Out in the blog world that I roam in, there’s a time-honored tradition of Friday Cat Blogging. This is exactly what it sounds like: pictures of cats. Since I’m a silly cat owner, I thought I would add this to my currently infrequent blogging. Let’s give it a try:

We bought Chewy a cat tree a couple of weeks ago. He’d started gaining weight when Anna wasn’t eating (I guess he decided all the food was for him since she wasn’t interested). We figured this might give him some new perspectives on the flat and make him excercise a little more. So far, with a special diet of food as well, it seems to be working. He likes to hop up and lounge on it.

OMG!!! He’s got frickin’ laser beams in his eyes! That’s just a nice full on view of his cat tree.

Coming up, I have tons of trips to fill you in on. Ludlow, the Lake District, Dublin, Cambridge and a parental visit!

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, mingled with our cultural and tourist outings in Brighton when we visited with Gerry and Ben, there was cause for celebration. For, yea, on this week in 1977, a Dina was born. Naturally, we needed to do some celebrating. We began the celebrations with a tasty meal at what has been called the finest vegetarian restaurant in England, Terre a Terre. We arrived to a modern, slick restaurant with some interesting organic beer and wine choices. While some of the choices were of the “make meat dishes but out of vegetarian fare”, they mostly had true vegetarian dishes done well. Take this nice one for example:

It was a Thai-inspired dish. We particularly enjoyed the sampler starter which allowed us to have a taste of all the wonderful food they had to offer. We had a seat by the windows and, an amusing sight kept walking by. In the UK, a bachelorette party is known as a Hen Party. This typically involves decorating the bride-to-be in embarassing clothes and going off to get very very drunk. We saw at least four of these groups wandering (or shall I say stumbling) past. A very amusing side note. 🙂
After dinner, we retired to Dina and Adrian’s flat for a little rest before the next phase of the outing. We also met up with their friend Heather met us. Here would be the whole happy crew at this point:

Alas, at this point, I developed a horrible, horrible headache. Since our next part of the birthday night was to be dancing at a club, I took a little time to rest. Our plan was to go to a special club night called Stick it On, in which people can submit their own playlists for a 15 minute set and be a DJ for a few moments. The idea was intriguing, so we made our way there. I shall spare you any photos of the revelers (alas, there are some thanks for Gerry 🙂 ), but it was a fun time out.  Obviously, when the DJ changes every three or four songs, you’ll get a few songs you don’t like, but there were some excellent choices of music. My headache subsided, which allowed me to enjoy ourselves and I think, when we took our leave at whatever hour it was, we were tired and content.

The following day, besides going to the Brighton Pavilion, we also enjoyed a Brighton favourite of ours, cream tea at the Mock Turtle. While we devoured scones and tea, Dina bought a Meringue. It was ginormous. See for yourself:

With a little help, it did get eaten :). We also wandered Brighton some more so Gerry and Ben could see some of the other sights of this fun little city. For those aware, on the side of a coffee shop near the train station, the graffiti artist Banksey put up one of his more famous pieces of art, two male police officers kissing:

Now, you might notice that this one actually has protective plastic over it. While most Banksey’s have a bit of a temporary aspect to them and could be removed if and when the owner of the property of the government decides to remove it (although I think now that they are quite valuable, this is increasingly less likely), this one has become quite famous and infamous. Apparently, the original was defaced by someone finding it “immoral”. It’s been fixed up and made “permenant”.

Anyhoo, we had some tasty beers, good food, and saw tons of fun things. But it was time to go backto London. Good times were had by all.

Now, I’ve spent a decent amount of time in Brighton, mooching off Dina and Adrian, trashing their place and generally making myself as unwelcome as possible. But, each time I go, there’s generally always some fun experience or time to be had. Amazingly enough, I didn’t go down there last year during the “summer” at all. It probably didn’t help that last summer was literally three months of cold and rain. But I was also working many many hours or in the US for a couple of reasons. Well, this summer has been quite pleasant and our friends Gerry and Ben had never seen Brighton while living in England for three years. To top it off, it was Dina’s birthday which seemed like the perfect time to go down, see Brighton and celebrate Dina being a year older.

The weather could not have been more perfect. The sun was shining and it was actually kind of hot. I even managed to get a sunburn (although that now only seems to take about 5 minutes of sunshine). And, this being the coast, we decided to take a little tour along the water. Weather permitting, there was to be a paddle around Brighton Pier on Sunday, and Saturday they had a little festival in advance. We wandered around the festival, seeing some beach cars and playing with some toys. This brought us to the West Pier. Brighton, for many years had two piers. The West pier eventually closed and fell into disuse. The council was debating for a while what to do with it, rather than letting it remain in ruins, until 2003. At that point, someone apparently set fire to it and the thing was burned beyond any reasonable repair. Here’s what it looks like today:

I hope they do something with it. Even in it’s current form, it’s still pretty cool looking but could use some tender loving care. Let’s compare it to the other pier, which is still in use. It’s full of arcade games and even has amusement park rides. It’s a great big festival:

Quite a bit different, no? Well, the weather on the land was lovely, but the English Channel was anything but calm:

Check out them waves and the lovely city behind it. We eventually got a little tired after about a 2.5 walk along the water and exploring the crazy beach scenes and the crowds of people enjoying a summer day along the coast. We needed a little bit of a pick-us-up. So we hit a local coffee shop with some pretty cool art painted on coffee sacks:

Once we were properly caffeinated, it was time to stop being tourists and celebrate Dina’s years of life. However, I’ll skip ahead to the following day for now and focus on the celebrating later. On Sunday, since it wasn’t nearly as nice out, we decided to soak in some cultute. The Brighton Pavilion is the iconic center of the city. When George IV was still a decadent prince, he set himself up down in Brighton to flee his creditors. In a truly modest style, he had the following built on top of the original “farmhouse” he was initially living in:

The main part of the palace has been restored to its original decadence. On both ends of it, are the magnificent music room and banquet room. They really do blow your mind. They achieve it by having a very low, almost claustrophobic entry hallway which opens into each of these enormous rooms. The banquet room has a 2-ton chandelier hanging from the center. Photos aren’t allowed in there so we (or rather Ben, who took all these lovely photos) couldn’t capture it on film. It was very impressive.

Next up: fancy vegetarian dinner and dancing!

So, let’s have a little more wedding fun with the first wedding Carolyn and I went to as a married couple. To cap off my grand American tour, we took a little road trip from NJ allll the way to Philadelphia. My dear friend Matt was about to get married to a lovely woman named Amy! We were trading groomsman spots, so it was my turn to help him enjoy his last days of single-ness (or whatever it is groomsmen do), since he’d been so kind to do me the favour the week before.

We started the grand weekend with a nice lunch at Amy’s parents place followed by a tux fitting. Matt, being a very good planner, had everything well organized, which was a nice thing to have a week after your own wedding. Things flowed nicely and I just had to be there and be a good friend. The weekend activities were all focused in the area around where Amy grew up, so nothing was more than 15 minutes away. Very nice. I hadn’t seen Matt’s parents in years, so it was a pleasure to catch up with them as well as a number of Matt’s friends and just take in the happiness that Matt and Amy exude. The rehearsal dinner was in a lovely Italian restaurant with even more people to see and enjoy. But, of course, it was just a warm-up to the next day.

Now, the groom always has what seems to be an easy task on the day of the wedding: show up showered and shaved. So, while the bride seems to spend the day of getting her hair done and all the other pieces of the puzzle together, the groom needs to do something to kill the time. In other words, the bride has the day set up for them (doing what is probably not the most fun shit in the world), while the groom needs figure out something to ease the nervousness. Matt came up with go-karting, preceded by some lunch in a local brew pub. The brew pub was good, they claimed to have an English Ale,  but they were lying (so I had an Irish red ale). The go-karting was a blast. It might seem like an odd choice of what to do before your wedding, but it’s a great way to let off some stream and release the tension that builds up if you just sit around waiting or doing nothing.

Which leads us to the wedding. It was in a beautiful country club. The ceremony was to be on an outdoor terrace but there was the perpetual threat of rain. Luckily, the rain held out, so everything could go as planned. Allow me to show you what you could look out on during the ceremony:

Tres beautiful.

The reception was in a split Southern-themed kind of rooms. It had a lovely airy feel to it. Here would be the happy couple showing off their moves in their first dance:

How cute! Meanwhile, here would be myself all Tux-ed out with my lovely wife:

All in all, it was a beautiful day. Matt and Amy have always been such a loving couple and it was so nice to be a part of their wedding and see them off so happy. Alas, the time ended quickly and my travels to London began two days later. Coming up, why don’t I do a little London blogging next.

So, when I made my last trip to the US, when I just happened to get married myself, there was a lot of love in the air. Consider this a first entry on some of that love. The week before Carolyn and I got hitched, my friend, Jackie and her long-time boyfriend JC decided to celebrate their many years together with a Celebration of Love. Jackie was one of my singing friends from college and the whole ceremony was partly a chance for people to show their feelings about this event through music and whatnot. So, I agreed to sing with some of my old friends. Jackie chose “A Single Drop of Honey” by Abigail Washburn, which is a beautiful two-part harmony acapella song. So, Carolyn and I made a short trip up from NJ to Briarcliff, NY for the event.

The location was amazing. Right next door to where Jackie grew up, there was the ruins of what was apparently an old coach house. They spent 6 months clearing the brush and remains to create a wonderful spot for the event (this was NOT a wedding):

An organically beautiful center for the ceremony. I’ll put some larger photos elsewhere that do the whole scene justice. It really was a wonderful spot.

Jackie and JC both came towards the center from opposite ends of the aisle to meet and unite at the arch. They were played down the aisles by our friend Seth who did an accordion version of All the Things You Are. Before you laugh and start thinking “polka music?!?”, Seth is very talented and did an excellent job and made it wonderful and beautiful. Of course, we knew he would as he played us down the aisle for our wedding on a piano a week later. Here is Seth with his trusted instrument:

The celebration was headed up by a local minister who knew Jackie and her family for a while. However, this being a non-religious celebration of love, he had the task of giving a secular ceremony. He was up to the task and did a very nice job. Sprinkled in were readings by some of Jackie and JC’s friends from all over, one of them even came all the way from Alaska. At various points, there were musical interludes including one in which we did a little singing:

After the ceremony, we all retired for a tasty vegetarian (ok, there was a fish dish) party and good beer. It was a fun time and a beautiful celebration.

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!

Let’s take a little trip back in time. Picture Carolyn and I as newly weds, fresh from getting married. As a lovely gift, Carolyn’s parents got us a snazzy hotel room in the Marriott Hotel in Times Square and tickets to see Spamalot on Broadway. A pretty cool gift. Allow me to share in some of the fun.

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.

Yesterday was the final day of Wimbledon 2008 at the All-England Club and as many of you know, Nadal came away victorious in the men’s final and Venus in the women’s final.  On thursday the 26th of June, during the first week of the tournament, Dina and I decided to go down and queue up to try to see Wimbledon for ourselves.  I was extremly excited after years of watching Bud Collins and Breakfast at Wimbledon to finally have a chance to see the place in person.

In order to have a good chance of getting in, Dina and I got up at 6:00 am the morning after our second attempt at the Radiohead concert, and hopped on the tube to SW19.  We arrived around 7:30 am and were handed a queue card (we were number 3139 on the line).  The cards kept things nice and orderly as we made our way forward through the line, through security including metal detectors and finally arrived at the gates at around 10:45 am.  Here is a shot of the famous Wimbledon queue.

We entered the grounds around 11:00 am and I barely knew where to look first.  There was the scoreboard with the order of play, St. Mary’s Walk (which I always remember from Bud Collins announcing), Murray Mount (named this year for Andrew Murray – Britain’s current No. 1) and all 20 courts on which play began at noon.  We wandered the grounds for a bit taking it all in.  Here I am on St. Mary’s Walk.

When you queue up for day of tickets at Wimbledon, you are pretty much guaranteed grounds tickets which give you access to Courts 3-19 and standing room for Court 2.  There are a limited number of Centre Court and No. 1 Court tickets available day off but people queue up overnight for those.  Although we were not able to see Center Court or No. 1 Court action, we had plenty to see on all the other courts.  While we were waiting for the matches to start, we had a chance to watch Nadal warming up on one of the smaller courts.  We then wandered over to watch some men’s doubles on Court 6.  Turns out we were watching Nestor and Zimoniic the eventual men’s champions.  Here is Nestor’s serve in action.

We continued up to Murray’s Mount to watch Venus win in straight sets on the big screen showing the match on center court.  Next, we wandered over to watch Jamie Murray (brother to Andrew and strangely reminiscent of John McEnroe in the 80’s) play his doubles match.

We stayed at Wimbledon (at one of the sunniest days I have experienced in England yet) until about 8pm.  Needless to say we watched many matches – singles, doubles, men, women, top seeds and unranked players.  We ended the day peeking over the guardrails to get a glimpse of Venus and Serena playing their doubles match on Court 11.

One of the great things about Wimbledon is their policy on resale tickets.  Anyone who leaves during the day is asked to return their ticket.  After 3pm those tickets are resold on an ongoing basis for 5 pounds with the profits going to charity.  So, it is possible to get on center court or No. 1 court later in the day when other folks have started to go home.  Dina and I didn’t try for resale tickets as we were too busy watching all the matches on Courts 2-19 to bother standing on another line.  Here is a shot of the Order of Play and the updated scores so you can see what a busy day it was.

So, on our day out at Wimbledon we got to see the eventual champions in men’s singles, women’s singles, men’s doubles and women’s doubles at least for a bit of play.  We had a great time!

So I take a lot of enjoyment in trains. I love just looking at transit maps and thinking about how to use public transport to get from one point to another. I love taking train trips. Back in 2002, I took a few days and took the trans-continental train from Oakland to Chicago. Two days in a train and I had a blast. I just have a fun time travelling on these machines that slice through the landscape and provide a unique perspective on the world.
So, in May, as we were driving back to NJ from the last of four weddings in April and May we were attending (including our own, of course!), we passed something called Northlandz. This was in the middle of nowhere (or at least it felt like it) on the NJ side of the Delaware River. Carolyn looks at it and says “Matt we should turn around and go there. I think you might like this”. And boy did I ever.

A number of years ago, a man named Bruce Williams Zaccagnino started building a model railroad in his house. Well, he is apparently pretty enthusiastic because, over time he needed to build additions to his house to keep it all in. Every year, he would invite friends to come and check out the amazing world he’d created. It reached a point where he decided to give it its own home and Northlandz was born. It’s a mile long walk of various landscapes with model railroads over it. He’s built it in 3-D so you walk up ramps and find yourself looking down two stories into a ravine with a railroad bridge across it and a train running along a river on the bottom. There are one way mirrors that are set up to make the scenes look bigger and yet, you cannot see yourself. There’s a huge concert hall with a gigantic organ in it. He’d collected model trains of all different sizes and they criss-crossed all of the amazing worlds he’d created. All very impressive.

Let’s take a look, shall we?

Yes, that’s two gigantic bridges spanning large crevices’.

Here’s another bridge with Carolyn to provide some perspective. Notice that she’s on a ramp climbing higher and below her is even more model landscapes created by this guy.

It’s not all imaginary Grand Canyons. This man (and he’s made this all by himself and has people helping to do maintenance) has created a large variety of worlds. Everything from the great outdoors to large cities. This picture shows a bit of a juxtaposition of that.

Anyway, it took about 2 hours to get through it all and soak it in. I was completely blown away that such a thing could exist and that it’s basically a labour of love of one man. It’s been around for a few years now and I hope it stays for many more years. Really a nice way to bring out the child in anyone (or just reaffirm the childishness of some of us 🙂 )

As an American, I take for granted that it’s pretty much illegal to drink alcohol in public places. Most cities will make exceptions: at outdoor festivals, movies and concerts they tend to turn a blind eye to it but you still need to be subtle about it. Here in the UK (and much of the world, for that matter), such rules don’t exist. In London, pick a day and pick a time and you’ll probably see someone with a beer in their hand. Now, Britain certainly has it’s issues with drinking. I don’t know if it’s any worse than the US or if it’s just more out in the open, but there’s a big concern about it and it’s a source of debate.

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.

Consider the blog to be in catch up mode while all the fun things we’re doing here in jolly old Londontown get added. Updates will be in a haphazard order, but bear with us. Let’s take a look at some cultural fun we partook of about a month ago. Obviously London is chock full of some amazing art, being the capital city of a country with many years of history. However, we chose, on that weekend, to check out a modern art exhibition in the Hayward gallery in the Southbank centre. It’s a section of the south Thames near Waterloo that has been redone as a lot of cultural venues, like museums, theatres, music venues and a long walk along the river of public space for people to enjoy. The Hayward is a particularly severe piece of modern architecture, but I personally enjoyed it’s look.

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! 🙂

So Radiohead would be up there atop my favourite bands. Over the last 15 years, they’ve played standard guitar-rock and experimented with more esoteric electronic music. Their latest album, In Rainbows, broke new ground in that you bought the digital format directly from the band and you could pay 1p or pay £10000000. The price was up to you. They’ve always impressed me with the musical skills and the ground they’ve broken. I saw them live in 2002 and, when Adrian offered the chance to pick up some tickets, I said yes.

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.