Tag: london

Peeeeeeeeeeectures!

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So I finally pulled the finger out and processed the picture backlog on my camera. The first set is from last xmas. Katy's dad commented on the fact that, shutterbug that I am, hadn't taken a lot of pictures on that trip. Meh. Those that did make it though, are really nice :)

http://www.flubu.com/various_pics/montreal_xmas_2007/

    

These ones are from our recent trip to London to see Varekai. I'll write more about that in another entry, but I have to say that it was one of the best London weekends we'd ever had. For once, the hotel didn't disappoint and we probably had the best steak dinner we'd ever eaten. Hmmmm, grilled dead cow *slobber*

http://www.flubu.com/various_pics/london_jan_2008/

   

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Weekend in London

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Katy and I were in London last weekend to go see Avenue Q. The show rocked. It was brilliant. It was wrong at so many levels but that didn't prevent us from laughing our asses off.

With songs like Everyone's A Little Bit Racist and The Internet Is For Porn, you have a clue what I'm talking about. The Bad Idea Bears, as pictured above, have the best lines in the show. Imagine two of the cutest little things you've ever seen yelling shit like “She's wasted! Take her home! Yaaaaaaaay!” and “Absinthe daiquiris!!!”

We bought the soundtrack CD, but I'm really going to have to be careful if I hum it at the office :)

Katy had booked us into the Hilton in Mayfair. I'm always surprised between the discrepancy between hotel ratings and value-for-money between North America and European hotels. This was supposed to be a 4-star hotel. It had no air conditioning and the rooms were stifling. For the same price and star rating, we can get an executive suite at the Casino Hilton in Hull, with marble bathroom and king sized bed overlooking the water fountain… It's just one of those things that is consistently different, but what can you do.

Mayfair is an interesting mix of money and minge. We saw homeless men crashing in the doorway of a Porsche dealership. We walked by a chauffeur in full dress livery and then ran into a fat guy with missing teeth coming out of a Tesco express…

As a side note, London in the summertime is stupidly busy. Every other time I've been there, it's been off-season – usually in winter. You know what? It's so much better! The crowds this weekend were stifling. You couldn't walk without somebody bumping into you. Piccadilly Circus smelled like shit and piss. We didn't go to the Aquarium as we'd intented to because of the queues and we couldn't be assed because we knew we wouldn't have a good time once we were in. We decided to avoid the crowds and keep to the smaller streets. We went and had a pint at the Sherlock Holmes pub off of Trafalgar Square. We went to Fortnum & Mason and browsed stuff we would never be able to afford (or want, really). We managed to have a good time regardless of the crowds.

We also ate waay too damn much. Friday night, we went to Shogun (Adams Row, Mayfair, London, W1K 2HP). It's a really, really good Japanese restaurant hidden in the basement of a hotel but damn! It was some of the best traditional food and sushi that I've had in a while. I had seafood soup served in a teapot (cute!), followed by sushi and finished off by sauteed pork with ginger and scallions. Katy had a steamed omelette with shrimp and veg served in a gaiwan, sushi and duck teriyaki.

On Saturday night, we went to Latium (21 Berners Street, London, W1T 3LP). It's a really cosy little Italian place off of Tottenham Court Road. I strongly recommend the place. A four course menu, with antipasti, pasta, main course and dessert is about £40 per person. We bought a bottle of wine that seemed never-ending (as well as glasses of sparkling water). The meal lasted well over two hours of excellent food – and they kept bringing more of it out all the time! I had steak tartare, tagliatelle with morels and pancetta, veal with runner beans and a trio of sorbets and gelato. Katy had a mozarella salad, spinach taglioni with courgette and shrimp, lamb with asparagus and roast potatoes. In a word, num!!!!! Like I said, go try the place while it's still undiscovered :)

I have to say that we found both restaurants because of a website that a co-worker recommended. It's a good thing too, because we would never have found either restaurant on our own. Both were a bit out of the way, but they were well worth it!

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An entry that's been 4 days in the making

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It was Katy's birthday last Friday. Did you all remember to send her love?

We went to London for a few days of pre-xmas R&R. We got there on Thursday morning and went to the hotel to drop off our bags. When we got there, we were told that our hotel was closing for the holidays because they didn't have enough guests to warrant staying open, but since it was part of a large chain, they relocated us to another hotel just 5 minutes down Tottenham Court road (the Radisson Kenilsworth). Got checked in and went walkies.

We ended up in Soho and found the pub where we had a snack the last time we were in town (it's called the Brewmaster. Nothing fancy, just good cheap pub food). We wandered around Leicester Square and went to Chinatown in search of a tea shop where I could buy a tea boat. We never found one, which is surprising really, but we found tons of shops that sold Peking duck (most of which was hanging in the window).

We went to Fortnum & Mason to gawk at stuff that was too pricey for words. F&M is a shop that must be seen to be believed. The xmas display is new each year. Last year was Dickens' Christmas Carroll. This year was Alice in Wonderland. It's impressive. It's completely over the top. Given the snootiness level of the shop, it's completely appropriate. F&M is a playground for people who have so much money they don't bother about little things like prices and if they can afford the stuff anymore. They have things that I can't even put a name to or even begin to contemplate a purpose. When even the props they put on the sales display are out of our league. I mean, who the hell needs a full size leather rhinoceros??? Don't even get me started on the hand-decorated soap bars! And the food! The food… If you want to buy overly posh, snootily exclusive, overpriced and hunted to the brink of extinction things, this is the place. True story that made me laugh my ass off. Food Uncut, a cooking show, recently reviewed 3 xmas puddings by doing a blind taste test. They were testing cheap (Morrissons, £3/kg), moderate (Waitrose, £10/kg) and ludicrously expensive (F&M, £35/kg) puddings for taste and texture. Unanimously, all the testers raved about the cheapest one and slagged off the most expensive one. Made me giggle :)

When we exited la-la land and went back to the real world, we walked to see the lights on Bond Street and Regent Street. Last time we were in that area, Katy drooled at the sight of a pastry display in the window of the Patisserie Concerto on Piccadilly Street. We decided to go in for a tea break this time. It smelled really nice and the menu looked really promising, but we already had dinner plans so we decided that we'd come back for lunch tomorrow and settled on some tea to get warmed up.

Our dinner plans were to go to Itsu, the sushi restaurant chain that gained notoriety recently for being the last meal of the ex Russian spy who got poisoned with polonium a few weeks ago – though not the same branch, for obvious half-life decontamination reasons. That place was a real letdown. It looked pretentious – the type of restaurant where the sushi goes around on little conveyor belts and you pick what you want and hope for the best. Also, since all the stuff is made in advance, it's no good for me because all the rolls had sesame seeds on them and apparently (Katy asked), all the dipping sauces have garlic in them. So yeah. No sushi for us. We were disappointed, but the evening was saved when we found a little hole in the wall called Niko Niko that served really good sushi and soba for dirt cheap. It doesn't look a lot from the outside (and the inside is nothing to write home to mom about either), but the food is good, not pretentious and you get a lot of it :) My kind of place.

The following day, we went back to the The Tea House, on Neal Street in Covent Garden. We'd gone there the previous day but it was so packed that it was unbearable. This early in the morning, it was possible to buy a cast-iron japanese teapot that I'd spotted the previous day and fell in lust with. I also got some orange-flavoured oolong tea that I'm keen to try. We returned to Fortnum & Mason because we wanted to get some clotted cream fudge that we'd noticed in one of the xmas hampers the previous night. After 30 minutes of looking around and not finding anything, we grabbed some poor floor clerk and got him to do the looking for us. Poor guy was sent from clerk to clerk and nobody seemed to know (or care, really) where the damn thing was. In the end, he said that they were sold out on the floor but he could have a look in the storeroom. I wasn't really looking forward to waiting another 15 minutes for him to go and come back saying he couldn't find any, so we left it (though Katy did buy some nice biscuits that subsequently had to be rescued from her mom a few days later).

We had reserved tickets to the London Eye, so we made our way to the waterfront. On our way there, we walked passed a woman who was having her chauffeur pack the boot of her Rolls Royce. She was the stereotype of the socialite, and again, it reminded us that we're so not even in that game that we don't even want to think about it. We stopped at Trafalgar Square so that Katy (i.e. bladder woman) could go powder her nose. I snapped a few pictures of Nelson's column and developed a heartfelt relationship with a pigeon, and then we were off to the eye.

The trip itself was a lot better than I thought it would be. My vertigo never really kicked in, even though the cabin we were in went through a 360 degree revolution around its center axis while the whole thing circled around the eye. The engineering of the thing is freaky. It was still a bit foggy, so we didn't get the best view of the city but it was fun nonetheless. What was funny though is that I'd forgotten that they do a search of your bags and the same restrictions as air travel apply so the Leatherman that always lives in my back pocket would have been a problem… if they'd seen it. They were too busy harping at the fact that I couldn't bring my tripod in the cabin and I had to take it out of my bag now please!!! to bother actually running me through the metal detector. Apparently, a tripod is considered more dangerous…

After the eye, we went to eat at the Oxo Tower for Katy's birthday. I think they thought we'd lower the tone of the restaurant, so they stashed us completely at the back of the restaurant. I didn't really mind though, cause it was nice and quiet. The food was good and the company was brilliant. A nice evening all around :)

We were a bit tired the next day so we took it easy. Bought another teapot and crashed at an internet cafe to waste a few hours. We had tickets to go see the matinee showing of “We will rock you” at the Dominion on Saturday. That was Katy's birthday present. She'd been wanting to go see that show ever since it came out. The show was… ok. It's a musical that uses Queen songs to score a story. The plot revolves around the following premise

On Planet Mall all musical instruments are banned. The Company Computers generate the tunes and everybody downloads them. But Resistance is growing in the form of the Bohemians – rebels who believe that there was once a Golden Age when the kids formed their own bands and wrote their own songs. Legend persists that somewhere on Planet Mall instruments still exist. Somewhere, the mighty axe of a great and hairy guitar god lies buried deep in rock. The Bohemians need a hero to find this axe and draw it from stone. Is the one who calls himself Galileo that man? But GlobalCorp is also looking for Galileo and if they get him first they will surely drag him before the Killer Queen and consign him to oblivion across the Seven Seas of Rye.

The idea is good, but the implementation left me bleh. I found a lot of the performers to be, well, annoying would be a good word. Still, Katy loved it so I'm happy. We got our bags from the hotel and headed home.

Katy's parents and uncle were coming down on Sunday to spend xmas eve, day and boxing day with us. We were hosting our first ever xmas dinner and I was doing all the cooking. I'm glad to say that it went really well. We had waaaaaaaaaaayyy too much food.

Let me re-emphasize this.

We had a STUPID amount of food.

As in, half of it is now frozen because there's no way in hell we can eat it all before it goes bad. Even with having handed out leftovers. Even with not having thawed out food to begin with.

We had too much food, but it was damn good!!!

My cooking was well received, which made me happy. It's a good thing too, because I spent most of my time in the kitchen preparing stuff :D Everybody ate their fill (and a bit more) and we had a good time.

Katy had to pop into work for a few hours on xmas day, so we waited for her to come back before we attacked the mountain of presents underneath the tree. As a side note, that tree managed to survive the cat, but just barely – poor battered thing. Santa's been really generous this year. I got a mountain of chocolates, some cookbooks, Bobbles snow globes, a new wok, a hand blender with a bajillion attachments, season 1 of Rome on DVD and an ipod with Shure E4C headphones. I've been hemming and hawing for those for the last year and I finally have them. My preciousssss!!!

We discovered that the cat is a catnip fiend. Katy had bought catnip tea bags from Whittards. They send him completely batty! We had to wrestle the bag away from him cause we were afraid he was going to have a fit or something :)

Katy's family left yesterday afternoon and we both crashed for a nap. It's been hectic, but now it's all quiet and should stay like that for the foreseeable future. We're going to be spending a quiet new year's eve because Katy is working on the 1st. We don't have plans to go anywhere or see anybody, and to be honest, I like that. I'm not a hermit by any means, but I like spending quiet downtime with my wife. (my wife, hee hee, that still makes me giggle).

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I love London but hate Londonners

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We're back in Cambs after a rather long weekend.

Thanks to a shady, back-room deal†, I managed to score 4 tickets to go see Alegria in London at the Royal Albert Hall. Katy and I left Cambs at 11 on saturday and met up with Katy's parents at St-Pancs. The hotel I'd booked was ok. Nothing to write home to mom about. Seriously, next time we have plans in London, I'll go back to the B&B we stayed in but get a better room. The rooms we had were big and had en-suites, but we had to call the front desk to complain about one set of neighbours who were having some sort of party in their room at 11pm. At 1:30am, I was awakened by the other set of neighbours who were doing god-knows-what. Anyway…

We had a pootle in Kensington parc, where large swans threatened to eat small children. It was a nice day out and I took some cool pictures. They'll be online when I can be assed. We went to eat at an italian restaurant on Kensington High Street called Sopranos. It's a little mom&pop place that has lots of good food for reasonable prices. It was funny because it was one of the restaurants Katy and I ate at the first time we spent time in London, about a year ago now, when we were in town to go see Dralion.

The show was good. Katy and her folks enjoyed it, but I secretly think that it wasn't as good as the other times I'd seen it. The clowns were better, but some acts weren't there (like the strongman) and some acts seemed less impressive than memory served (like the speedtrack and the trapezes). Anyway, maybe I'm spoiled and biased because I've seen Alegria so often now (this was my 3rd time). Katy and her folks hadn't seen it before and were quite impressed. The show was also incident #1 in my I-am-really-starting-to-hate-people phase. The family behind us kept talking really loudly in arabic. The father of the family kept belching. I wasn't impressed. Katy told them to be quiet during the intermission. For the most part, they were. Except for the belching and the munching noises.

We spent most of today wandering around the Victoria&Albert museum, where I saw a kick-ass collection of stained glass, and the Natural History Museum, where incident #2 of my IARSTHPP reared its ugly head. The museum was packed. It seems like a really interesting place. Just the architecture of the building made me want to stop and gape. There was just WAY THE FUCK TOO MANY PEOPLE. You couldn't move at times, and when you wanted to stop and look at the exhibits, there was a queue of people pushing you in the ass to move forward. Throw in a ton of hyped-up kids who couldn't care less to be there and preferred to run and scream, parents who indulge them instead of giving them a good smack once in a while and it all made for a situation I was glad to get out of. And then there was the fat kid who kept trying to kick the pigeons (and when that didn't work, her strategy devolved to barking at them). Classy.

All in all, a good weekend, but people need to learn manners and social graces. I don't say that I don't burp (dear god, people who know me know that's not true). But I do it at home, or at least I try to be discreet…

† I asked Nat.

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We are all connected by a network so big we can't even begin to imagine it

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… it's called plumbing.

No, I haven't lost my mind. It's one of the things I have retained from the Blue Man Group show Katy and I went to see in London. In one word, it was stupendulous! (ok, so it's more than one word, and the last one isn't even a word, but if you can see the show, do it!).

It's hard to describe the show. It's funny and cynical, without being pretentious. It's original. It makes you laugh, it makes you go wow! It makes you think, without driving the point home. It's musical, but not in the traditional way. Most of the instruments are made out of PVC or 45-gallon drums, though there is also a kick-ass backup band.
The Blue Men are silent, they never speak. You'd also think that they'd be expressionless, given the fact that they're completely anonymized by the mask. They're not. It's impressive just how much they manage to convey without actually saying anything out loud.
The show really involves the audience, and in a way that isn't coerced. They really do understand the human psyche, if you want, because you want to do to it. it's scripted in a way that you pick up your cues and you don't really even realize that you're doing. All of a sudden, you're unraveling meters upon meters of toilet paper and you're giggling like a small child. The next minute, you're yelling your guts out and it feels good.
One of the skits in the show involves paintballs and paintings. You could buy the canvases (and the money went to charity). I have to admit that I was impressed by human nature. It's not often that it happens. We'd asked the guy running the merchandising stand if we could pre-order one of the paintings. He said no worries and that he'd save it for us. Once we were seated, I started doubting that, thinking that he either wouldn't remember us or would give it up to the highest bidder. Not so!!! Apparently, tons of people asked him for it, but he kept it for us. Dang! (though lugging a wet canvas back to our hotel and all around London the following day turned out to be a pain!) Oh, and one of the Blue men “signed” it by kissing the back of the canvas. Those masks are covered in paint, so there's a bright blue kiss on the back of the canvas :D

The weekend itself was also fun, though a bit frustrating at times. We got into Kings Cross around 1:30pm and didn't make it to our hotel before 3pm! We got completely turned around in the underground, even though we knew which line and which station to go to, we just couldn't actually get to the right platform! Apparently, we both have the sense of direction of drunken pigeons. Anyway, we decided to take a cab, but even that was an ordeal. We had to wait in a stupidly long queue to get one. Apparently, when the weather turns a bit chilly, people refuse to walk. One of the first things we did after that was to get a pocket city map to avoid such further problems and we walked everywhere after that.

I wanted to go to Portobello Road and see the antique market. I expected it to be like the song from Bedknobs and Broomsticks, a place to spend lots of time investigating interesting knick-knacks and doodads. I was sorely disappointed, really. It's all… well crap, really. Nothing like what I expected.

Sunday was a good day. We had a leisurely morning, checked out of the hotel and went walkies. We spent a bit of time at the British Museum, one of my favouritest places in London, until the shops opened. We investigated a lot of funky shops on Tuttenham Court, found a star for our xmas tree and headed out to Picadilly Circus. I found a really cool bookstore in Soho that had a very complete Sherlock Holmes section. We had a pub lunch and then went walking along Saville Row and Bond Street. That place looks and smells of SERIOUS money. If I had money to burn, I'd get a handmade fitted suit in Saville Row, but until I can afford to throw money out the window, that'll stay a dream. Walking up Bond St, where Tiffany, Cartier, De Beers and Rolex are all neighbours, you realize that you are so not even in that same ballpark. While we were window drooling (I wanted to lick a parked Bentley), Katy turns to me and says “Is it bad that all I can think about now is cake?“. I'm sooooo lucky :)

I just don't get the fashion world. Katy summed it up correctly when she said that when you're rich and into fashion, you need to dress like you're poor and have absolutely no taste. Thing is, she's true. Rich people get away with looking like idiots. Anyway.

On our way back to the underground, we passed in front of a really cool shop display. The shop is called Fortnum & Mason and brings the term posh to new heights. Staff uniforms involve greatcoats and tails. You have to be seriously rich to shop here. I mean, seriously. People think that M&S food is expensive – they ain't seen nothing. I was blown away by a pound of coffee for £55. Now granted, it comes in a humidoir made out of rare african hardwood and has a built-in hygrometer, but still, IT'S ONLY FRIGGIN COFFEE!!!!

I bought Katy two mince pies (which only cost £2) and, a bit shell-shocked, we headed to the train station and home. All in all, a nice weekend. It was nice to sleep in our own bed though. The bed at the hotel was small, noisy and not that comfy.

Edit: just so you know, each word in the links can point to a different picture.

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You gotta love the british

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Quotes from all over regarding London going boom:

———
When the news reporter said “Shopkeepers are opening their doors bringing out blankets and cups of tea” I just smiled. It's like yes. That's Britain for you. Tea solves everything.

You're a bit cold?
Tea.
Your boyfriend has just left you?
Tea.
You've just been told you've got cancer?
Tea.
Coordinated terrorist attack on the transport network bringing the city to a grinding halt?
TEA DAMMIT!

And if it's really serious, they may bring out the coffee. The Americans have their alert raised to red, we break out the coffee. That's for situations more serious than this of course. Like another England penalty shoot-out [in soccer].
———-

“It's hard to panic the British. They've dealt with the Blitz, the IRA, the Silurians, the Zarbi, the Daleks, the Cybermen…”
———-

To quote an old Londoner who lived through the blitz and got caught up in the Canary Wharf explosion: “I've been blown up by a better class of bastard than this!”
———-

“They did their worst, and they managed to disrupt our transport network and get fatalities in the low double figures. That happens on a fairly regular basis anyway, you twits. What's your next trick – a fiendish weather control device which makes it rain on a bank holiday weekend?”
———-

“Al Qaeda say: 'Britain is now burning with fear, terror and panic in its northern, southern, eastern, and western quarters.' Bitch, please. Osama, you live in a fucking cave. You're like an evil Batman or something. No wonder you have a thing for blowing up commuters, because you will never commute because you live in a cave. You see transport, and you are filled with rage, because you? Live in a cave. You could try forming a political wing to… oh, wait, you can't because YOU LIVE IN A CAVE. Twat.

The BBC paused news coverage to show *Eastenders*. That'd be the nationwide fear, terror and panic, then.”

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