This was the view when I came out of my elevator this morning in my office:

My coworker came in for some work on Saturday and they were just putting it out. Since I took this picture, it seems as though the roof has collapsed even more and there people milling about taking pictures inside and whatnot. It was unoccupied at the time however, the part to the left was (I think) still an active hipster kind of bar. The building is literally 20 feet from my building, just across a street but it seemed to be pretty well contained.

Wow, this guy got action photos. Crazy!

Well, it took a year, but Carolyn is finally making the move. She arrived for her first really extended stay on Friday night. She makes the final, official move after the wedding (in 2 months!). Now we’re stocking my bachelor pad up to make it a little more friendly to others as Anna and Chewy get used to the confusion of another person around. And, as luck would have it, the hot water broke in my place. Allegedly, it’ll be fixed tomorrow morning. I never realized how much I love having a shower nearby. We have some nice friends who are letting us borrow theirs, but it takes a little trip to get there. Never fear, Linda, your daughter is not stuck without a hot shower.

In the meantime, I’m obviously very happy to have her here. It’s nicer to have your loved ones around in person than over the phone. And, the waiting is over as Carolyn begins her adjustment to a pretty big move. Here’s a picture of Carolyn and her new roommates:

Just a little quick update on things. Carolyn moves here in 4 days (yeah!), my place needs work to get ready for a second tenant (boo!). I’m cat-sitting for my coworker who’s on holiday and they’re both very cute (yeah!), Anna hasn’t been the healthiest I’ve ever seen her since she moved here and I’m giving her medicine to settle her stomach which she just loooooves taking (boo!). With that in mind, my life this week will pretty much be cats, work and cleaning. But I enjoyed seeing some spirited debate about these bags. I’m excited to see these snazzy new ones they seem to be selling in the US. All we have here are canvas bags which aren’t exciting, they just work. 🙂

So I’m not always the most environmentally friendly person in the world. Carolyn does a much better job of it than I do. But, I’ve always been confused about how plastic shopping bags suddenly appeared at some point in my youth and became the standard for buying things. I know there’s always some study out there claiming paper bags are worse for the environment overall, but that seems a little suspicious. Anyway, lately, I’ve noticed people have slowly been picking up on a newish trend which is going towards reusable cloth bags. This seems like a nice idea.

Why am I bringing this up? Well, aside from my more environmentally conscious friends, I hadn’t noticed a whole lot of increased use of these bags in the US. In the UK, there’s definitely a nation-wide trend towards cloth bags. The government is sabre-rattling about getting stores to charge for people using plastic bags. I’ve got a cloth bag I try to bring with me all the time so I can use it for shopping. If I don’t always have it, I never seem to have it when I need to go shopping.

Today, I had an interesting experience. I went to a bakery to get something tasty baked goods (there are seemingly tons of them around me) and, instead of just handing me my roll and baguette, the woman behind the counter put them in a free cloth bag. I looked on the bag and the local borough council seems to be sponsoring this giveaway.  That’s a really nice idea. And all the major grocery stores either sell reusable bags or give them away.
On a related note, back in 2002 (yes, 6 years ago) Ireland imposed a €0.15 (later increased to €0.22) tax on any plastic bags which decreased its usage by 90%. That’s impressive. Seems like a smart idea. People aren’t necessarily going to do this on their own initiative and if you leave it to the grocery stores, people bitch to them and they give in. Countries like China and Taiwan and Singapore are apparently putting bans on them outright.
So, my question to my US friends and family: Is this something that is becoming more of an issue in the US? Or is it confined to the damn dirty hippies in the cities and university towns? 🙂

I see this is making some news. There was an earthquake about 200 miles north of me. Did I notice it? Well, no. I was sound asleep 🙂 Ooops!

For those of you with good memories, you might recall my triumphs last year in both lawn bowling and American bowling. Well, I was heading home one night and ended up catching my bus home in Finsbury Square, which has the lawn bowling pitch in the middle of it. The architecture around it is a mix of 1920s, 1950s and contemporary architecture. This building isn’t that exciting looking, but I do like the colors on it once the sun goes down:

Since it’s a winter lull in the interesting part of my life :), I’m shooting just to capture some of the fun little things in life. Hope you enjoy. And mom, if you’re nice, I might take some pictures of skinny Anna and fat Chewy.

The last couple of mornings have been extremely foggy. However, the fog has burned off and it’s become very lovely. As luck would have it, I thought about an interesting compare and contrast photo and whipped out my camera on my way to the bus stop yesterday morning. Let’s compare shall we:

Normal (slightly overcast and rainy) weather

Slightly foggy 🙂

I saw a picture in one of those horrible free dailys always floating around town where someone managed to get a photo from an airplane in which the entire city was socked in except the tall buildings in Canary Wharf. Pretty cool.

This is unfortunate. It looks like there was a nasty fire at one of the Camden Markets on Saturday night. I’ve written about one of my trips there before. The first picture is inside the section that caught fire, I believe. It’s a bit of a hipster area with a lot of funky shops that are fun to peruse. The part of the market affected is built into an aqueduct which creates a very cool environment. Here’s hoping the local shops are able to recover and rebuild after this. The details still seem to be spotty, so we’ll see what happened and to what extent the damage is soon.

By popular demand (aka. my mom’s request), I give you Dina’s dish:

(and the garden below her flat in the darkness)

Now, let’s get a little mundane. We have two things at work here. First, I have a TV now. One thing you learn about having a TV in the UK is the licensing scheme. Like all things in life, the BBC is not free. It gets paid for by a yearly fee you pay. If you own a TV, you pay about £11 a month. This alone is no big deal. Why they just don’t deduct it out of a payroll tax is beyond me. But, regardless of that, it goes to a worthy cause as the BBC has come out with some great shit and most of the quality programming in the UK that isn’t Simpsons syndication comes from the BBC. My issue is the collection method. The BBC has paid a bunch of companies to act as Big Brother, checking address databases with who has paid the fee and who hasn’t and allegedly roaming the streets and looking for signals from places that haven’t paid. Earlier this fall, they had adverts up with things like “We’re watching you so pay up” all over the city. It’s creepy and overkill. On top of that, there is a presumption that everyone has a TV and if you haven’t paid, they assume you’re hiding something and harass you and threaten so show up and inspect your home. I have no idea what authority they have, but my colleague, who really doesn’t have a TV has had to call repeatedly to get to stop sending threatening notes about their obvious guilt because everyone has a TV.

Anyway, the point is, I have a TV and I wanna get a real signal, so I’m paid up on my license and I’m looking at the two big TV providers Sky and Virgin. As I started trying to sign up for Sky, they asked about installing a dish which confused me because i thought they were terrestrial cable. So I asked Dina who mentioned it and I realized I had some sort of dish outside my window so I asked what hers looked like so she sent me a photo. I’m obviously ignorant because Sky is satellite TV. Very exciting, no? 🙂

Here ends a daily mundane post. Was it boring as shit?

I figured I should start the new year out with a blog posting since it’s been exactly a year since I first posted something on in it and, in three days, since I publicly told anyone I’d be making a trip to England. It’s been a long and busy year. Let’s hope the adventures don’t stop 🙂

I’ll be making a US trip in 2 days. I’ll be in New Jersey to see Carolyn for a few days and then off to Arizona to see my parents in their new environment and my sister. It’ll be a much needed break.

As a result, I was in the UK for the whole of the holidays. Considering how hectic London is during the bulk of the year (7 million people in a single city makes it a little crowded), this was a ghost town the last week. My commute, short as it normally is, was absurd. The roads were empty, the buses were empty, the office was empty. Alas, I was sick, so all the work I planned on catching up on became ‘This needs to be done yesterday’ again. But it’s been nice and relaxing to have everyone off on holidays. And now I get to flee before it gets to crazy again. I’ll post more once I’m stateside!

Oh yeah, if you’re in NYC on 5 January (it’s a Saturday), lemme know as I’m hoping to spend the evening in the city.

For those of you reading this today (you shouldnt be! 🙂 ), I just wanted to wish you a merry christmas. I managed to get down to Brighton before the entire UK shut down (it really does), but I’ve got a nasty flu which made for an unpleasant time but Dina and Adrian have been very nice and helpful. So it’s been a nice relaxing Christmas. Hope you’re all having the same.

Much of what I previously posted ended up being moments while I was walking around the city. Cold or not, I wanted to use the downtime I had (mostly in darkness 🙂 ) to see a little more of Paris. I did manage to do a little sightseeing in the daytime too, though. I initially thought it would be possible to check out the Louvre, but I ended up working longer on Sunday than expected and figured I’d need a full day to see it. So I went for something a little smaller, but equally as nice, the Musee d’Orsay. It was originally built as a railroad station, but it now houses a great collection of late 19th and early 20th century paintings, sculpture and decorative art. I was impressed. First of all, it uses the space it occupies in an interesting way. Once you go through the absurd security and buy your ticket, you begin in a large hall:

They’ve lined this part with large sculptures from various periods. Off the hall are some smaller galleries to check out. The rest of the museum is laid out chronologically, but it’s hardly linear. You should start by heading up to the fifth floor and working your way through the proto-impressionists and then on to the impressionists themselves, which is what the museum is best known for. It was a good cross-section of artists from that time period and contains a decent number of master works from these artists. In this section, there are also places that provide nice views of Paris as well.
You then travel towards a nice hall (the museum got a big makeover in the 80s incorporating the station into a modern museum nicely) that has artists like Gauguin and Rousseau:

Now, if you wish to see the Naturalists and Symbolist art that came a little after the Impressionists, you go back down to the second floor. However, since the majority of the building is the main hall, there are many sub-floors to explore as well. Once you’re on the second floor, it provides a nice place to sit and soak in the atmosphere amongst the sculptures. That includes this cool bear which sits in view of the Great Clock of the station:

The clock is still working.

Also make sure to walk to the end of the main hall to see the inner workings of the Grand Opera (which I STILL haven’t been into yet) and a cool scale model of the area around the opera house.

Overall, it’s a lovely museum. The collection is excellent and it’s laid out in a meandering way which slows you down and allows you to appreciate the location as well as the art. They’ve kept the element of the old railway station intact so you also get to see a slice of French architectural history as well.

(My mom found what this is — Pari Roller. Nice idea. I’m glad I stumbled upon it that night. It was fun to see. I also now realize a quick search for “Friday night rollerblading paris” turns this site up nice and easy. Good catch mom!)

After a long day at work, I was about 5 minutes from my hotel and I stumbled upon this. It was definitely organized since they had people in yellow vests and were tailed by a police escort and they all stopped at traffic lights (the reason I managed to get them all together was there was a long light that had just changed). It looks almost like Critical Mass on Roller Blades, but it was 11pm. There isn’t exactly a lot of traffic to disrupt, even in a big city like Paris. But it was on Boulevard Haussmann, which is one of the bigger streets.

Oh yeah, youtube compresses the shit out of this stuff, so it’s not nearly as good a video. I do like the woman trapped in front of me and how she even thinks for a second about trying to cross in the middle of it. Anyone know what this event is?

Last night, after a late dinner preceeded by a long day at work, I was walking back to my hotel which is right off Boulevard Haussmann. This also happens to be conveniently where the very large department stores are located. And, for the holidays, they appear to go all out. The exteriors are decked out in many many lights and the displays are linked together in winter themes, all done very nicely. It might have been 11pm and the stores might have been closed, but the windows were crowded with people checking out what the offerings this season were. Allow me to demonstrate pictorally:

This store takes up a city block and the entire store is covered in lights. It’s very impressive to check out.

The next block is home to Au Printemps. Even without the lights, I think this would be an amazing 19th century building (just look at the sign on it). Their lights were a little more subtle but had strobes flashing as accents as well.

I mentioned the window displays. Here are a couple of samples from Au Printemps

Every other window contained scenes of automated marionettes. This is a chorus of owls which would raise their wings in unison. A band is playing to the right of the photo. There were also scenes of foxes and deer.

In between the whimsy were the more classic windows with maneqins but still fit with the white winter theme of the more lively windows.