Halloween happened to coincide with one of my (Carolyn’s) co-worker’s last days of work. She is taking a career break for 6 months to travel to India to work with a charity organization, Roshni UK, providing physiotherapy services for children.  So, we coordinated a leaving-do/Halloween bash to send her off in style.

Here is a photo of some of my coworkers decked out for the night.

And here is a photo of our feeble attempt at dressing up (Matt does have devil horns on).

People are very much about being courteous in England. So, when people behave like asses on public transport, everyone else gets pissed off. Seems like the biggest issue involves school kids taking the bus to school and being annoying. So, the transport authority in London came up with an ad campaign of cartoon people like the one above. There’s actually been talk about trying to ban “Smelly food”. How they would determine that (usually, it involves kebabs), I don’t know. Among the others are “remembering what it’s like to be 13″ and giving up your seat for pregnant people (the pregnant cartoon character thanks you when you give it up). Hee hee!

Ooo. Here’s the website with all the characters!

Now, this being a place with a shitload of beers, we needed to have an approach to how to choose our beers. We decided to hit as many regions as possible. So then, it was a matter of hitting a region and choosing amongst the 25-30 beers from that region. The festival had some descriptions for each beer, but they were not always the most useful. If we could not find a beer based on the description or some pre-existing knowledge of it, well, to be honest, we picked based on the name and whether it seemed interesting or not. At the end of it all, this approach worked quite nicely. We only ended up with one beer that was truly not very good. Here’s a little peek at it all:

A view a bit from above. One drawback of having such a huge collection of beer and people is that the choices of location can be a bit limiting. Earl’s Court isn’t the most soulful place in the world, but it did the trick. CAMRA managed to lay things out nicely enough though. This was the Wednesday night crowd. I don’t know when the busiest day of the festival was, but it got more crowded than when I took this photo.

This would be one of the regional bars (Mid-West England, to be exact). Note the multitude of kegs behind the fine gentleman serving up the beer. Can you imagine a single pub having this many beers? Well, this was just one of about 15 bars, each having their own selection of beers. It was interesting to see how people approached all of this. Many people just seemed to pick a region and start drinking. So, around the bars, there were crowds of people just hanging about.

Anyway, I didn’t go last year and I was quite pleased to be able to go this year. And, we got to celebrate Adrian’s birthday as well! Happy birthday Adrian!

Alas, one of the big drawbacks of England is Sunday evenings. Basically, many things shut down on Sundays and it gets even worse after about 3pm. In particular, along the south bank of the Thames, it almost seems like nothing is open that isn’t a crap chain. Add to the fact that it was raining and the Scoop is outdoors and our plans were kind of shot, since we didn’t want to watch fine theatre in a downpour. This left us a little crabby and feeling out of sorts. We decided to turn up onto Tower Bridge and make our way back north to just get some sort of food. Well, what did we see as we stepped up to make our way across the Thames:

(click on the image to see a much larger image. Or this much much larger one)

The rainbow was literally from one side of the river to the other. There we are standing in London on one of the icons of the city and there’s a rainbow. Needless to say, we just sat in awe, and all our irritability just melted away. Take another look:

By the way, that’s two complete rainbows, not one (it’s not a reflection).

We almost didn’t get it on film. Carolyn had her camera, but when she hit the power button, nothing happened, no batteries. Luckily for us, every mobile phone nowadays has a camera too. These were taken with my crackberry. Not too shabby!

Anyway, two fun things I’ve found. First, at least for now, if you search for “Apollo Jalapeno” on google, one of my pages is the top choice! Second, I figured that my bike, not being the finest in all the land, was probably not that popular. However, two weekends ago, we were down in Brighton for the weekend (more on that later), and we stumbled upon its doppelganger:

If you look closely, you’ll notice the back tire (or tyre, if you will) is totally flat and the chain is rusted up, so mine is sooo much cooler. But it was funny to just walk into one sitting on the street. I also saw someone up north selling a smaller, childs version of it on eBay. So clearly, I have a pretty hip bike! Long live bright yellow!

We arrived at Port Authority and, being from the NYC area, there’s always some things I have in my head that I need to see and do. Typically, this involves food. We got there too early to check in, so we dropped off our huuuge bag and set out to get some New York pizza. One of the impressive things with NYC pizza is you can pretty much go anywhere in the city and there will be a pretty good pizza place. Here would be me and my pizza (in my hand — only cheese!) and Carolyns (the fancy looking pizza on the plate):

We wandered over to the Hudson River and just soaked in the nice weather with the view of NJ (not a bad view, I assure you!) until it was time to check in. Now, the Marriott in Times Square is known for having funky automated elevators where you go to the bank of elevators, select your floor and it tells you which of the 15 elevators you should go into and then get swept up in a glass elevator with views of all the floors below and the beautiful lobby. We checked in and were sad to see we were only on the 22nd floor (our of about 45). However, as we got to our room, we were more than pleasantly surprised:

Check out that view! With this opportunity, we decided to just spend a couple of hours sitting in our nice room and take in the view. Who needs a bar with a view when you can sit on a couch in a private room instead? Here would be my blushing bride enjoying it:

As is something of a tradition when we see a show, we sought out some Russian food. We needed something near the theatre, and we found one called Russian Samovar. They had nice food and vodka infused with various things like peppers and lemons and so on. Good stuff. Then we made our way to see a fun Broadway musical. Spamalot is a stage version of the hilarious Holy Grail by Monty Python. A number of the original members contributed in various ways with voice overs and writing. Our seats were excellent, in the front row of the first balcony. The show was good fun. The performers were obviously wonderful and the music was good. I tried my best not to compare the musical too much to the movie as, while they are based on the same story, they are obviously not the same thing.

We woke up the next morning and decided to spend a beautiful day in NYC. We went to a small exhibit of wonderful Greek artifacts found in Georgia (the country). There were some stunning gold pieces and whatnot pulled out of the ground there. Then we got me a chicken cutlet sandwich from a good deli (yum!) and then spent the afternoon wandering around Central Park. Eventually we made out way to the Upper West side to meet up with Carolyn’s friends Haley (and meet her new boyfriend — we approved) and Renu at a bar literally called Dive Bar. But. before drinks, we ate at an Argentinian steak house. Man, I missed good steak. The UK definitely lacks in it. Dive Bar had excellent beers and we had a blast with all the fine people there. Alas, eventually, it was time to go. Many thanks to Jim and Linda for such a nice time in the city.

So, with that as background, our idiot of a new mayor (he only won because the previous one was Labour and people hate the Labour party here almost as much as people in the US hate the Republicans — please please please say they get trounced in November) decided he would attack the scourge of drinking on public transport. I can honestly say I have NEVER seen a single person on public transport making problems while drinking. The assholes are the ones who are way too drunk before they get on that train or bus. I’m sure you could pull out a host of other people with their evidence of people with beers in their hands on the tube harassing people or doing various illegal activities. I know this is not a political blog, but it’s mine so forgive me the occasional rant. And spare me the “well, one time I was on the NXXX bus and saw two people drinking and harassing some other people”. Go to Hoxton on a Friday and count the number of morons who have had too much and tell me if they are still drinking. Or is the problem that they had too much to drink and THEN went out into the public space. This is politics, pure and simple and Boris Johnson wanted to score points. As a result, in the name of some sort of crap along the lines of “making your journey more pleasant” drinking was banned on 1 June 2008.

So, what happened at 11pm on 31st May? Well, a whole lot of chaos. Here are various BBC reports about what happened. Basically, the interwebs allow people to organize way to easily. So they decided to meet on the circle line, which goes in a big circle meaning you could hang out on the train and drink drink drink without reaching the end of any line. Alas, it was a little too successful and became a massive fiasco. Some people had waaaaay too much to drink, property was damaged, transport employees were assaulted, the police overreacted and stations were shut down. But, now that people got that out of their system, drinking is banned on the trains and buses of London.

The real thing that annoys me is that people seemed shocked that this would be a normal reaction to a silly policy going into effect. AND, people seem to point to this as evidence that drinking should have been banned on trains and that supporters of this rule were correct. It was a reaction to the ban, not a reason to ban it. If you don’t ban drinking on trains, it happens in small, easily managable batches. Even worse, now some people are howling to ban drinking in public entirely. I know this doesn’t matter to most people, but I very much enjoy the lack of puritanism in the UK compared to the stuff that seems to pervade the US (at least in this aspect — there’s plenty of silly things in the UK that smack of puritanism). People drink here and, most of the time, no one cares if it’s in a pub, in a park on a nice day, whenever. Yes some people abuse it, but you deal with them, you don’t enact blanket laws and demonize something that many people do whether it’s between 4 walls or in public.

Sorry for the rant. This blog is supposed to be more about mine and Carolyn’s life abroad. Since the worst I normally do is have some beer on my way to a Radiohead concert or in a park, how does this affect me? Not a whole lot. I heard about the whole party happening and decided it was a bad idea. But I had a meek little send off of my own. That night, we’d gone out with Dina and Adrian after seeing the Psycho Buildings exhibit. When it was time to go our separate ways, we picked up some beers and, for the first time, did a little drinking on the public transport. Here would be the evidence:

Boy, aren’t I the rebel? I must say, it was the most public drinking on a bus I’d ever seen. There were probably almost 10 whole people with a beer in their hands. And I’ve been on buses at all hours of the day and night on some of the sillier lines out there. Anyway, thus ends my rant and tribute to public drinking.

In the Hayward (until the end of August) is an exhibition called “Pyscho Buildings“. A number of artists were commissioned to come up with various spaces in their own creative ways. Some did smaller scales of larger architecture in unique situations (like a very very large dollhouse version of his apartment block in the US being struck by replica of his old home in Korea. Others were large-scales spaces to explore or take in. For example, a group of artists purchased a number of IKEA “showrooms” (as in they bought all the pieces in a sample room) and then tore much of the pieces apart. The pieces were then put together in a way to give the impression that something had ravaged the house and you were seeing it just as it happened in suspended animation.

It being an art show, they get kind of anal about people taking photos, so it was hard to capture. But one of the more popular ones (there was a line as only 4 people at a time could enjoy it), was by an “Anarchist” art German art collective (it was the most orderly and organized exhibit) who took one of the exterior terraces and built a gigantic pool on it and built some rowboats for people to go out in the pool on. Here are Carolyn and I with the London Eye in the background.

It was a great way to spend at least a few minutes taking in the city from a unique perspective.

Some other exhibits: a gigantic globe being held together using air pressure, a movie theatre that seemed like an homage to David Lynch, the staircase to the artists landlords apartment done in extreme detail made out of sewn silk (and could be folded into a bag), hundreds of dollhouses lit up and placed in a community of sorts, a 100 ft long tunnel made out of aluminum, a room created out of chicken wire and fragile paper, a room that looked like it had been attacked by some sort of unknown creature and a cave like room made out of some sort of woven material. All in all, it created a wonderful series of art pieces. I found the sewn staircase to be the most impressive from aesthetic standpoint. The destroyed apartment dollhouse and the IKEA destruction were also quite impressive. The above links are photos from the Guardian. If you want a visual representation, they show most of them. It was good fun. Carolyn, Dina and I went. Adrian was lame and had to take some class, but we met up with him after and wandered the Thames for a bit before making our way north past Arsenal where we saw all the folks going to the first of a two night Bruce Springsteen concert and had some good Mexican food. Not a bad way to spend a Saturday!

The fun really started on Tuesday, 24 June. Radiohead had two shows in London’s Victoria Park. Dina and Adrian said our ticket was for the first night, Tuesday. So we met up at a convenient point and made our way to the park. After some beers, we tried to enter. They wouldn’t let us in. Looking at this photo, can you tell us what’s wrong with this ticket?

Yes, the actual date of our ticket was for Wednesday, NOT Tuesday. In fact, we had tickets for the following day!

After much merriment, we made the most of it and enjoyed our company. Hopefully this shows us in good spirits (I’m not really pissed off):

Sooo, after some beers on Tuesday, we went our separate ways with a plan in mind to meet up the next day to actually see the band. After making absolutely sure we had our tickets and the right night, we met up tonight to see Radiohead. It was a good performance. Obviously, they are a very popular band and have long passed the point of having shows in intimate clubs, which are typically the ideal location. However, they played a 2+ hour set that spanned the whole range of their impressive career. They played music from all their albums and satisfied everyone. The crowd was bit un-exciting, but it allowed us to roam a bit and take Radiohead in from all angles. Here would be one of them:

The concert, as all good things, had to end. We made our way towards the train and here I am, writing about all of it. I would have to say I’m not the best for concert reviews, but they ended with Paranoid Android from OK Computer and it was absolutely brilliant. Their song selection was excellent and each song was dead on and beautifully performed. I really enjoyed it.

Well, bikes, like most things here, aren’t cheap. I wanted a decent used bike that I could ride hard and would still hang on. Alas, I wasn’t sure where to get such a bike. Most places were spiffy cycling shops with bikes of any quality starting at $400. Well, in honour of Bike Week, I stumbled upon a link to second hand bikes and, unlike the previous year, we found a couple that were near us that had a larger selection of bikes. Along with our friends Ben and Gerry, we tramped over to Camden Cycles and we all found what we want. Here’s the one I picked up:

It is an Apollo Jalapeno. Yes, a Jalapeno. It was cheap and will need some work, but I’ve ridden to work 5 of the last 6 work days and gone on rides of various distances on the weekends (more on that later). I’m really loving it. I now truly feel ok with the whole driving-on-the-left and I’m amazed at what a biking city London is. The cars (so far!) are very aware of the cyclists and at any intersection during rush hour, there will be a ton of bikes waiting for the light. The city has taken many through streets and done what they can carve bike lanes on the narrow ancient roads. And my 2 mile commute, which can balloon up to 40 minutes if the buses are running like shit, never takes more than 15 minutes. Next up, I find a bike co-op, get some cheap parts and make my bike a little more durable and reliable!