Spent three days in London with my better half. I was supposed to be there for business on Monday and since the £ is pretty low we decided to make it a weekend. We didn’t plan much, just hook up with old friends, walk around and indulge in epicurean pleasures.
I guess the umbrella theme of this posts is it the fact my iPhone camera seems to have completely replaced writing stuff down. I’d love to have said “completely replaced my moleskine”, but fact of the matter is I’m more of a napkin guy due to being too chaotic to always carry around a notebook, my phone however is always within reach.
I’m not some run-off-the-mill tourist, see, I even got my name on TV!
It was really sunny on Saturday, but unlike Paris with it’s large boulevards and huge open spaces, the sunlight rarely makes it to street level.
According to this Snapple cap, the average person spends two weeks of his life kissing. Unfortunately, I am not, nor do I know any, average persons.
My favorite London restaurant is Moro. What I found out on their site is they grow their own vegetables on an allotment in Hackney. And what I know from their books is they don’t only bake their own bread, they even cultivate their own yeast.
My pal Philippe has been living in London for 14 years. He makes more money in a day than I do in a year. Sometimes he also loses more money in a day than I make in a year. Being a trader sure seems stressful. On the upside he’s retiring this year (at 42!) to go live in his chalet in Chamonix.
He’s taking his lovely wife with him, and might take his friend with him too, if he manages to get a few rounds in next time.
When Londoners say “underground club” they don’t mean underground as opposed to mainstream (of course we all agree the difference between mainstream and underground culture evaporated somewhere in the nineties), they mean underground, as in under the ground.
Apparently in the minimal-techno world, having only red lights that don’t flash, is a thing.
There’s a lot of Starbucks clones around. And of those clones there are a lot of ‘em around. Franchising is killing London, it’s -Subway-Burger King-Pret a Manger-American Apparel- Nero-Subway-Burger King-Pret a Manger-American Apparel- Nero- giving the impression you’re walking in circles. We would have had this coffee and a mum-and-dad place but we couldn’t find any.
I love the British Museum. Wandering through 5000 years of culture is quite an experience. Coming home afterward, switching on the TV and seeing what it all lead up to is also quite an experience. Still, I wish I had visited more museums, and the Egyptians seem like fine folks.
Image credit: Flickr.
This was so interesting I forgot to take a pic, thank god Flickr came to the rescue. This is a bust of Mercury. And I was wondering where I knew it from. It only hit me later that I know it as a hood emblem on Mercuries, the cars. But as I was standing there wondering, I was thinking that what was missing is a “Mercury in popular culture”-button the way Wikipedia has. Which in turn reminded me of this amazing BBC documentary my friend John-Paul turned me on to. John Berger’s Ways of seeing. (YT, Wikipedia). So I’m divided by my own compulsive information junk behavior, and John Berger’s views on how to experience art. I decided I’ll have to ponder on this.
And walking out of a museum with something to ponder about is very satisfying.
Propaganda porcelain. I’m sure it must have been a good idea at the time. It’s the kind of thing that I might start collecting once I’m old and wealthy and have the impression collecting something will give my life more meaning.
Sunday was the Chinese New Year. We saw a parade and ate dim sums. I love dim sums. Unlike this guy, he likes something else.
Monday was like waking up and finding out it snowed, because we woke up and it had snowed!! Apparently the most snow the South of England had seen in 18 years. And the snow is also why this post is filed under The best things in life are free. I don’t know it’s because it hadn’t snowed in almost two decades but the city went crazy. Schools closed, no busses, hardly any trains, business closed… all resulting in a massive city-wide snowball fight. It was crazy! I loved it.
Monday we had lunch at the River Cafe, which wasn’t as expensive as we expected because we took the Winter Set lunch offer.
This is one of the chefs involved in a snowball fight.
This is the lobby of The talent business, which was the business part of my trip. As you can see, the lobby is abandoned, as was the rest of the building.
“Due to adverse weather conditions”
So that was a bit anti-climatic.
Guess I’ll just have to go back to London soon.
Tags: london, snow, tbtilaf, the talent business
