn't know I had an accent!' and think you're a paragon of wit.

*Sigh*

Insert They Might Be Giants Lyrics Here

2008-06-04T16:07:00.004+01:00

A typical conversation around our flat goes like this:

Me: Let's go somewhere.

Beautiful Competition: OK, where?

Me: I dunno, what's good on Last Minute?

BC: Here's a trip to Istanbul for dirt cheap.

Me: Hey, that's cool. Istanbul, formerly Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine and later Ottoman empires? In Turkey? Why not.

And then we book tickets and go.

We didn't exactly time this trip perfectly since it was the weekend after a bank holiday weekend with miserable weather, but it worked out fine. We got up early on Friday and trundled out to Heathrow, boarded a plane and in about four hours were in Turkey.

This is significant for a lot of reasons for me. It was my first visit to a Muslim country. It's the furthest east I've ever been. And it was within spitting distance of another continent: Asia. Which brings the total of continents I haven't laid eyes on before to two, Australia and the cold one.

We planned the o'dark thirty flight so we could get in and have some time to get a feel for the city, since we realistically only had two and a half days to see anything. We made it to the Hippodrome, the chariot racing course built back when the city was the Greek colony of Byzantium, poked around a bit, and had a laid-back evening with delicious and amazing food.

Although I'm not sure we're conscious of it, we tend to fall into a nice rhythm when we travel: sleep in a bit, do most of our heavy touristing before lunch, eat a smallish meal, meander for a while, head back to the hotel, nap for a couple of hours, then have an enjoyable and relaxed evening. We weren't trying to cram as much sightseeing into our trip as possible this time around; it was intended to be relaxing and it was. If I sound defensive it's because we saw very little outside the main, top tourist attractions but that's OK.

Saturday was up early and hit the Grand Bazaar. The Grand Bazaar is basically the world's first indoor shopping mall: a large structure (really a series of structures) that house shops of various types, divided roughly by what they sell: carpets, jewelry, leather, clothes, and so forth. We found some artwork we liked, haggled and bargained for it, and ended up getting ripped off I'm sure but had a great time while we were at it.

Traversing this press of humanity and hitting the book bazaar and spice bazaars took most of our day. It's a very different environment, where there are no prices and it's even considered rude to accept the first price a shopkeeper tells you. Many of them spoke English but not all, so you have to resort to pointing, grunting, putting numbers into a calculator and so forth.

The next day we hit the tourist attractions (rather than the tourist traps), which are luckily clustered within about a mile of each other. The Blue Mosque was the first, an incredible huge mosque that takes its name from the blue tilework inside. It was built to attempt to rival the nearby Aya Sofia (or Hagia Sofia) and came pretty close. The Aya Sofia was completed in 567 and for nearly 1000 years was the largest and grandest Christian church in the world. It is huge on a scale difficult to imagine, especially considering it was built as Europe was slipping into the Dark Ages and is a marvel of architecture that hasn't been rivaled since.

Topkapi Palace was our next stop; at this point we were hungry and getting a bit tired and kind of missed some parts of it. The best summary I can think of is 'the Alhambra if it hadn't been allowed to go to pot,' although there was much more modern work at Topkapi since it was the seat of the Ottoman sultans until early in the last century.

Istanbul wasn't a narrative trip, even though I tried to create one above. It seemed to me very much about feeling: the warm sun, the Mediterranean air, the sound of the calls to prayer echoing from minarets across the city, the taste of Turkish tea and coffee, the smell of Turkish tobacco in nagrileh, shopkeepers trying to entice you in with outlandish questions or statements, and all of the things that make traveling so wonderful that you only start to notice when you're on the plane ride back.

Also, Istanbul was a very cat-friendly city. There were cats everywhere, obviously cared for. I'm not sure if this is because the cat is respected in Islam, or if it's a beneficial relationship to have them on pest patrol. Can someone enlighten me?

Edit: check out the pics on Flickr, including one of the Beautiful Competition in a headscarf.

Blah

2008-05-26T09:03:00.003+01:00

It's a Bank Holiday weekend, which means no work. Normally I'd be outside basking in something fun, but it has been raining like nobody's business the last couple of days. And Saturday, the day when it was nice? I spent most of that indoors, cleaning and straightening up and catching up with Liz since she just came back from a week in the US.

We did manage to get out for a little bit yesterday to hit a couple of historic pubs (my historic Roman London walking tour was put on hiatus because of the weather) and today I'm thinking a museum might be in order. Anything that doesn't involve a lot of walking in this dreary wetness.

Europe / America: On Sports

2008-05-16T13:33:00.002+01:00

Sports are Serious Business no matter where you are. Some places, sports is more serious business than other places. A lot of people think Americans are really serious about their sports. After all, we turn out by the hundreds of thousands to watch sports where pansies in pads try to move a ball around and take breaks every 30 seconds, sports where fat men try to hit balls with sticks, sports where skinny men and butch women try to hit really small balls with really long sticks, sports where tall men try to put brown balls through laundry bags, and sports where drunken Canadians on ice skates hit each other and something resembling a hamburger patty with long sticks.

But say what you will about American sports: when our favorite NASCAR driver loses a race, you don't see thousands of rednecks trying to run each other over in the parking lot afterwards.

Sadly it seems that in Europe sports can be pretty Serious Business to the point where people can be really badly hurt.

A Preview

2008-05-15T08:23:00.001+01:00

I've been terrible at updating lately, mostly because the weather here has been fantastic and I've been spending every possible moment outside when I'm not at work. OK, not every possible moment, but every possible blogging moment.

I realize I don't normally say where we're going on our next trip or even when we're going, but there will be a trip soon. To prepare, Elizabeth purchased a head scarf.

Where could we be going?

The New Look

2008-05-05T08:31:00.004+01:00

Just had to plug the new banner and the artist who did it, Robert Jones, who is doing art for all three of my blogs. Adds a much-needed bit of color to the homepage if I do say so myself.

Here We Go Again

2008-05-03T07:23:00.006+01:00

So London has elected itself a conservative mayor with no real political experience known for making verbal gaffes and is racist, anti-immigrant and anti-homosexual.

Now where have I seen this before?

My fellow Londoners, I feel like Cassandra but believe me when I tell you this will not turn out well.

Say What?

2008-05-02T18:24:00.003+01:00

Cod Pieces?

Language is a funny thing. Even when you speak the same tongue, it can still be very difficult to understand what someone's saying. Maybe it's word choice, or accent, or cadence, or simply what isn't being said.

I admit I struggled a little bit with language when I first arrived here. Not that I found my new countryfolk hard to understand, but I don't have the greatest hearing in the world to begin with. Let me rephrase: when there's a lot of background noise, I have a very hard time picking out an individual voice, even if that person is sitting right next to me. I often have to turn my head so I can make out what a person is saying if I'm in a pub or a restaurant.

Lately though I noticed I've been doing it less, especially when I'm listening to Brits speak. I know my hearing hasn't improved at all (what?) so I can only assume I'm getting more used to listening to British voices. The funny thing is they don't seem any more or less clear to me per se but I certainly ask them to repeat themselves less, and I find myself smiling and nodding a lot less as well.

Oddly enough I've noticed that I've started to pick up a couple of Brit-isms, mostly in my word choices (a fine example being "I've"). But my good old Yankee accent is completely intact. I was in New York less time than I've been here and managed to pick up more of a New York sounding accent (for a time, anyway, but don't ask me to say "dog" without saying it "dauwg" if I'm not paying attention) than I sound anything resembling British. Which is good because I don't want to be Madonna.

It's one of the less-noticeable things about living here but I admit that it does make me feel like a bit less of an outsider, likely because it makes me feel a little less self-conscious. Honestly I haven't had the feeling of "hey, I'm an American!" here in quite a while. After a while you begin to feel as though you belong and not asking people to repeat themselves every three sentences certainly helps.

Metaphor

2008-04-23T21:59:00.002+01:00

Literature and history has provided us with a great many metaphors and images for London: a dark city, a labyrinth, a forest, Hell itself, a battleground, a ritual chamber, a market. TS Eliot used one of my favorites, simply referring to London as the 'unreal city,' a place that couldn't possibly exist and yet somehow does in spite of itself.

London is unusual in that the founding of the city can actually be traced to a specific period of time; in this instance, the landing of the Romans and the conquest of Brittania, where Londinium was a key military supply point and fortress. After the Romans withdrew, the city weakened and eventually passed from importance as the Saxons and Britons squabbled over control of pieces of what Rome left them. It wasn't until the late Dark Ages that London once again became important, and has continued to grow in importance ever since. It is arguably a city like no other, and certainly one of a select group which only includes New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong and Tokyo - and others one would no doubt argue belong in this set. Cities where things happen, events that trickle down into the rest of civilization. Vast centers of moneymaking and culture.

While many poets and sociologists no doubt have arguments as to why this is, I would offer a rather simple solution that the sheer numbers of people in these places offer no other possible conclusion. In less flowery language, it's the 'million monkeys' principle: they'll eventually produce something, be it Shakespeare or this blog. Or something entirely new.

And that's the problem I've found with trying to describe London in any of the metaphors I've encountered: they're too specific. The very thing that makes London so unique is that (as the quote at the top of this blog says) it really does contain everything. It in and of itself is a metaphor for the existence and condition of our entire species. That's some crazy mojo, dude.

The metaphor I've come to apply to London is that of a vast organism. Similar to the movie Pi, where the narrator describes an impossibly complex system 'screaming with life,' that is how London appears: a place where due to the sheer numbers you will encounter anything and everything, from the very best to the very worst humanity has to offer. In the scant few months I've been here I've seen people do heartless things to defenseless and crippled homeless people, and I've seen incredible displays of compassion for total strangers. If there is a representation of the city as anything, it's an extension of what makes us human: it's like a vast series of cells with the people as various organelles running to and fro, and the cells working together to make the organism work.

London isn't a tree or a creature or even some Cthulhoid monster that I might call it if I were less imaginative and observant. It's more like one of those massive underground fungus' scientists have discovered, something so ancient that it's hard to conceive that it started as a few simple cells and now covers miles of space. But that's exactly what London is: nothing more or less than the people that live here and make up the city. If the organelles were to stop working, London would simply cease to be and quietly slide back into the earth, awaiting the next militaristic expedition that realized the Thames would make a good shallow port for landing supplies.

I must admit the seduction of making London more than this. It is an inspiring city in all of its massed urban glory, and one that cannot help but fire the imagination in ways you'd never conceive. It is - unreal.

Last Thursday Was the Winter of My Discontent

2008-04-15T19:27:00.005+01:00

The Valley

Made glorious summer by my decision to take a long weekend and go on a hiking and writing retreat to the North. I needed a little time off; I haven't really had any since before the move apart from the trip to Prague, and that was pretty high-impact touristy. I needed something more chill.

I started with the vague idea of holing up in a country inn somewhere, hiking, writing and drinking beer. My requirements were pretty simple:

Had to be outside of a major city. Preferably a small town. Preferably with 2000 people or less.
But easily accessible by train and/or bus.
With hiking trails in the area.
Maybe in a National Park?
In a pub. Or at the very least a place I didn't have to go outside to get a drink if all else failed.

In five minutes of Googling, I found the Blue Bell Inn in Kettlewell, North Yorkshire. In the Yorkshire Dales National Park. With train tickets to nearby Skipton and a 30-minute busride, the location was perfect. And miles of hiking trails. And beer. In a small town. It was exactly what I wanted.

So I booked the room and train tickets and had a couple of weeks to look forward to it.

I took Friday and Monday off work because the bus didn't run on Sundays and I wanted to take advantage of my time there - two full days of hiking plus travel days. I arrived in Kettlewell early in the afternoon on Friday, checked in and immediately headed out.

Now, National Parks in the UK are a little different than they are in the US at least as far as trails go. The parkland was formed in the 50s, but obviously people have been living there far longer - for thousands of years. So it's a full, working rural area where people make a living from their farms. It's not like hiking through Yellowstone or the parks in Washington - it's more like hiking through rural Ohio, through people's fields and pastures and sometimes their backyards.

The trails vary greatly as well, from paved one-lane roads to unpaved country roads to bridleways for horses to tracks through fields - sometimes just a bit of trampled grass. And they aren't always well-marked; more than once I got lost trying to figure out where I was supposed to go next, because signs tend to hide or have been knocked down. Other times, they're just blank or very hard to read, or so general that you can't quite tell where you're supposed to be.

Kettlewell is in a valley (as most towns are) and most of the trails head up into the hills so you can get out on the moors. The first day I started winding up a trail and made it as far as a farm before I turned around - I didn't realize that I was actually on the right trail, I thought I'd ended up on private property. Turning around was damn lucky though because soon after I did a storm rolled in and started dumping a sleet and rain combination on me. By the time I got back, I was soaked.

The next day I picked up a poncho from the helpful village store along with a guidebook to walks in the area - which combined with the ordinance survey maps I had with me was perfect for getting around, because the OS maps helpfully do not label any trails, and the book used fairly recognizable landmarks.

Snowy Moor

Day 2 started out innocently enough; I decided to do an approximately 10-mile loop to the next town, then across the moors and up to a mountain called Great Whernside. The hike ran for two miles along the river, passing through low pastureland broken only by the characteristic stone walls. I saw plenty of wildlife, from sheep to lambs. And rabbits, and grouse. At Starbotton, the next village, I began climbing to the hills. As I climbed, the sun disappeared and things started to get cloudy - especially back towards where I was hiking yesterday. At one point as I reached the high moors I could see the rain falling in the area I had just covered - so I pulled out the poncho and prepared for it.

The rain was heavy. Really heavy. Heavy like sleet, then hail, then heavy English snow.

Hard Rain

You can see from this picture exactly how hard the rain was falling - luckily it was at my back most of the time, but it eventually covered the trail, so much so that I got lost and had a really hard time finding my way back and almost trampling a grouse's nest in the process. I wasn't cold and I wasn't wet, but the area I was in was also really boggy and one wrong step could have had me knee-deep or waist-deep in some really cold muddy muck - not what I wanted when I was five or six miles out of town. I reached a small country road that was the last ditch before climbing Whernside and the weather up top looked even more miserable. I met a couple of hikers who had just come down and had stopped for tea (hey, this is England after all) and talked to them about the trail - it was rocky and slippery and likely concealed under snow by this point, and very steep. At one point the weather looked like it was going to clear so I decided to chance it, then got summarily worse so I turned around and took the road back to town. All in all, clocked about eight miles that day and still had a great time.

Day 3 I decided to do a southern route, which would take me not up a mountain but across the high moors, through some forests and back along some ruins. The weather was much more cooperative - even though I had the poncho there was no rain, and the walk was incredible. The high moors were absolutely deserted, although I did meet a couple of other hikers later in the trip. The climb was gradual; it took about an hour and a half to get to the top but I stayed up for another hour and a half, including the time I got lost and ended up way the hell off course but in the middle of an amazing moor, with more rabbits than I've ever seen before in the wild. I also saw hawks, although they were smaller than their American counterparts, and the corpses of rabbits - so there were probably foxes around as well, even if I didn't see them.

In all, I clocked about 20 miles between all 3 hikes, wrote around 10,000 words, took about 10 pages of notes for a couple of projects, and came back completely relaxed and refreshed. It was exactly what I needed, and today was one of the easiest and hardest days at work: hard to go back, but easy because I was so recharged and chill.

One or two of these a year and I'll be a much happier camper. Hiker. Whatever.

Complete Yorkshire Dales National Park Picture Set on Flickr.

April Snows Bring.. ?

2008-04-06T08:59:00.004+01:00

Snow

I rolled out of bed this morning and was halfway through getting ready for my morning walk when I happened to looked out the window and noticed a lot of cold, wet white stuff falling from the sky. Somehow, on April 6, it was cold enough to snow - and snow real proper snow. Big, wet white flakes rather than the kind of anemic little balls of slop I've seen so far here.

That was two hours ago. It's stopped now and it's already starting to melt - it never stuck to the streets but it did stick to the trees, as you can see - but it was beautiful while it lasted.

The Change from Tourist to Resident

2008-03-30T16:49:00.002+01:00

We've been here four months now, and London is starting to feel more like home than like a place we're visiting. I think this becomes true of any place you move: things begin to get more familiar, and once you see the traditional touristy things to see, you start looking for the cool places you can call your own. Last night we met up with some people from work and ate at an Argentinian steakhouse in the middle of South London; it was a great time, and it was one of the first places I've been that hasn't either been immediately around my flat, or something either Lonely Planet or the Rough Guide recommended. It's that time when we're discovering places we'll be that are off the path a little and are the ones we'd recommend to newbies.

It's a fun time.

A Weather Interlude

2008-03-24T16:05:00.002Z

Every culture is good at something. The Irish are good at drinking and partying. The Australians are good at drinking and drinking. And the Americans are good at drinking and religious extremism.

The Brits are good at complaining about the weather. You may think people from your part of the world are good about complaining about the weather, but these people are like goddamned pros at it. It's like thinking 'yeah, I know how to drink and party' because you did some beer bongs in college and saw some sorority girls take their clothes off in the shower. And then you meet an Irish person and go out drinking and partying and realize 'holy God, I knew nothing.'

After this weekend, I think I understand why my new fellow countrymen excel at this particular venture.

For the last four days - the entirety of my long weekend - it has hovered just around the freezing mark with Arctic winds occasionally gusting in to make you feel particularly cold should you be outside. The weather pattern appears to be controlled by some 3 year old with ADD and some anger issues; on Friday, I walked to the pet store, a five minute journey. When I left, it was sunny. When I stepped out of the pet store, it was raining and hailing on me. When I walked back into my flat complex, it was snowing. Five minutes later, the sun was out again.

Today, things were looking up so we went out and walked around a bit. We decided to stop when the frozen rain - I can't even call it snow - was pelting our faces so hard it hurt. And looking outside about 45 minutes after getting back, it looks sunny.

But here come those clouds again.

Yes, I'm joining them. The weather here can really suck.

And All is Right With The World

2008-03-21T07:02:00.001Z

Yesterday we went out to Heathrow to pick up the cats. They've mostly skipped the scardy-cat phase of hiding under things and are just happy to spend time with us.

We are a family once more.

Big City's a Little Different

2008-03-19T13:07:00.003Z

Walking to work the other day, I cut down Bolsover Street rather than hiking down the (larger) Great Portland Street and noticed some cops standing outside a row of flats and some flowers on the ground. Turns out a 23-year-old socialite was found dead there under a pile of rubble with neck injuries. That's two blocks from my office building. I pass the place every day, or at least every other day when I don't take the main road.

London's funny because you can't take anything for granted: the great neighborhood where you work experiences a brutal murder. A building you pass every day conceals secrets behind its anonymity. True these things are possible anywhere, but here it seems like the volume gets turned up a little bit. Most of the time you lose yourself in the crush, but when something happens to break that illusion it's far more jarring.

For laughs, read some of the comments on the Daily Mail's piece about a suspect in her murder, who fled to Yemen.

Also, since everyone is doing it, here's my theory: erotic asphyxiation. You heard it here first, folks.

On Cabbies

2008-03-12T21:49:00.004Z

"I got to warn you mate, I'm depressed." That's what my cabbie said when I jumped in the black taxi today on the way back from a meeting. And then he proceeded to strike up one of the oddest conversations I've had with a local since touching down.

Cabbies are basically the same the world over: some of them are nice and will talk to you, others think you're a captive audience for whatever belief they espouse, and some (my personal favorites) just don't say anything at all. I prefer the last one because I'm kind of antisocial about conversing with someone who will be played in the movie of my life by an actor who isn't even SAG.

This guy started by telling me how immigrants are ruining the UK and how lucky we had it in America. I wasn't feeling particularly feisty (and I noted uncomfortably that I was one of said immigrants, but didn't share this with him) so I kind of went along with it, said immigration was a big topic in the US as well, yadda yadda. He went on and talking about how horrible London was now that Red Ken was mayor, how it was better after Maggie Thatcher got rid of the GLC and no one was in charge of anything, how the congestion tax was causing more problems than it solved, whatever.

I make it a general rule to just smile and nod and ask a few unassuming questions when I'm in an unfamiliar place and people are discussing politics - not only can you not offend anyone that way, but you can also learn a lot regardless of your own political leanings - but I had to say by the time he got on the subject of the dyke cops who were keeping his son off the force, I was ready to protest a bit.

Then we were at my office and I missed my chance. Not that it would have accomplished anything but it would have been an interesting cap to a pretty surreal experience.

Cabbies. Gotta love 'em.

Poem: Sonnet to a Stilton Cheese

2008-03-10T14:55:00.002Z

Sonnet to a Stilton Cheese by G. K. Chesterton

Stilton, thou shouldst be living at this hour
And so thou art. Nor losest grace thereby;
England has need of thee, and so have I--
She is a Fen. Far as the eye can scour,
League after grassy league from Lincoln tower
To Stilton in the fields, she is a Fen.
Yet this high cheese, by choice of fenland men,
Like a tall green volcano rose in power.
Plain living and long drinking are no more,
And pure religion reading "Household Words",
And sturdy manhood sitting still all day
Shrink, like this cheese that crumbles to its core;
While my digestion, like the House of Lords,
The heaviest burdens on herself doth lay.

Copied from Wikipedia and assumed to be public domain; if not, please contact me.

Lesson Learned

2008-03-03T20:47:00.002Z

Good lesson: do not run the washing machine, oven and three out of four burners at the same time.

Also, "minted peas" are exactly what they sound like.

About Freaking Time

2008-02-25T13:42:00.004Z

This morning, our stuff arrived. It was two hours later than they said it would be, but considering it was also two months later than they said it would be I'm not going to complain about it.

There's just one more thing to ship over and we'll be good. Two things really.

Back from Prague

2008-02-24T14:33:00.004Z

After the Beautiful Competition damn near worked herself to death for her major event, we knew it was going to be time to take a little bit of, well, time. So we booked a trip to Prague on lastminute.com and spent the last three and a half days there. Just what the doctor ordered.

Prague's a city of contrast. More appropriately, it's a city of expectation and reality, and it's interesting the number of ways those intersect. Prague has kind of been turned into a bit of a myth by the Western world - both among travelers who remember the good old days right after the fall of Communism when you could eat and drink and stay for fifty bucks a month, and among fantasy aficionados who quite appropriately regard it as a beautiful Gothic and Baroque gem where legends can live. The reality is that it's somewhere between those two things, but intersects with them enough that you get that big grin on your face you get when you know you're experiencing something cool.

We spent 99% of our time in the old city (technically, the "old city," the "new city," the "lesser quarter," the castle, and the Jewish quarter - but it's all really the old city.) Prague is walkable and there's stuff everywhere that caters to tourists, but it's still authentic enough that it doesn't matter. The Astronomical Clock is a little underwhelming, but the city itself is the attraction - the Baroque buildings and churches, the amazing Gothic spires and the cathedral, and the overall vibe of a place that's quiet and still trying to figure itself out after it threw off Communism almost 20 years ago.

In fact we started with a tour of the sites important to the Velvet Revolution, so called because it was mostly bloodless except for the massacre that instigated it and it was lead by intellectuals rather than the military. Any right-wing mouth-breather who thinks intellectualism is the cornerstone of the evils of the godless communist oppression need look no further than Prague and the Czech republic to be proven wrong in a grand fashion. It was a good indication of the importance the Czechs placed on art and their history when we received far more fliers for classical music concerts than we did for dance halls, techno shows or even strip clubs.

After treading the pavement where hundreds of thousands of Czechs assembled to end Communist oppression (attach any political message you want to that, but in my opinion they wouldn't have a memorial to the victims of Communism if it wasn't oppressive in some way), we tread the pavement walked by Kafka during his time in Prague - back through the Old Town Square and into the Jewish quarter, which (like the rest of Prague) was mostly spared during World War II. I mean the buildings, not the residents - of some tens of thousands of Jews who lived there before the Nazis invaded, there may be about 5,000 there now.

Somehow Prague managed to escape the devastation inflicted on so much of Europe during World War II, and this authenticity certainly adds to the feeling of history there. The Jewish Quarter is no exception - you can (and we did) visit the Synagogue where Rabbi Low kept his Golem, the mythical Jewish monster meant to protect the Jews against threats. I also got my first yarmulke so I could cover my head in the Synagogue. Pretty nifty.

The next day, we hit Prague Castle which is actually the original castle but built-over by a lot of Baroque palaces, so there isn't really much castle-y about it. The awesome St. Vitus' Cathedral is up there, probably the best pure Gothic cathedral I've seen apart from Canterbury, and the palaces are all pretty nifty. They're also the current seat of the Czech government so they're functional as well as cool to look at.

The last night we kind of just took it easy - had a few beers, drank some hot mulled wine as we walked around and just enjoyed ourselves. Charles Bridge looks pretty sinister at night with the soot-covered statues glaring at towering over you as you pass. It's not hard to see why Prague takes on just a bit of the sinister at night, and why you could imagine coming face to face with a vampire as easily as you could a tourist who's had too much to drink.

Oddly enough, outside of the city center Prague starts to look a lot like many American cities, especially a little further out when it becomes brand-new apartments, housing developments and office complexes. On the way out, there were several times I could have sworn I was in Dallas if the signs weren't in Czech.

So yes, expectations and reality clash. I didn't meet any vampires or Golems, but that's not to say I didn't expect to see one at any time. Maybe I should have stayed out later. I'll look for 'em a little harder next time I'm there.

Update: Pics here.

A German Diversion

2008-02-13T22:19:00.004Z

Bier ist Gut

It was kind of last-minute, but my company ended up sending me to Germany during the first part of this week for a Digital conference, which turned out to be really kickass. But the best part was - it was in Germany! I got to practice my German a little, which I would wager I still know just as much of as I did the last time I was there, and was actually complimented - twice - on speaking German by the locals. I guess they're used to people speaking English and not even trying, so I'm glad I at least made the effort. Only a couple of times could I not at least make myself understood and I asked before switching to English anyway. Kinda cool.

Hamburg was unseasonably warm, and I spent most of Sunday afternoon wandering around without a jacket and enjoying the awesome weather. Sunday evening landed us in a restaurant where I enjoyed the above beer, which was like every good Bock/Amber I've ever had all rolled into one. And compared to London prices, unbelievably cheap. I can't wait to go to Prague in two weeks!

I didn't get to see a whole lot more since I was in a conference room most of the time, but we did manage to hit a club on the 20th floor of a building by the harbor which afforded some awesome views of the Elbe river, the ships, all veiled by a cool winter fog. Flickr stream here.

From The Office

2008-02-08T16:16:00.001Z

Earlier this week, my French coworker told me:

That was a great email. It had the right balance of annoying American optimism and vague 'fuck off' tone.I took it as a compliment.

A Day Out In London: A Narrative By Jason Mical

2008-01-31T22:15:00.000Z

Liz Ready

Time: 12:40 PM
Location: Holloway Road

"Woke up, got out of bed
Dragged a comb across my head
Found my way downstairs and drank a cup
And looking up, i noticed i was late
Found my coat and grabbed my hat
Made the bus in seconds flat"

Holloway Road

Note: we did not take a bus. But it is time for a day on the town, a perfect way to spend a Sunday afternoon walking around our new home town. Holloway Road stretches south towards London. Did you know that Holloway Road goes all the way to Scotland as the A1? It's true, there are signs for "The North" everywhere. It's a very vague term to see on a sign.

It's a 10 minute walk from our flat to the Holloway Road tube station and we're taking it slow, joking and laughing. The Nag's Head shopping center is across the street, home of the Morrisons where we buy most of our groceries.

12:43

Time to get a move on, we've only got a few hours! The usual hubbub on Holloway Road, a half-dozen languages - English, Arabic, French, Italian, etc. - all around us and people of every size, color and shape. The newspaper calls some of them chavs and others dangerous but I realize more and more it's just the latest iteration of classism.

Scouting

The Scout Center is a bit of a conundrum since you can't do a lot of camping here and there's always trash piled outside (aren't Scouts clean here?) but as an Eagle scout I have to salute them for at least trying. The good old three-finger Scout salute in fact.

Speaking of, "we like to hike along, hike along, light-heart and free... we like a rowdy song, rowdy song, jolly good bunch of Scouts are we.." [repeat 10x]

Underground

Then it's down into the mirror city, the upside-down city of the Tube. The dirt on the sign is nothing compared to what lurks in the tunnels but believe it or not it all seems cleaner than it was the last time I was here. At least I'm not blowing as much black snot out of my nose as I used to.

That's a good thing right?

The Tube is like, well, many things. That's part of its beauty: it's a metaphor for some many things, and so many things are a metaphor for it. Aside from London itself, there are very few things that can inspire such networks of thought.

Fines

It's hard to charge a fine for something when the thing you'll be fined for using is broken / gone / nonexistent, but that won't stop them from trying I guess. I wonder how much someone got paid to create the placard, because the 'button' certainly looks to be permanently gone.

The idea of a key emergency button seems like it defeats the purpose of said button, eh? If the only one who can use it needs a key... oh fuck it, never mind.

Useless

Speaking of useless as tits on a bull, I don't think I've ever seen this so-called 'help station' in service. I guess I'm glad I've never needed help in the Holloway Road tube station because I'd have to run around and find someone first.

But we're not here for help, not today. We're here to keep going, deeper into the rabbit-hole of the Underground.

Adultery

Those crazy Europeans, free from Puritanical views on sex. Actually this ad is kind of uncommon and it was only up for about a week; it's been replaced now by an ad for the new Mary J. Blige album, but I'd actually rather have this suggestive and admittedly effective piece of advertising up there anyway. You can kind of see how the walls of the tube station curve here, giving the Tube its nickname.

It's actually called the Underground, which is equally appropriate. No one officially calls it the Tube but they might as well, kind of like the way people in New York refer to New Jersey as "shit."

Sign for Line

Urban Dictionary seyz:

whippin picadilly
d: having nothing to do, wasting time

Guy: "Hey man, what's up?"
Other guy: "Nothing, just whippin' picadilly."

I can only imagine they're referring to the wait time on the Picadilly line from about 8:15 - 8:45 am. On Sundays, there's no wait so we waltz right on the train and continue.

No/Motion

Speed is a relative thing when you're on the Tube. When the black walls are six inches from the window, it looks like you're flying by even though when they suddenly drop away for a switch or something it looks like you're only going about 10 MPH.

Escalators are no different; it's all relative, I suppose. Still the Tube is typically faster than any other form of transport in London because it travels in a (generally) straight line from point to point and somehow the hodgepodge of competing railroads from the 1800s actually managed to make a layout that decently serves most of London.

1:05

Even after a quick change of lines it's still only 1:05, so about 20 minutes from when we left our flat and walked by the Nag's Head till when we're in central London. Bloomsbury to be exact.

Most literary types know Bloomsbury by the people who hung out here: Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and some other poor chumps who never became quite as famous. It's one of those quiet sections of London where you go to stroll around because there aren't a lot of tourists or other people to get in your way; at the very north end is the British Museum. At the south end is Chancery Lane.

Oyster Card

This is an Oyster card. This is a newfangled invention so you don't have to buy paper tickets every time you want to ride the Tube. It carries a balance on it for single trips, or you can do what we did and buy monthlong or yearlong passes (at a discount.) It works by and RFID chip.

Conspiracy theorists and right-wing loonies are constantly shitting themselves about how the government can track where you are at any time because of these things. I find that exceptionally hard to believe because most times I have to lay mine on the reader for two or three seconds for it to pick up the signal. We're a little ways off from real-time people-tracking. That's what all those CCTV cameras are for, sillies!

Griffin

I want to say a quick word about these griffins, not because of any familial relation but because the griffins are a symbol of London. A similar pair guard the south side of London Bridge, and this used to be one of the gates to the city which these fellows used to guard.

Oddly enough, Griffins used to be the symbol of the Iceni tribe, whose queen, Boudica, burned Londinium to the ground after the Romans abandoned it to her army. Griffins and London go way back.

2:00

A brief meander later and we're looking up Regent Street. Our destination: the Dover Castle, a pub near my office where I've eaten lunch a few times. We're out for their Sunday Roast, a traditional English dish eaten on Sunday consisting of Roast. But where Regent turns into Great Portland is this church, rebuilt several times, most recently after the Blitz. Even what's new looks old here.

The Beeb

Speaking of, here's a pair of jokers outside the BBC office. The BBC is the UK's answer to... well, I'd say PBS but that would be insulting the BBC. It's entirely funded by taxpayers so there's no commercials, and it's channel 1 on every TV in the country instead of channel 50-something. And it actually has interesting content and cool shows, although their special effects are laughably bad most of the time.

Pit

Typically you don't get a good look inside construction sites because there are big fences to keep you out - mostly because there are a lot of dumbasses around who, when drunk, might think it's a good idea to go playing around in construction sites. Hell I've done that in my adult life and I wasn't even drunk. And the results were not pretty.

I learned after our walk that this is the location of the New Beeb - the BBC's new office building. Apparently the bottom floors of the building will be located somewhere in China because goddamn that's a big pit. I can't wait to see what it will look like when it's done.

One Glove

There's kind of a lost-and-found thing going on here, but this glove looks really nice. So I made up this limmerick about it:

There once was a glove lost in London
Which smelled a bit like an onion
It sat on a spike
And said "this I like,"
"For I don't have to cover a bunion."

Needs some work huh?

Flashman

Seth only recently introduced me to the Flashman novels by George MacDonald Fraser, who sadly died just a little while ago. Flashman is an anti-hero I can admire if not identify with: a coward who constantly shirks responsibility, sleeps with many women and betrays people.

Maybe admire isn't the right word.

I can however admire this statue, which looks like I kind of imagined Flashman to look. If he were made of Bronze.

Pub

And we arrived at the Dover Castle, which turned out to be closed. It's down the tiny Weymouth Mews, surrounded by houses that cost more than a million pounds. The irony is that they used to be servant's quarters (a "Mews" is the street where the carriage-houses were for the rich folk) and the pub's prices are really low compared with most of the rest of London. My local boozer in Holloway is more expensive.

So we set out in search of something else, which took us right by my office and the lovely views of this big phallic symbol. Its tall and yes, it looks like a big wiener. It's also covered with BT's mobile phone sending/receiving devices so I imagine working in it would be akin to frolicking around Chernobyl as far as the radiation exposure goes. Which is probably why none of the offices in there are occupied anymore.

It is definitely a noticeable part of London though, and it's a long way from the Isle of Dogs and the rest of London's really big buildings.

Food

We eventually found another pub with an even cheaper roast so we went up, ordered some pints and noshed some, um, nosh. The roast was boiled beef and the gravy came from a can and the sprouts were overdone but otherwise it was OK. The good news is there was a really good cider on tap, which I'm starting to like as a good beer choice even if it is a little sweet.

Grey

The name of the place was the Yorkshire Grey, and I'd definitely go back again. It's one of those quintessential pubs: horrible wallpaper, strange photos or memorabilia on the wall, great beer on tap, food, a few people talking quietly. I like a pub where I don't have to ask my tablemates to repeat themselves.

I just wrote "tablemates" which is a pretty British sounding term. Crikey, I have to watch my language around here eh guvnur?

Buried

So a brief walk later - if you want to see the pictures go to my Flickr stream - and we're in Marylebone, near Regent's College, our old haunt. The churchyard for St. Marylebone (a bastardization of St. Mary le Bone, in case you're wondering) holds some awesome old graves which you don't realize you're standing on until it's too late because they're the sidewalk leading through the churchyard (actually a peace park, because that part of the church was destroyed during the Blitz.) It's awful small to read on the sign, but one of the great forebears of my craft is buried there which I didn't realize until I read the placard: Hoyle, of the Book of Games fame. He was buried here in 1769.

Detective

A little further along and we find this familiar fellow:

"His very person and appearance were such as to strike the most casual observer. In height he was rather over six feet,and so excessively lean that he seemed to be considerably taller. His eyes were sharp and piercing, save during those intervals of torpor to which I have alluded; and his thin, hawk-like nose gave his whole expression an air of alertness and decision. His chin, too, had the prominence and squareness which mark the man of determination. His hands were invariable blotted with ink and stained with chemicals, yet he was possessed of extraordinary delicacy of touch, as I frequently had occasion to observe when I watched him manipulating the fragile philosophical instruments."

4:10

And by now it's time to head home, a little tired but happy and satisfied at a great day out in London.

Like I said before, so many people compare London to so many things that it practically serves as a metaphor for everything at the same time. I will say this: it is very much a giant, collective organism more than the sum of its millions upon billions of parts. Say what you will about many cities, but there is no place like London anywhere else on Earth and I love living here.

For Fuck's Sake (AKA VIP Relocation Sucks)

2008-01-29T14:30:00.002Z

Liz gets a call today that there might be a problem with the stuff we shipped over, including my Xbox 360. The original quoted timeframe of "one month" has long since come and gone, but supposedly our stuff was supposed to be in Essex this week for delivery on Friday.

Except it isn't. They popped open the container with our stuff in it, and... our stuff wasn't there. Some stuff that was supposed to be in Germany was there, but not our stuff. It's not "lost," they just "don't know where it is."

I told Liz to tell them that when they find the box with my hiking boots in it that they can save themselves some time and put the boots up their own asses so I don't have to.

In case you're wondering, the name of the company is VIP Relocation. Or V.I.P. Relocation. VIP Relocation is based out of Los Angeles. VIP Relocation are now almost a month late and VIP Relocation have "misplaced" our stuff (not "lost" it.) And I wager when you Google search for VIP Relocation (that's VIP Relocation kids), this post will come up.

VIP Relocation. VIP Relocation. VIP Relocation. VIP Relocation. VIP Relocation.

Update: Carlo from VIP Relocation contacted me about this post (see the comments below.) He informed me VIP is under new management and that problems like this should be fixed. Since this happened a year ago, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

The Mid-January Blues

2008-01-22T11:57:00.000Z

Or is that middle to late January? I haven't updated a whole lot this month because I haven't really been out doing much - although we're planning a little trip this weekend so I should have a great batch of photos then. Last weekend I visited a coworker and his wife in Peterborough and we drove to Stamford, which was picturesque but we didn't really get into town until dusk so the photos turned out pretty bad or not at all. Before that, I was in San Francisco for Macworld manning Microsoft's Blogger Lounge for a couple of days, and now I'm back and deep in the grind here.

Elizabeth is slammed at her job because their giant conference is going down on February 12, so while she's in the home stretch on that she's working 12-14 hour days so our time to get out and see stuff has been relatively limited the last few weeks.

We've settled into a routine, which is odd considering I feel like I'm "traveling" instead of "living" here. I think the "living" part isn't going to come until the cats do. And our shit / my Xbox 360, which is still on a damn boat. It was supposed to be here on the 12th, now it won't be here until the 27th. Blargh. And a package my mother sent is stuck... somewhere. So it'll be fun trying to find that.

Last Night's Commute

2008-01-10T10:28:00.000Z

Well my next post was going to be about the great time Elizabeth and I had last weekend at the British Museum but I haven't had time to write it up yet and last night's commute warrents a story all on its own. It was like The Odyssey packed into about an hour and a half. OK, that's a little hyperbolic, but it was my first encounter with riot police. What? Read on.

I had every intention of leaving my office at 5 yesterday afternoon, but a late meeting and the need to wrap up some very important work had me staying until around 6:20 or so. I take off and head to Great Portland Street Tube, which aside from being fuller than normal for 6:25 at night was just a typical commute. As I'm riding the H&S line to King's Cross, an announcement comes on at Euston Square that King's Cross is closed. Like, completley closed and the train won't stop. It rolls through King's Cross and I press my nose to the window and the platforms are completely deserted, there's a siren and a yellow strobe light going and an announcement on the loudspeaker that 'due to an emergency, the station is closed. Please proceed to the nearest exit.'

For those who aren't familiar, King's Cross is one of the busiest Underground stations, so for it to be closed during rush hour is really really strange. It's like Grand Central or Times Square stations in New York being closed. And it's creepy as fuck to look out onto a platform that's usually jammed with people and it's completely deserted except for a few pieces of trash blowing around.

So I go all the way to Liverpool Street, change to the Central Line and meet the Picadilly Line at Holburn. The train is packed, like my morning commute - usually it's not quite as bad in the evenings, especially later in the evenings. We roll north (through King's Cross) and on the way to Holloway Road (my station) they announce that it's closed too because of the Arsenal-Tottenham game.

I support the home team as much as the next North Londoner (or I will, once I learn all the player's names) but being disgorged in front of Arsenal stadium with thousands of drunk fans and a 20 minute walk to the supermarket isn't my idea of fun. There are cops everywhere, some of them dressed in riot gear, some on horses. The streets around the stadium are closed and people are milling around, cheering for the home team, eating kebobs and generally having fun. So it's nothing really more than a minor annoyance that I have to walk a little further than normal, and it's kind of fun being in the crowd.

I make my way to Holloway Road, turn right and run right into a line of police vans full of riot cops. The vans are three deep, and there's a squad of mounted cops behind them - flanking a group of about 200 people dressed in Tottenham colors. Apparently the rivalry is so great the opposing fans needed a police escort to the stadium. And I soon learned why.

The Tottenham crew were yelling about how shite Arsenal was, and the Arsenal fans on the sidewalk were letting the Tottenham fans know how shite Tottenham was. And I was in the middle of it - and by that I mean physically between the two parties, trying to make my way home. When you're abroad, you learn a few rules to keep yourself out of trouble: don't discuss politics, don't be a dick about being an American, and generally keep out of the middle of two groups that look as though they could erupt into violence. So I was a little uncomfortable at this point.

Then the garbage-throwing began, and not five feet from me a mounted cop inserts himself between a trash-chucking Arsenal supporter and the crowd of Tottenham fans. By insert, I mean he physically rode his horse right in front of the guy, giving him no choice but the back the fuck off because there's a giant goddamned animal in his way. Things died down after that (I think - I admit I didn't stick around any longer than I had to) and at that point the excitement in my commute was over. I stopped by the grocery store - mercifully empty (the express checkout only took 10 minutes, a new record) and finally made it back to the flat.

And that was my first encounter with football hooligans and riot police!

Highgate Times

2007-12-30T10:07:00.001Z

Highgate Cemetery is one of the "must-see" sights in London according to pretty much every guide book and every friend who's been there. It also happens to be within walking distance of our flat, and we ended up staying in town this weekend and tours of the Victorian West Cemetery only run on weekends so visiting was a no-brainer.

It was a nice half-hour walk up Holloway Road and through a park to get there, and there were two cemeteries to explore with some famous people to visit. Sure, Karl Marx' grave is there but more interested to me personally was the marker for Douglas Adams, author of the Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy series - Adams was a resident of Islington until he moved to California late in his life. Both of those are in the East Cemetery, which you can go in at any time and wander around. The West Cemetery is locked up tight unless you're on a guided tour because vandalism, occultism and crime were big problems here until the 70s, and the group that runs the place is working very hard to restore it.

So we latched onto the first tour of the day, which was nice since there were only five of us and our guide was exceptionally knowledgeable about the cemetery and its residents. I was taking pictures the entire time and the best are on my Flickr stream if you want to take a look - our guide was really cool and let me stick the camera in some mausoleums that had been opened for restoration work, so there's some pictures of decaying coffins and other creepiness in there I feel lucky to have taken.

Afterwards we fortified ourselves at a nearby pub with mulled wine and tasty food and set off for the West End, where we caught a show of Spamalot! Somehow it wasn't as good as the first time I saw it, but watching it with Liz more than made up for that. There was no Tim Curry, David Hyde Pierce or Hank Azaria, but whatchagonnado.

Still not sure what we're going to be up to for the new year. Maybe just going to a local pub and having a few drinks? We'll figure it out.

Local Art

2007-12-28T10:39:00.000Z

Liz and I began our Boxing Day ramble at our local Tube station, Holloway Road. We were surprised to find that graffiti artists had tagged pretty much the entire station between Christmas Eve and Boxing Day - and I got some pictures of what it looked like. I figured the context would remain a mystery but recognized a photo on Londonist as being a shot of the same art. So a few clicks later and I'm on Nicobobinus' Flickr stream, where he is displaying his shots of both Holloway Road and Caledonian Road (and commentors noted that Angel and Arsenal stations were tagged as well.)

More importantly, he linked to a Guardian story that provides context to the tags - seems its a memorial for two artists named Ozone and Wants who were stuck by a train and killed in early 2007. The article is a good look at the London graffiti scene, and makes for a good afternoon read.

I've always enjoyed well-done and artistic graffiti - it's a unique form of expression in urban areas, and is beautiful when done by a real artist - so it was cool that a series of coincidences and click-throughs gave me the whole story on the art in my local station.

My First Boxing Day!

2007-12-27T17:40:00.001Z

We Americans severed our connection with the home country early by dumping our tea in Boston Harbor, so we don't celebrate Boxing Day - the day where the rich used to box up their unwanted shit to give to the poor and companies would give their employees gifts. These days, it's a day everyone gets off work and stores hold big sales. We celebrated our first Boxing Day by taking a walk across London - literally, across most of the City. We started at Green Park on the north end of St. James', stopped by Buckingham Palace to see if Lizzie was around (she was but she wasn't receiving Americans), then walked along the Thames until we ended up between St. Paul's and the Tower. If we would have kept going we could have seen the Tower and pretty much covered most of what there is to see in the inner city in one afternoon - without going in anything of course - but we ended up having to catch a bus back so we stopped a little shy.

It was a great day to see London. A great day. Most people were still inside or with family, and the only place that was really crowded was around Westminster and Parliament. Otherwise there were only a handful of people on the street at any time - quite an achievement as anyone who has walked in London can attest - and it made for a good, leisurely stroll through the city. The wind wasn't bad and we found a couple of open pubs for pints and bathrooms making it all around a great day.

I realize I haven't really talked much about my experiences here yet, which is mostly because I'm still settling in (we just got Internet today.) Once things start to sink in a little more, I'll be able to do more synthesis. Right now I just feel like I'm collecting data and haven't really had time to analyze it yet.

Liz has to be online tomorrow but we may go somewhere this weekend - I'd like to see Nottingham but we'll see what shakes out.

London: Capital of the World

2007-12-27T17:36:00.000Z

Hey, I live in the capital of the world!

Via Londonist, the Independent named London the Capital of the World.

Suck on that, New York!

What a Difference Two Weeks Make

2007-12-21T17:08:00.000Z

Two weeks before London:

I'm not moving across the world so I can drink coffee at Starbucks!Two weeks after being in London:

Jesus Christ, where's the goddamned Starbucks?!

The First Batch

2007-12-17T13:07:00.000Z

The first batch of London pictures are up on my Flickr stream, from moving in and our walk through Camden Town. Enjoy!

On Water

2007-12-11T14:52:00.000Z

Dear My New Fellow Countrymen,

I love you dearly but there's something very important we must talk about.

This is the 21st century, and in the last 100 years or so we've accomplished great things as a species: we can fly, and trips that used to take months now take hours. We walked on the moon. We invented the Internet.

And more importantly, we created a device that allows both hot and cold water to come from the same faucet in a real mixture to prevent your hands from either burning or freezing.

Take note, friends. This truly is the way of the future!

Deliver Me To Swedish Furniture!

2007-12-09T20:04:00.000Z

New flat. No plates, no glasses, no towels and we needed a new bed. So what are two Euro-savvy Americans to do?

That's right, go to Ikea.

After a great protip in a comment on the newly-found blog "A Singaporean in London" suggested not the Wembley Ikea, but the Tottenham Hale Ikea - which worked out great. It was a tube skip and a quick bus ride away, and the cab back to our flat was less than 20 pounds. The total cost ended up being reasonable, and our bed will be delivered in a couple of days. Not too shabby, that.

We also got a chance to bum around the new neighborhood a little bit more, and found a "good" local pub called Big Red, which was decorated like a TGI Fridays and had a distinctively American twist to the menu. Not a bad fallback when we're looking for a taste of home but I think I need something more English for my regular watering hole. The pints were cheap and it was great to be there when Arsenal was playing even though they lost. Next time, lads.

Now we're back in the hotel, eating store-bought Indian food and relaxing. And on that note, I'm going to go watch the tele.

A Londoner Am I!

2007-12-08T16:40:00.000Z

My, it's good to be back!

I got in yesterday and spent the better part of today getting my things in order. I have, in no particular order, been to the bank, been to the grocery store, been to the chemist (drugstore for you scrub yanks out there,) ridden the tube several times, walked around Islington, walked around Holloway Road, been to a pub, watched people betting on horseraces, eaten double Gloucester cheese, met our new neighbors, met our new neighbors again in a grocery store, and let (rented for you scrub yanks out there) our flat.

London seems pretty much as I left it, and I didn't expect anything less. It's off to the pub for a pint or two and then back here to pretend I'm not really getting sick.

Also I have a 9 am meeting on Monday. Glad I checked my work email!

The Big Day

2007-12-06T15:31:00.000Z

Depending on how well you count, today or tomorrow early is the Big Day. I leave this evening, I arrive tomorrow morning (afternoon local time.) London is upon me!

The last few days have been tying up loose ends (car is sold) and saying goodbye. I've been troopering through the later, although I have a feeling the emotion of this all is going to come out sometime if it hasn't already expressed myself in frustration in other ways. The last day at work was kind of tough - I really hate long goodbyes and it was basically nothing but a long goodbye. On the other hand, it's really awesome to see how many people I've met and how many friends I've made here.

I've got a couple of tiny things to wrap up today including a visit to a dentist, and then I'm out of here. My next post will very likely be from London.

Cheers, mates!

London LOL Already

2007-11-26T18:45:00.000Z

Liz is on the ground and I've got a little more than a week, but Seth linked me to a Metafilter post about the "Voice of the Underground" being fired for posting parody sounds on her website. I listened to a couple and holy shit are they funny. If you've ever want to hear the nice lady on the Tube telling people their city is a "stinking shithole," now is your chance.

STATUS: APPROVED

2007-11-19T17:25:00.001Z

The Visas have been approved. My (very expensive) flight has been booked. London, here we come!

Getting Better

2007-11-18T15:06:00.000Z

Hot on the heels of my last post, we got word that our visa application (current status unknown) is on its way back to us. I find out Monday whether it's approved or denied, which will have a profound impact on the next few days of our lives and the move in general.

Fingers crossed.

Carry That Weight

2007-11-14T19:21:00.000Z

Nothing like cutting it close, huh?

No word from the embassy on our Visa applications. No emails, no calls, nada.

I'm not sure I'm going to have any fingernails left after this.