You'll miss me when I'm gone

Tomorrow morning, very, very, very early in the morning, we're headed to Paris for the weekend. Sure beats a weekend train trip to D.C. or Boston. More info and pictures to come.

Maybe next time

The largest earthquake to hit the UK in the past 25 years occurred at around 1 a.m. and I slept through it. This is now the second large earthquake I have experienced and not felt. The first one was in 1999 when I was in Cyprus on an archaeological dig. After having a few beers at the local bar, some of my roommates and I skipped down the street to go to the other dig house to hang out. When we got there, we found everyone crouched in doorways and fallen items scattered all over the the floor. My fellow skippers and I were shocked when we were told that an earthquake had just occurred and how traumatic the experience was. We found a similar scenario when we skipped back to our dig house. The following day, I called my parents who had been quite concerned about the earthquake. They didn't understand how I hadn't felt anything, and I explained that I must have been in mid air (as I was skipping) while it occurred.

This time, my only excuse is that I was sleeping.

House guest #2

John (a.k.a. Country Lawyer) arrived very early on Saturday morning, looking bleary eyed and disheveled after his flight from DC. As is our custom, we opened a bottle of champagne upon his entry into our apartment. We were all pretty hungry so we wandered around the neighbourhood until we happened upon the S&M Cafe, where we ate huge servings of English breakfast goodies. Service was a bit slow, as we've come to expect, but the quality and quantity of food we got for the amount we paid, made this a great place which we'll go back to again. John kept passing out while eating his breakfast, so we decided to bring him back to the apartment for a nap. Then, realizing that John was a bit larger than our couch, I went on a mad hunt in search of an inflatable mattress. The late afternoon/evening was spent walking around the Tower of London, wandering around part of the South side of London, finding a pub, playing some rummy 500 (which I won!), then heading back to our neighbourhood for some Vietnamese food and an early night's rest.

Sunday, we awoke early, and began what I like to refer to as one of Leo's death marches. These are walks which seem endless, appear to have very few defined destinations, but always involve drinking, eating, and blisters. This walk took us to the Hayward Gallery, followed by a pub near Covent Gardens, where we introduced John to a Sunday roast, followed by passing by Leo's office (in order to find another pub which turned out to be closed), and heading back to the pub by our flat. It was probably about a 6 mile hike around central London. After which, we wanted nothing more than to sit quietly, so we went to the movie theatre and saw Be Kind, Rewind, which we all thought was a wonderful movie, made even better by the fact that you could buy beer (at the theatre) and bring it in (to the movie) . For dinner we dined at a Turkish restaurant around the corner from our place, and again drifted off to sleep well before midnight.

Photos from Bath

As promised, here are some photos from our trip to Bath...

Success

Houston...we have internet!

Leo's bad day

I called Leo at home a number of times yesterday, since I know how awful it is to sit around the house without much to do, waiting for a delivery. He was getting angrier and angrier with each call, and by the time I had left work, the delivery still hadn't shown up. When I arrived home, I found Leo yelling on the phone to a woman, probably in a call centre in India, about our delivery never turning up. The reason given was that BT (our phone and broadband provider) never gave the delivery people our flat number, so they couldn't figure out where we lived.

Our building has 9 flats in it. Most people who live there, I assume, go to work during the day, so there would have been little harm if the delivery guy just hit all 9 buttons. When Leo ask them why they didn't call when they couldn't find us, he was informed that the drivers are not given phones. When he asked if we could change the order and have it delivered to either of our offices, they told him that they only deliver to postcode E2. When Leo explained that we didn't know anyone in this postcode, and that there weren't even any stores nearby that would be open all day to receive the package, the woman on the other end gave him no assistance and just repeated the same story. At that point, Leo reached his limit and slammed the phone down.

Luckily, Leo had encountered a neighbour of ours when we first moved in to the building, so he asked him if he'd be home and could accept the package. To our surprise he said yes, so hopefully by the time I get home today, the package will be there and we'll be able to be connected to the world once again.

Island Time - revisited

Leo, right now, is at home waiting for our hub to be delivered so we can have internet access. The time frame given for the delivery was between 7:30 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. today. Since his job is a bit more flexible than mine, he offered to stay home and wait for the package (which of course needs to be signed for). It's now 3 p.m. and nothing has arrived. I tried to track the package on the website and it says that it was put on the delivery truck at 6:40 this morning. The website also states that the delivery company's phone number is not public, so you cannot call them to find out when packages will actually be delivered. How convenient! So now, poor Leo, waits...

Tom's Birthday Bath

Our friend Tom's birthday was this past Saturday, and he wanted us to all leave London for a weekend to see what lies outside our new home. So we hopped a train to Bath and spent the weekend touring the little town, sight seeing, eating, drinking, and of course bathing.

When we got there, we checked into our hotel, which was just over the bridge from the centre of the city (about a 5 minute walk). The rooms were adequate - bed, tv, toilet...no bath in our room, which we found quite amusing. After a lovely lunch in a renovated train station, we went to the Roman Bath museum, where we learned that a lot of what was displayed there was not actually original, and we witnessed dumb tourists sticking their hands into the ancient bath, with signs above them clearly stating not to touch the water since the bath waters were not filtered and bath was still lined with lead. We went to the Holburne Museum of Art to see an exhibit on 70 years of Penguin book design, but were a bit disappointed when we saw that 70 years fit into one small room. After a drink and some cards at a pub, we went out for a wonderful fish dinner and headed to home base for a night cap and an some well needed sleep.

Sunday we decided to heal ourselves in hot spring waters of Bath at the Thermae spa. Once Tom and Caron got over the shock of Leo in his blue Speedo, we all spent the morning relaxing in the pools (one was on the roof of the building with a view of the city) and in the steam rooms. Feeling healthy and rejuvenated, we had some pints and lunch and then went on our separate ways. Tom and Caron toured the Jane Austen museum and Leo and I went to the home of the man who found Uranus (giggle). We met up again for tea and cakes at Sally Lunn's in the oldest house in Bath. Realizing we had seen pretty much all of Bath, we hopped an earlier train home, where we got to sit in first class. So, what did we learn - Tom is old, England extends beyond London, sulphur water tastes bad, fudge is not always as wonderful as it seems, and first class travel is way better than normal class. Pictures will be posted on Wednesday (when we hopefully will get our internet set up...yeay!)

Germ warfare

This was supposed to be an entry about our first house guest and what a great time we had while he was here, showing him the sights, introducing him to local cuisine, staying out far too late on a Monday night and regretting it the next morning. But that's not how this story goes.

Our friend Jared came into town around 6:30 Monday night after spending a few days at the Berlin Film Festival, where he says he was doing work, but I think he was just partying. He had just planned a quick visit to London on his way back to New York, so he could see us briefly and see how we were settling in. After picking him up at Liverpool Station and dragging his enormous bag back to our apartment, I set out a spread of whatever we had in available in our fridge (pickled garlic, cheese, and stuffed grape leaves...not bad for having just moved in) and we had a bottle of our favourite cheap champagne. We then took Jared for a stroll down Brick Lane, which is when it hit Leo. He excused himself for the moment to head back to the apartment, since his stomach was churning. He told us to continue our walk and pick a place for dinner, where he'd hopefully meet us later. So we walked, and we walked, to the end of Brick Lane, and back, looking in every restaurant along the way. When we finally heard from Leo, he sounded weak and told us to eat without him. After a quick and delicious Bangladeshi dinner, we headed home to hang out with our fallen comrade. Back at the apartment, Leo was not well. When we offered him some of our leftovers, he grew pale. Every 10 minutes, he'd run for the bathroom. He then had to go lie down, leaving Jared and I to chat a bit before we both decided to go to sleep.

Leo kept passing out, waking up with a start, running to the bathroom, sluggishly returning to bed and passing out again. Then, around 1 in the morning, I started feeling bad. I thought I must just be suffering from sympathy pains, but eventually I was on the same bathroom routine as he was (luckily about 5 minutes apart). This went on until Jared left at about 7 in the morning to get to the airport. Leo and I were wrecked. We both called in sick. We were in bed until about 1 p.m. We couldn't eat. We drank as much water as our bodies would allow us. We had conversations about going to the store to pick up some supplies, but couldn't make it off of the couch. We watched episode after episode of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," just so we could claim to be doing something. Our bodies ached. It seemed we'd never be well again.

This morning, however, the pain in our stomachs lifted. Though exhausted, we've both made it into work. Hopefully we won't infect anyone. And hopefully that will never happen again.

Weekend outings

This weekend Leo and I did some exploring of our neighbourhood as well as the area a bit south of us. Sorry for not posting pictures, but this blogging thing gets a bit difficult when I have to do it from work or from a cafe (still no internet at home yet). Saturday we walked down Bethnal Green road, scoping out the largest supermarket in our area, as well as the local pawn shop (which felt more like a Best Buy than a pawn shop). We sampled some local cuisine at G. Kelly's Pie And Mash Shop, which is one of the oldest pie shops in the city. Unfortunately, they no longer serve jellied eel at the shop in Bethnal Green, which we really wanted to try.

On our way back to the apartment, we stopped into another local pub. Let me preface this story with that fact that it was 1:30 in the afternoon. The place was quite boisterous for a Saturday afternoon. All around the pub were red-nosed folks, most of the men in either sweat pants or some form of trousers that had elastic at the waist and the bottom. There were only two women I saw...one drinking wine out of the small bottle it came in, and the other looking like she had just gotten off of a long tour with a heavy metal hair-band from the eighties. Everyone was drunk, or at least many more sheets to the wind than us. So, I felt out of place, which Leo thought was amusing.

Then a gentleman wearing blue hospital pants, still with his hospital bracelet on, walked into the bar selling bootlegged DVDs. One patron of the bar, either a film buff or someone interesting in seeing the escaped hospital patient leave quickly, bought the entire stack off of them. Not two minutes later, another man walked into the bar (this is getting to be a bad joke) shouting that he had cheap meat to sell, pulling out of his plastic bag sealed packages of sliced meat from the Tesco across the street. He was selling them at a deep discount, since they were either stolen or old and had been thrown away, and no one seemed interested. It was at this point that I convinced Leo to drink the rest of my beer so we could be on our way. It's not that the place didn't have charm, in fact, I think there was just too much charm going on there for 1:30 in the afternoon. Leo, of course, can't wait to go back.

Island time

Something that I keep noticing is that people move at a very different pace here than I'm used to. This difference is most evident during "rush" hour. In New York, I was used to being swept up in the sidewalk traffic, having to battle my way in and out of the people-stream, often out of breath once I reached my destination. Here, people meander. They take their time. No one seems to be in a rush to get anywhere or do anything. There are still massive crowds, especially in the tube stations, but people will just form a quiet queue, wait peacefully to proceed through the electronic gates, and then move at a snail's pace to their train. Getting on and off the tube is maddening as well. A large crowd will form outside a door, let the people out (sometimes), step gingerly inside the train, each person taking a look around, stretching, grabing a paper from one of the seats, opening it up and starting to read, all right next to the train's door, as other people are also trying to slowly make their way inside.

This slower pace seems to extend to all aspects of life here - from the work day (my co-workers were horrified when I told them at my old job I had in be at my desk and working by 9 and couldn't leave at least until 5:30 or 6 unless I wanted to be reprimanded), to service in restaurants and pubs, to getting your keys from the landlord of your new apartment while you stand on the sidewalk with 6 suitcases, a guitar and a ukulele, in the cold, hoping to move in. This is not a bad thing...it is just something that will take some time to get used to. Perhaps since the same winds that blow in the Caribbean also hit the coast of England, the English have the same slower-paced lifestyle...what we like to call island time.

1st day of work

Today was my first day of work. I won't go into all of the boring details, but I really like the people, it seems like a rather laid-back environment, the building is amazing, and there is a plastic dinasour on my desk...which makes me smile.

WiFi is wonderful

This blog is coming to you from the coffee/surf/skate shop down the block from our new apartment. As promised, here are some photos of our place. So happy to be settled and to have unpacked our suitcases.

Moving Day - the sequel

Today we move into our new place, so updates to the blog may be a bit less frequent, since we have no internet service. Hopefully (but doubtfully) setting up a phone line and an internet connection won't take too long. Pictures of our apartment to come...that is if some guy named Paul shows up today with our keys.