London Wrap Up

Well, I finally made it back to balmy San Francisco. I never realized how warm a winter can be here till spending a few weeks in London. What an ice box. Here is a link to the whole mess of photos I published. Sorry for the lack of order but I really wanted to get them up and announce the pages.

London photo gallery

London. What an amazing town. So much history and so beautiful. Great food. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. So much to see and do. If I were to recommend a few things to visitors I would say that you have to go to the Tate Modern, get a great meal at Chimes in Pimlico and bring your walking shoes for taking several days and exploring.

Amsterdam Weekend

With the extra time that I’ve had with this UK trip, I decided to take advantage of the cheap flights to mainland Europe and booked myself a weekend in Amsterdam. I’ve never been there but remember hearing two different stories from people that have visited. In high school, it was tales of “cafes” with menus of dozens of different types of marijuana and windows in the red light district with semi-clad women selling sex.

More recently, people tell me about the beauty of the canals, architecture, food and museums. I decided I should check it all out and see for myself. The flight itself is just over an hour from London and reminded me of how easily I can get to LA from San Francisco (but at about twice the price). I’ve read about how easy it is to get around speaking English and it is true. The strange thing for me was how similar Dutch is to English in terms of the cadence, gestures and intonation. It was as if everyone were speaking English but with different words. Very odd. And then when someone spoke to me in Dutch I responded in Spanish. I’m not sure what happens in my brain but it seems like when I hear a language I don’t understand, I instinctively respond in Spanish. It really didn’t help any.

I landed Saturday morning and headed off on a 8 hour walk around the city. The tiny streets of the old central city are lined with canals and tall 3 to4 story builds. It is difficult to keep your bearings without being able to keep on eye on the sun. As I walked farther out towards the zoo and main parks, it seemed the streets widened and straightened out.

A co-worked arrived at about 8 PM and we headed to the sordid red old town to check out the cafes and famous attractions. I left Sunday around sunset and I’m not sure what to think. I’m guessing that I ended up in the tourist part of town, seeing all those tourist things, the city itself had some amazing sites, buildings, but for some reason it left me feeling unsatisfied. Maybe in Spring, with the flowers in bloom, maybe getting into the countryside more…

Living on Borrowed Time

Since I jumped on the grenade for the company and am staying in London for another 2 weeks, I’ve been trying to make the most of the time when I'm not working by exploring the city and seeing the sites like St. Paul’s Cathedral and taking walking tours along the Thames. Note bad ass scarf in above photo. Looks like I fit in, right? Below photo, I'm trying to look up Saint Peter's robe to see if he lives up to his name.

London is such a beautiful city with such a wealth of history. It amazes me to walk around and see so many places that I’ve heard about my whole life and all of the history that has happened here. I’ve been reading “Great Expectations” by Dickens to get into the English mindset. Below, Fiona's snow covered house where I've been staying.

Why does the bad weather seem to follow me? Last year setting up the New York office I was there during the single snowiest day they have ever had. Now in London I gone through these awful wind storms and now it is freezing and snowing. Yikes, good thing I bought a wool jacket.

And I recently went to see Patrick Stewart in Antony and Cleopatra. He is in the Royal Shakespeare Company and has been getting phenomenal reviews for this play. Check out the photos. I’ve never seen Shakespeare performed live but figured it wouldn't get any better than this. I have to say that I don't think it's my thing but I'm willing to give it another shot if something comes up that sounds interesting (like this performance in a few weeks). It was so well done, great sets, well acted… but in the end, I just had to see Picard! Make it so!

Change of Plans

Slight change in plans. I'll be in London for another 2 weeks. The ISP screwed up the UK to SF network connection so rather than me going back to SF and then flying out here again next week to finish things up, I'll be in London for a bit longer and will try to make it over to Paris or Amsterdam if time permits.

I went to see another show in the West End Saturday night, Icons in London It was an entertaining show but this is the second Elvis impersonator I've seen in a week and that kind of creeps me out. The show itself was a VERY loose story about how the lead, Greg London, found his true calling, singing, even though he was just impersonating others. We watched as Elvis, Johnny Cash, David Bowie... spoke to him and he sang their songs. Then they shoe horned in Arnold Schwarzenegger, Austin Powers, Kermit the Frog. Very Vegas and entertaining.

The weird part that I’m still trying to wrap my head around is that I’m watching someone from the US play to a UK audience (for the most part) and do characterizations of US Pop stars in a cheesy Vegas over produced style. Snippets of US pop music (top 40 pop hits) are being sung by someone who is imitating real pop stars in a slick manufactured show. It’s 3 levels of fake-ness. This is representing, in a way, the worst parts of the entertainment industry of the US; being packaged and exported for international consumption. It reminds me of the time I was in a hostel in Edinburgh and there was a large international group piled into the rec. room watching and cheering for WWF wrestling. What kind of crap are we unleashing on the world?

Leaving London

It has been a whirlwind week or so but Monday I'm headed back to the States. Sorry no pics since the last post but between all the long work days I did manage to get out a couple of nights while I was here.


On Tuesday, I went out with a co-worker and a group of his friends to catch a local Elvis impersonator, Lou Jordon.

There is something really weird about being in a smoke filled London basement bar and watching some guy pretend to be Elvis Presley. The audience was shouting for all his famous songs which everyone sang and danced too. I always forget how much influence the US has over Pop Culture until I see something like this. BTW, he had a newer jumpsuit than in the photo. It was white still but covered with sequins in the shape of flames.



Then on Thursday I saw Don Johnson in Guys and Dolls at the Piccadilly Theater in the West End. Fiona had gotten a deal on these tickets and I've always been told that when in London, go see a Broadway show so... I really wasn't expecting too much but was surprised how much I enjoyed the production. The dancing was excellent and the singing good. Don, not so much but it was fun to watch him out there trying to hoof it. The weird part was that they had the actors trying to these awful New York / Brooklyn accents that made the dialog very un-natural. Don kept coming in and out of his accent which was hilarious. It was as if English was a second language to them (which is another discussion altogether) but all in all it was fine.

First Few Days in London

The jet lag is finally wearing off and I’m sleeping the whole night, if you call waking up at 6 AM a whole night. I arrived uneventfully into Heathrow around 11 AM Wednesday the 10^th. Fiona picked me up at the airport and we headed back to her flat in her VW Polo (why don’t they bring these cool little cars to the US?). Having not slept on the flight, I powered through the following few days drinking 4 Red Bulls and some caffeine gum per day. Basically, forcing myself to stay awake as long as I could stand it and then collapsing into a fleshy imperialistic lump.

The job seems to be coming together slowly. I found my way to the main office eventually and started setting up my gear. They move at a different pace here and I found myself trying to be patient as the power and internet circuits were turned up. It also didn’t help that I was so hopped up on caffeine that I could see through time but when in London…

I took the weekend off to take a short trip to Brighton with Fiona and her 11 year old son Josh. He competed in a regional swim meet there and then we spent the rest of the drizzly cloudy afternoon enjoying the beach, town and some wonderful Haddock and Cod fish and chips.

Sunday we slept in a bit (finally) and enjoyed the clear blue skies and crisp morning air. We visited the Columbia Road Flower market and eventually hooked up with my co-worker who is here helping setup also.

We all met up at Spitafields Open Air Market, had a nice lunch, did some shopping and then walked back through town to see the Tower of London, Tower Bridge, Tate Modern, House of Parliament and Big Ben.

Foggy London Town

So I'm headed to London, England for 2 weeks to build out the newest Current TV facilities. Current signed a deal with BSkyB to broadcast a localized version of our stuff. My boss and I are going over there to build the same amount of IT infrastructure that we currently have in San Francisco (that we’ve spent the last two years building). We’ll be bringing 3 locations on line, each with a set of firewalls, switches, SAN servers, VMWare servers, mail servers… My guess is that I won’t be sleeping too much.

It will be great to see my old friend Fiona that lives in London. I haven’t seen her in a few years, since I was there in 2000(?) and she had a sweet little flat in Pimlico. She has since bought a 3 bedroom place south of the city center with a friend of hers. I’ll post when I can but not sure when that will be.

Stay tuned…