In October 2008, my parents were due to visit London and my mom had a special request.  She asked us to get tickets to the Ceremony of the Keys at the Tower of London.  I had not heard of the Key Ceremony so I looked into it.  The Ceremony is the nightly routine to lock up the Tower of London and has taken place every night without fail for over 700 years.  It even happened nightly during WWII as bombs were falling on London.  So, we wrote off for the free tickets and were sent 4 for one of the nights during my parents trip.  Unfortunately, they weren’t able to come in October 2008 so my friends Nicola and Rachel joined Matt and I on the scheduled night.

Fortunately my parents were able to reschedule their trip so in March 2009, we were able to go again with my parents.  Here is a spooky shot of the Tower at night during their visit.

Each evening had a different character but the ceremony is the same every night.  The Tower, the Jewels and all the residents are locked in at 10:00 pm sharp.

Well, we’re seeing the beginnings of Spring here in the capitol of the former British Empire. This week, I’ve felt something in the air, the plants on our window sill look less dead and some flowers are starting to sprout up and ponder the concept of blooming through the gray. With the temperature being a little more mild (it’s never exactly arctic here), we decided to load our bikes up onto the Overground and meet up with our friends Nic and Clint, who live in Richmond, a cute area in the Southeast of London and have a little bike ride around Richmond Park. It’s apparently one of the former playgrounds of the Royal Family although it’s been open to the public since it was walled off and made into a park. It has a wonderful wild feel to it, even being home to a shitload of deer. It’s apparently three times the size of Central Park. Impressive. Let’s take a look:

Those would be the deer. Check out the antelers on some of them. As we were getting near this group, a number of them went off and formed their own splinter herd, which is where the rest of them are looking. They are remarkably peaceful considering that, even on a gloomy kind of February day, people were playing in the field around them and assholes like me were walking up to click pictures.

This is a lake in the middle of the park. Hard to believe this is middle of a city of oodles of people. I think it’s less than 10 miles to Charing Cross as the crow flies. It’s a nice piece of green space in a very large city.

This would be the Thames River from the Richmond Bridge. We began and ended our little bike afternoon there, with a nice detour for tea at Nic and Clints place down there. We’re looking forward to more outings as winter receeds and springs rears its ugly head.

As always, I’m happy to provide an image dump of this entry. It’s not a lot, but I aims to please! 🙂

Well, among the positives of living in the capital city (and a big ass metropolis), is the opportunity to take a in a lot of culture. The oodles of free museums aside, we’ve also soaked in some high-class music as well. A few weeks ago, we went to the Barbican to see some choral/orchestral music. Earlier in 2008, we went saw Partenope, an opera by Handel performed by the English National Opera at the London Coliseum. The music was excellent and the performers were great as well. However, while the opera takes place in Roman Naples, this production changed the setting to 1920s Paris and Partenope is supposedly living in some sort of Surrealistic flat and hanging out with artists. It didn’t quite work.

Regardless, a good time was had by all and we decided to go again but see a performance with a more classic performance. The ENO was performing The Magic Flute by Mozart and we managed to snag some seats. Behold a British opera house:

Now, the ENO does all of their performances in English. They still have the words shown above the stage since, regardless of what you might think, classical singers are not known for pronouncing anything well. I was a little worried about a German opera in English, but this one has speaking parts instead of recitative to move the plot forward. And, having British singers speaking German would haven’t worked either, so overall it was good. Unlike Partenope, The Magic Flute was a more classic staging. The singers were excellent, the plot harebrained, the setting was lovely. We had a blast.

During intermission, we tend to have a drink and the nose-bleed section in the Coliseum has a nice bar area which leads to a glass atrium that has a nice view of the area. Observe:

And here are some happy opera fans:

Twas a wonderful day out. The day began with pre-opera drinks at a great pub near the opera house. Then there was opera and we finished the day out having a good curry near the Tower of London. Fun for all. Now we’ve seen a baroque opera, then a classical opera so I guess we should prolly go for a Romantic opera. Pucini? Verdi? Wagner? We shall see. We’d also like to check out the Royal Opera, but that will be more difficult since the tickets are in the range of £200-800 and the cheap seats (they seem to have handful for quite a bit less than £200) are hard to come by. We’ll just have to keep an eye out.

Well, my two mile commuting walk wasn’t the fastest trip even and I got a good workout, but I made it. There were quite a few people on foot since only about half the tube was running (unless you live off the Northern or Victoria Lines, good luck), no buses, most of the commuter rail is shut. My boss took 2.5 hours to get into the City when it usually takes less than an hour. The streets are very quiet, even though a few insane souls are using their cars. The less major roads are sheets of packed snow/ice and the major roads are heavy, dirty slush. It was cool to witness. In the meantime, here are some images of my walk today. Those of you in the US might just yawn, but this is the most snow London has seen in 18 years. 🙂

This is right outside my house. People were out playing in the snow, making snowmen, clearing cars off with their arms. Very festive and happy.

A London pub covered in white. The Scolt Head is a nice place. Good beer, friendly folks and a fireplace.

Regents Canal — This is a canal that traverses North London. No narrow boats on this stretch, I wish I had seen some narrow boats to snap.

Bunhill Fields – The old City cemetary that was the place for dissenters (people who were not Church of England goers), until the dead were buried further out for health reasons. It’s right near my office and was shut due to the weather. It looked pretty and untouched through the fence.

Snow brings out the fun in everyone! Nothing to brighten your day like a happy Mini under a foot of snow.
Anyway, those of you in England – enjoy your lovely wintry day!

We went to bed last night with snow falling and about 1/2 inch of snow on the ground. That was cool. What we woke up to was even cooler. It seemed unusually quiet outside and when I opened my windows, what did I find? There is maybe 4 inches of snow!!! Even more amazing is that the city is basically shut. Hell, a huge chunk of the entire country of England is shut! Trains coming into the city are not running. All buses are suspended and the tube (yes, the London “Underground”) has severe delays or complete closures. This is absolutely amazing.

The Victoria line is the only line which is almost entirely underground, hence the “Good Service”. They have zero idea what to do with snow. No plows, no shovels. Nothing. It just doesn’t snow enough here to be worth it. The bad news? I can walk to work. So I guess, I’ll at least try to go in. Bummer. But it’ll be a pretty walk! 🙂

My office is in the picture! (photo credit: Jason Hawkes)

A friend of mine pointed me to a couple of articles on boston.com that contain a series of really great photos of arial shots taken at night of London. Generally, the skyline of London, when you move away from Westminster Abbey, isn’t though of as being that spectacular. At least compared to a city like Chicago, with it’s wonderful skyline. It’s always been about exploring the winding streets and soaking in the history. However, these shots show a great persepctive on a city that’s quick complex and beatiful in it’s own way. I ‘borrowed’ the picture from above because that’s one of my stomping grounds. Shoreditch and Old Street is where my office is. You can even see our main office in the lower-right hand corner (at least the northern wall of the building). The actual picture is number 12 in the second set of photos. I’d also like to point you to this photo (picture number 17 in this set of photos). That’s the home ground for Arsenal, who play about a 15 minute walk from my flat. Anyway, the photos are gorgeous and they give a nice view on the town I live in at the moment. Enjoy!

Les Musiciens du Lovres led by Marc Mikowski takes the stage at the Barbican

Two Sundays ago, we had a chance to partake of some culture in London. Our friend, Tobiaaas, is a big fan of classical music and one of his favourite tenors, Richard Croft, was singing as part of a performance at the Barbican. The Barbican was one of the large planned developments of the 1970s to replace aging and destroyed sections of the City of London. It’s a very stark multi-function complex of apartment towers, art gallery, performance spaces and movie theatres. It’s a pretty polarizing piece of architecture. Personally, I kind of like it, but I can see why it might piss some people off. The interior is lofty and welcoming. You can just go in during the day and wander, which is nice.

A happy Carolyn and a Matt making some sort of face (trying to be silly)

While I’d been there to see a film (The Simpsons movie, complete with an academic-like explanation provided when you went into the theatre), I’d never seen a performance in the hall. It’s a lovely space, modern, but comfortable and the acoustics are excellent. The orchestra and choir we saw focuses primarily on early and Baroque music, but they have recently been expanding into more comtemporary music. However, this night was about the earlier stuff. We saw pieces by Purcel, Handel and Haydn, to celebrate a varity of anniversaries in their honor. The theme was St Cecilia, the patron saint of music as all three pieces were about her in some form. The performance was excellent and we definitely got our money’s worth as it lasted almost 4 hours. We went home afterwards tired but content.

Since Matt has been quite delinquent with regular postings I have decided to jump in once again =) in order to wish everyone a Happy Chinese New Year.

Last Thursday, Matt and I joined a group of about 30 of his coworkers and their assorted friends and families, for a lovely meal in celebration of the Year of the Ox.  Unfortunately, we ourselves don’t have any photographic evidence of the night (although several minutes of entertainment was had by all as one friend took video footage of all party goers via his digital camera and the lazy susan in the middle of the tables.)  If I get access to the video I will post it here soon.

Our dinner location was China Delight in the City.  We had two large banquet tables and enjoyed a variety of delicious meals shared amongst ourselves.  My favorites were the sweet and sour prawns and sea bass.  Matt enjoyed the fish stew and cantonese roast duck.  The best dressed attendee was Echo’s daughter who wore a lovely pink silk outfit and impressed us all with her excellent table manners, considering she is just one year old.  Here’s wishing everyone happiness in the Year of the Ox.

New Year’s is not usually one of my favourite holidays.  It really bothers me that everywhere jack up their prices for the same thing they provide every other day of the year and any bar/pub/restaurant is packed full.  We started looking around for a place to go to ring in the new year that had 1)no cover charge and 2)a generally relaxed atmosphere.  Dina and Adrian decided to come up from Brighton to celebrate with us and we considered a few options.  We finally settled on heading over to the Salisbury Hotel on Green Lanes which has become one of my favourite London pubs.  It is an old Victorian pub that has been restored nicely.  It is always welcoming and relaxed and for New Years it met the requirements.  It was pretty full but we managed to snatch a table for the four of us and enjoyed some pints, good music and general merry making.  Great way to ring in the New Year with great friends!

So, Halloween in London is not quite the same as in the US.  Most people generally ignore the day and if you do partake it is all about ghouls and gore and scary costumes.  No pumpkins or cute animal costumes here.  Needless to say, Halloween is much more about trick and not very much about treat.

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!

In case you haven’t noticed, I enjoy my beer. Not just to pound beer after beer, but to be able to enjoy it and sample many types. I believe I’ve also mentioned the organization CAMRA, which is the largest single issue lobbying organization in the UK whose sole purpose is to petition to keep British Ales alive. Once a year, they hold the Great British Beer Festival, a very very large festival of “Real Ales” in London’s Earl’s Court convention center. To put it gentlely, it’s freaking huge. They had 450 different types of beer, most of them in kegs. To make it a little less chaotic, they organize the beers in two ways. Most beers are grouped by region. So there’s a section for beers from Northeastern England, beers from Wales, the Peaks District and so on. They have an international section as well. The larger brewers are also able to have their own sections which comprise the section grouping of beers. This year, the festival occurred during Adrian’s birthday and, since he’s a lover of beers as well, he chose to come up to London with Dina to celebrate at the largest pub in the world.

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! 🙂

It was a dreary, lazy Sunday in London. We’d been sitting around generally relaxing but we needed to get out of the house. Carolyn had recently been to an outdoor show in a scooped out section near City Hall called, appropriately, The Scoop. Over the course of the summer, they show movies, music and plays. Well, on this night, there was a Spanish play which we were interested to see. However, we were also quite hungry and headed towards City Hall in hopes of finding a place to eat beforehand.

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!

So, my lovely bike, the wonderful Apollo Jalapeno, has been called a disgrace to all other bikes by my coworker with the obscenely expensive carbon fiber road bike. I think that means it’s pretty good then! 🙂 And I’ve getting to be a pro with navigating the streets of London. I have pretty much all the routes around North London down pat. They’re basically the back routes that the cab drivers with “The Knowledge” use. That means that there are few traffic lights or buses. I’ve also noticed the pains the English goverment goes through to keep cars on specific roads. They will randomly make a road shrink down so the largest thing that car fit through it is a smallish SUV. Roads suddenly have barriers across them. And best of all, roads that would be an alley way in the US get cut in half with dedicated bike rights-of-way. That is very cool. A bike road. Oh yeah, there are also one-way roads that have bike lanes for going against the traffic.

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!