Panos

Panos from the years:



These are all put together using Autostitch.

(And yeah, that's right, my first post in months, and I don't write anything.)

Quarterly Roundup: The Return

As my few remaining readers (as in, Joie and Daorcey) have pointed out, it's been a while. So here's more words to read, tho I warn ya, it's essentially a repeat of last round... as in, places I've been. What else is there, really?

So when we left off, I was about to head off to Spain for Christmas there with my parents. It's the first time since I moved out to London-land that I haven't gone home for Christmas, so it was good they came out. Otherwise, I probably would have drunken myself near-death out of sheer depression. So yay for that.

We stayed near a town called Estepona on the Costa del Sol. It's all very lovely, but it is dead over the holidays. Our resort was beautiful, and the only other person we saw there was the security guard. On top of that, we had hella shitty weather -- note the name. Costa del Sol. It's supposed to be sunny 330 days of the year. It rained pretty well every day we were there. It's not supposed to do that.

That said, we still got out and saw a lot of stuff and it was wonderful to spend so much time with them, even if it did bring out the grumpy teenager-like side of me. Seville was beautiful, tho we didn't visit the barbers. Rhonda and the pueblo blancos were super cool. The bullfight we saw, not so much. My mom and I actually walked out after the second fight -- my mom felt sick, and I wanted to punch someone. Cheering wankers on for torturing animals to death, not really my kind of thing, you'll not be surprised to learn.


We also took a day trip to Gibraltar, where the highway runs across the airport landing strip, and I nearly got bitten by a monkey. I would say that Gibraltar is like Britain, but warmer; however, it rained.

I also managed to talk my parents into a trip to Morroco. Neither seemed too keen on it, but then we were standing on the Rock (aka Gibraltar) looking out toward Africa, and that seemed to convince my dad. I loved Tangier, and would go back anytime. It's dirty and colourful and lots of fun. We did touristy stuff like ride a camel -- harder than it looks -- and my mom got hassled by a rug salesman. He actually followed her around the market. And I had as much mint tea as I could... I love that stuff.

Back in London, in February, it snowed. I mean, proper snowed. This doesn't happen often here; a light dusting is enough to shut the airports down, and we got several inches. Even better, it was the wet stuff -- perfect for snowballs and snowmen.



I worked from home that day, but managed to sneak out of the house for an hour to go for a walk. So much fun! There were snowmen built everywhere, like they were invading. And in a few places there's be three big snowballs feet high lined up -- people had clearly tried to make massive ones, not realising it's rather hard to stack them when they're that big...

At the end of the month, I had a work trip to Cannes, so stayed up for the weekend to tour around. On a friend's advice, I checked out a chateau a few miles out of Cannes called La Napoule. It sits right on the sea, and was rebuilt by an American artist and his wife. They filled the garden with crazy-ass statues and carved faces and animals into the walls. Everywhere I looked, there was something random to surprise me -- a weird statue, a face above a window, and above the main door, they carved the fairytale phrase "once upon a time...". Very sweet and beautiful.



From there, I wandered down to Nice, which had a cool carnival going on, and was a good base to visit Monaco and Monte Carlo. On the way to that tax haven, I stopped off at a village called Eze, which is set up on top of a cliff overlooking the Med. Again, perfect views. I want a house overlooking the sea...



In March, I managed to travel for FUN not work -- crazy times, I know. Kris is living out in Berlin for a few months this summer, so went to see him. Berlin was pretty cool, and it's always good to have a tour guide. And, a free place to stay. Did all the usual touristy stuff -- saw the Brandenburg Gate, bits of the wall, Checkpoint Charlie -- but also wandered into the Turkish district, where we had some damn fine Shwarmas and mint tea... noticing a trend here?

Berlin's weirdly cheap for a capital city. Kris and Tina have a two bedroom apartment for less than I pay to live in a five-person houseshare, and the beer and food and transport is all well cheaper than London. Time to learn German, then?

And that's it for travel... for ten days at least. (Noticing another trend here?) I'm back home in Calgary for a week -- need to visit my preggers sisters. (Yes, plural, they've synchronised.)

In May, I've got DarNat visiting, and we're heading out to Stockholm -- mostly because it was cheap -- for a weekend, and who knows what else we'll get up to. I predict pubs and beer will feature rather frequently...

Pictures are all up on Facebook and a few random London ones are on Flickr.

Tim Hortons in London

I just drank a double-double and ate a Boston Cream from Tim Hortons. Yes, I am still in London. No, not the one in Ontario. The other London.

A former classmate of mine sent me a message on Facebook a short while ago... asking if I was one of those donut-obsessed Canadians -- and if I was, to let me know he'd noticed a Tim Hortons sign in a shop window near Piccadilly.

A bit of googling later, and hot damn, it turns out he was right. So this morning I meandered my way to Haymarket -- a major road which lives between Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square.


View Larger Map

But who needs such sights, when there's donuts needin' eatin'... Haymarket being a one-way street, I pushed my bike along the pavement, looking out for the sign for Spar -- that being a chain of corner shops in the UK and Ireland.

Didn't see the Spar sign, but I sure as hell noticed the massive Timmys logo on the window. My heart soaring, I parked and scrambled inside.

It's (obviously) not a proper Tims, more like the ones you find in Esso stations. But beggars can't be choosers, and when it comes to donut options in London, you've got 1) crap and 2) Krispy Creme (ie, Krap).

The coffee comes from a machine, and shamefully, isn't very good. They do sell the tins of take-home coffee, but you could get that from the Australia Shop (which has a corner of canuckistan shiznit -- mmm... Kraft Dinner).

There wasn't much of a donut selection. They had lots of Boston Creams -- my favourites -- as well as chocolate ones with chocolate bits on them, ucky looking white-iced ones with sprinkles, jam-filled naked ones (no sugar? no icing?) and the basic chocolate iced ones.

The icing looks a bit weird, like they're doing something wrong somewhere along the line. And the donuts themselves don't really taste that fresh, though possibly they simply weren't. So not quite on par with walking into a proper Tims, right when they're putting still-warm donuts on the shelves... Still, a sweet, gooey taste of home, washed down with caffeinated awesomeness.

We just need to get slurpees out here, and I'll be happy. Morbidly obese, but happy.

Now for an aside on identity and branding: I realise it might seem stupid to connect a donut brand with nationalism, with "home." It doesn't just seem stupid, it really is. Canadians shouldn't feel patriotic for cracking open a can of Molson's Canadian (if the name wasn't enough, the slogan "I. AM. CANADIAN" and that lovely commercial kinda slammed the idea home).

The idea of Canadian-ness, however it should be defined, shouldn't be defined by marketing departments (even those that created Roll up the Rim to Win). Donuts aren't culture; they're not identity.

That said... I've spent many, many, many hours in Tims, chatting with friends into the wee, wee hours of the morning over an extra-large mocha and apple fritters -- shout out here to Kris, Mary, DarNat and Mel. (I just started salivating at the thought of apple fritters.) To me, Tims is one of those familiar stand-ins, a comforting pill to swallow when you can't have the real comfort of familiar faces and places.

And sometimes, when you're rather far away from home, something as basic as a familiar experience or taste is what you really need to feel a bit grounded and okay again. So it's not so much patriotism as homesickness, I guess.

All that, and donuts too...

Artsy

The Tate Modern has a new installation in the Turbine hall, which (for those of you who have never seen it) is a massive, open concrete space in the former power building.

Previously, it's been home to thousands of white boxes as well as slides. Based on those two alone, you can imagine why I get the urge to go back whenever they have something new.

So this is what they've done this time... they've cracked the floor. Or more precisely, some artist has. It's supposed to represent something about racism and divided society, but I just think it's cool.


As did the hundreds of visitors there. People were generally using it as one big photo prop, taking shots of themselves straddling it, lying down next to it, or jumping over it. Kids treated it like a toy, dancing around it and sticking their feet in the wider bits.


There's a warning sign near the ticket desk, warning people to watch where they step. Art than can hurt you (or, at least your ankles) -- now that's good times.

In other artastic news, Shannon and I went to go see the Turner Prize Retrospective at Tate Britain. The actual Turner Prize is temporarily in Liverpool this year, so they've gathered up a bunch of pieces from the last 23 years and crammed it in a few rooms.

As a show, it's not great. Some pieces seem to have no explanation whatsoever. And, generally, I'm not all that happy with Turner stuff. But there was a pair of Chris Ofili paintings, which are awesome, and the Damien Hirst cows in formaldehyde, which was cool to see, if a bit gross. I really liked this one video, too, by Gillian Wearing of police arranged in a group portrait and then filmed for an hour while they just stand there. Really cool and surprisingly enjoyable to watch.

Post-Tate, Shannon and I went in search of Starbucks -- mmm... gingerbread latte, I love you -- and happened past Trafalgar Square, where there's a new statue up on the fourth plinth. It doesn't have a permanent statue, so they rotate a new one in every 18 months. The last one was a gorgeous statue of a pregnant woman with no arms or legs... I wasn't sure about it at first, but it def grew on me.

Now, there's this:

It's called Model for a Hotel. It looks a bit like cheap shelving from Ikea, but it certainly is bright and colourful, and London can always use a bit of colour. But it does look rather out of place among all the military statues.

Public Art

Free museums are by far one of the best aspects of London. All the art and history and whatever sitting in the National Gallery, the Tates, the British Museum, the V&A, the Natural History Museum -- and all for free.

The National Gallery decided to take it one step further, and put paintings -- reproductions, anyway -- out on the street. They've hung 45 clever copies -- not just the art work, but mocked up frames, too -- in various side streets of Soho and the West End.

So there you are, innocently meandering along St Martins Lane, and you think, hey, I'm gonna go look in shop windows around Seven Dials. You turn up Shelton, and this catches your eye:

Rather stunning. Such a brilliant idea. Whoever thought of it deserves kudos and a pay-raise and even a pony, should they want one.

The "art" has been stuck on London's walls for a week at least now, but none of the pieces we saw was graffitied. One looked like it'd been rubbed by a van, and others were showing the effects of the weather, but only one was missing, likely stolen by drunken thieves, I would guess. Tho maybe it was tourists, claiming one hell of a souvenir...

Aside from the aforementioned Whistlejacket, I also really wanted to see the street version of Monet's Water Lily Bridge. I found it on the map and wandered up Neal Street. I found one painting, but couldn't find the Monet. I looked at the map again and was clearly in the right place, but the painting was missing. It's a popular one, so maybe it had been stolen. But no -- some dude selling Bansky knockoffs (ironic?) had put up his stall directly in front of the Monet-fake, completely blocking the view. On purpose? Surely.

More street art here. I haven't found all 45, but I'm getting there...

BT Tower

I had lunch 158 meters above London yesterday -- try not to think too hard about it, Natalie. I attended a BT-sponsored report launch in the BT Tower, which is rather handily just down the block from my office, and had lunch in their 34th-floor rotating restaurant.

Not my picture.

The cool thing about the invite is that's the only way to get into the tower, as it's been closed since the seventies after a bomb attack. The tower itself is, according to Wikipedia, 188 meters/620 feet tall, if you include all the aerial shiznit at the top.

Also not my photo.

Anyway, it was a nice sunny day, so we could see pretty much all of London. I made the "I can see my office from here" joke a few times -- which is funny only because my office is about half a block away.

I've had some nice views of London lately. Flew in from Prague (that post to come, um, tomorrowish) on Thursday night (very, very tired) and for some reason or another, the pilot took us on a loop over London. Wish I'd had my camera handy, but really, I couldn't have captured it properly -- the whole city, laid out like that, all sparkly and glittery. Very pretty.

Borough Market

I was hungry on Friday. It happens from time to time. I happened to be near London Bridge, which also happens from time to time, and therefore near Borough Market, which is the biggest (apparently) and best (so they say) food market in Europe.

Yes, that is a man in a bowler hat, selling pies,
below a boar's head.

I apologize to everyone who has visited, because I didn't take you here. Even if you're not much of a foodie -- as I am not -- it's a ridiculous mixture of dead animals, tasty food and cliche traditional British Icons.

Didn't see anyone buy any of these,
but a lot of tourists took pics.

Whatever you want to eat, it's available -- from rabbits and pheasants to every kind of fish, including shark. A hundred types of cheese, bread varieties I've never heard of, vegetables and fruit that actually looked fresh. And more pies and tarts and fancy desserts than even I could imagine eating. But me, I had a burger. Because I'm creative that way.

Monkfish, apparently. Mmm, ugly.

One stall had a bunch of different types of fish. The lobsters were still alive, sitting on the ice. A clerk was explaining god knows what to two older ladies, and every few moments he would reach over and pick up an escaping lobster and put it back in its place, only to have it start crawling away again. One of the ladies looked absolutely horrified.

Those are some damn
big/expensive truffles.

During the week they sell to stores and restaurants apparently, but the weekend is set aside for the gourmet items for posh people. And, of course, tourists. I would like to know who walks into a market and walks out with truffles at a price of 1900 pounds a kilo, though.

Whee!

So the Tate Modern has this big massive hall -- the Turbine Hall, as the building used to be a power station -- which they fill with random pieces of art.



It's all random and exciting and crazy and makes me like modern art. They've now filled that room with SLIDES. Slides that go from the fifth floor! Slides! Slides you can slide on! For free! Bloody hell that's cool.

According to their website:

"For Carsten Höller [the artist], the experience of sliding is best summed up in a phrase by the French writer Roger Caillois as a ‘voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind’. The slides are impressive sculptures in their own right, and you don’t have to hurtle down them to appreciate this artwork. What interests Höller, however, is both the visual spectacle of watching people sliding and the ‘inner spectacle’ experienced by the sliders themselves, the state of simultaneous delight and anxiety that you enter as you descend."

We only made it down the two smaller slides, as we were on lunch breaks and you have to get tickets -- free, but with a line up -- for the higher up ones.

And yes, I will be going back. One must keep up with art...

Very exciting. On the downside, all the tour groups and school groups are ignoring the rest of the museum and just hanging out at the slides.

So cool. I really want to go on this last one... how fast do you think that drop would get you going??

Horniman Museum

With a day off and no plans, I decided to go to a south London museum that had caught my eye, and not just because there's a lot of ads for it on the rear of buses, which I tend to get stuck behind while cycling.

No, it has a damn funny name. Horniman! Okay, I'm immature. But childishness is good for this museum.


That's not a comment on the exhibits -- they were, for the most part, pretty high quality. No, the whole place was full of moms (and grandparents) with toddlers and noisy preteen school groups. So immaturity fits right in. As does running around. And screaming. And throwing temper tantrums.

Despite the attendees, the Horniman is a decent museum. The new aquarium is amazing. The music room is really cool, especially this one interactive feature, which lets you listen to hundreds of different instruments.

The natural history bit is a bit weak, especially compared to the Natural History Museum (which is so hella cool, nature pales in comparison). The Horniman's exhibit had some old-school stuff things -- including dogs, yes, domestic ones -- but their growning glory is a full-sized walrus. Compare that to the NHM, which aside from a moving t-rex, has a real stuffed blue whale... a wee bit more impressive than a walrus.



More pictures here.

Joust!

Of all the things I could have done last Saturday in London -- galleries! music! alcohol! -- I chose to go see some weird "family friendly" war-themed exhibition in Chelsea.

Why? It was called Horses in War. (My brain: ponyponyponyponypony, ect.)

Pretty well, it consisted of:

• a few horses, looking bored;
• some stalls we didn't look at;
• a camel and a mule -- neither of which are horses;
• a tank -- also not a horse;
• a beer stall -- thank god;
• jousting.

Tho the last bullet point there only lasted about 7 minutes, it was by far the most entertaining... aside from the beer. Video goodness:

More photos -- of the still variety -- are here.

Front Page

I had a few hours to kill on Friday before heading back to Dan's -- as I don't have a key yet -- so I wandered over to the British Library to see an exhibition on newspapers.

I've previously gone to the Library (and yes, it deserves a capital letter) to do research. It has every possible book you could imagine and then some. Previously located in the British Museum, the collection needed more space and was moved to this new building a few years ago. And keep in mind how massive the BM building is... so yeah, the collection is ridiculous.


It's the kind of library where you look up your selection, write it on a card and then hand it to staff, who will fetch it for you while you wait at a numbered desk. Rifle thru the shelves yourself? Ha, don't be silly! Take the book home with you? Don't be absurd.

So much fun. When I die, if there is indeed a heaven, and I'm somehow allowed in it, I would not be disappointed if it looked something like this library.

Anyway, that's a major digression. I had time to kill, and the Library had a cool and free exhibition called Front Page, which chronicles the past hundred-plus years of British newspapers.


Well-curated, the pages are not done chronologically, but by subject area, so you can compare how a paper in 1895 and 1914 and 1962 and 1989 and 2003 dealt with disasters, politics, sports and -- of course -- royalty. It's all very well explained, and it's cool -- for a news geek, anyhow -- to see classic covers and ones from major events. And, intriguing to see all the different design and layout looks from over the years.

Moreover, it's a celebration of how totally awesome the newspaper is. As the British Library people write in their program -- wonderfully produced in newspaper format in newsprint -- for the price of less than a cup of coffee, you get comment, opinion, fact and entertainment which will make you think. Can't argue with that.


Also in that publication is a note on subeditors, and how they are often derided (by editors and writers alike) at work and ignored/unknown by everyone else. In honor of subs, the exhibition picked a headline they think sums up how creative the best subs are... A Scot on a sports desk wrote this gem after Inverness Caledonian trounced Glasgow Celtic: "Super Caley go ballistic, Celtic are atrocious". Worthy of a pulitzer, that is.

Hotel Nicole, pt 5

Kris and his cousin Maciek have been here the past few days. Kris is on his way back to Calgary -- but for how long?!?! -- after a summer slumming it in Geneva and Germany and Poland and Spain and Rome and Paris and yes I realize I'm mixing cities and countries. Maciek is finishing up a stint working in a Fish and Chips shop in a touristy town in South England, and is heading back to Poland to finish his degree.

Obviously, we've spent much of the evenings here in various pubs, which have sadly proved disapointing. The guys arrived from Poland Sunday night, and we couldn't find an open pub despite being in Waterloo at 1030pm.

And last night, we met up in Soho at a Slug and Lettuce pub for a few drinks with Mike Bowerman (just arrived to do is MA in some finance shiznit) and two Canadian girls Kris knows, Kat and Lauren. (How Kris knows more people in this city is beyond me.)

We were booted from that pub promptly and rudely at 11pm. We found another with a closing time of midnight... and got rather rudely herded from that one, too, as soon as the hour struck, leaving Kris and Mike to chug their Guinness. Terrible.

Thankfully, they have had one nice pub experience, at our local, which has the sweetest, most perfect English lady bartender in the world -- not to mention a very impressive selection of beer.

Not only does this lady -- whose name I shamefully have never asked -- know her beer, she's eager to let you sample them before you buy. Pair that with a sweet but sharp sense of humour, and a willingness to ignore the clock when 11pm approaches, and yeah, I think she wins my bartender of the year award. In the very least, she managed to salvage some of the UK's pub reputation...

84 Charing Cross Road

A few days ago, I bought the book 84 Charing Cross Road, by Helene Hanff, from the used book stalls under Waterloo Bridge on the South Bank. It's really just a series of letters between Helene and the employees of a book shop at the address of the title, where she begins by ordering rare or complete or original-language works, but ends up making friends -- heartwarming, I know.

Helene, living in NYC, idealizes London and Charing Cross Road, but she wouldn't be disappointed (indeed, she wasn't, as she describes in her follow up, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street).

The center-focus of Charing Cross Road -- in terms of book stores, anyway, and that's all that matters, isn't it? -- is Foyles, an indie book shop of chain-store proportions. But it's the smaller, used stores, like Helene's pick, which make for the best browsing. And, they're cheaper.

After finishing 84, I of course needed to find out what is now at that address. I nearly googled it, but then the realization that I was just a 20 minute walk away stayed my typing fingers, and I did my (short) pilgrimage by foot.

From what I could tell -- the buildings are frustratingly inconsistently numbered -- the current tenants of number 84 are either a chain pub called All Bar One or a Pizza Hut/Costa Coffee, either of which are lamentable, but at least the spirit of the rest of the street remains essentially the same. (The internet tells me that the bar is indeed at number 84... you win this time, Google.)

While there is more chain crappiness on the street than there was in Helene's time (just post-WW2), there are still book stores like her Marks and Co, and there are still Helenes about. A lady followed me into Henry Pordes Books the other day and walked straight up to the counter -- manned by two grey haired men in glasses -- and asked if the had the Iliad in Latin. Sadly, they did not at the moment, one said, and this launched a conversation on the sad state of things that people no long read such works in the original Greek and Latin. Helene would be proud.

So to pair the booky theme with some modern techy interaction -- and because I need to revitalize my to-read list -- I hereby request some recommendations. What book do you think I'd like? What's your favourite/top three/whatever?

Aside to Mary: There's an awesome bit on Helene being converted to novels after reading P&P that made me gleeful... I think you'd like it. Have you read it?

Checked out

Before my parents left on Saturday, they/we did the following:

• Monday, got my flatmates drunk and fed in order to thank them;
• Tuesday, wandered around Regents Park and did some shopping and something else which escapes my mushy brain;
• Wednesday, met up with me near Spitalfields, then went on a Ghouls, Gaslight and Guinness walking tour, despite the rain -- which was good for the atmosphere, actually;
• Thursday, in keeping with the ghostly theme, saw Phantom of the Opera;
• Friday, went out for dinner and sat in a pub.
  

Among other things. Since they left, I've slept. I'm tired and I'm sick-- indeed, I'm sick and tired. I can barely remember what we did this week. Compiling the above list required more effort than it should have and I'm not even sure of its accuracy. A month of vacation is tiring. A month of work is tiring. Doing both, simultaneously, in one month, is exhausting.

But the thing is: a month long visit, it's just not long enough.

I want all the people I care about, love and miss in one place and I want to be in that place -- but that's not ever going to happen again, is it? Indeed, that wouldn't happen even if I still lived in Calgary, to be honest.

I remember the first person who "left" Calgary and was therefore to be missed by me: Jolaine, moving to Minot, ND -- of all the places -- for university. And since then, lots of people have moved, travelled, come back and left -- likely -- forever. Mel went to Olds and thankfully -- for me and for her -- came back again. Nat travelled to China, sure, for four months, but four looong months -- just ask Daorcey and the good folks at Boston Pizza. South, to Ottawa, crushing the happy Gauntlet family. Michelle, to Lethbridge, taking the living room furniture with her. James to Halifax and a perfect life. Sonia to Toronto and an MBA. Mike to China. Mary and Esther and even Rob to Edmonton. Kris to who knows where and who knows what. And then hell, I come out here, make shiny new friends. And then they move on, like Ann, who moved back to T.O. from London.

Okay, there might be a joke here about how everyone runs away from me no matter where I go.

But I guess you get used to it. Or more used to it? I remember when Jolaine left, man, did I feel devestated. Bawled my eyes out. I was, I should note, 17 and drunk. On two liters worth of Kiwi-Strawberry Coolers. But it was also the end of the summer after high school, so movie-like, it probably felt significant to my melodramatic teenaged brain.

But then, I still bawl like an idiot. Ask my parents about me crying in the airport. Or ask Nat and Daorcey about me sobbing after their wedding -- again, drunk and overemotional.

I'm not sure I'll ever get used to missing people and I suppose I shouldn't want to. If I didn't miss you lot, and had no one to miss, that'd be quite a bit worse, then, wouldn't it?

One snore over the cuckoo's nest

While I toiled -- toiled, people! -- at work yesterday, 3/4 of my family were off galavanting around London, visiting Buckingham Palace, and touring the National Gallery.

When I was finally released from my drudgery, I met up with them, had a few pints, had dinner in a crypt, and then went to see a play, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, "starring" Christian Slater.


My younger sister seemed a bit excited, as (according to her) she used to have a big crush on (the formerly) hunky Mr Slater, back when he was A-list, and young. Now he is neither, but she appreciated the nostalgia, I'm sure.

My parents didn't appreciate the play, however. While it didn't suck, it wasn't quite captivating enough to keep them awake, and both slept through parts of the first half. My dad even snored.


It wasn't bad, but it wasn't great either. Slater was decent, though I have to admit when his character dies at the end, I really didn't care. And Alex Kingston (formerly of ER) was annoying half the time, and great the other half of the time, which was frustrating. And confusing.

And the guy who played the Big Chief -- he hasn't been in shitty movies or big-name television, so I don't know his name, nor (apparenlty) care to know his name -- did a very funny voice. Kind of like shitty old Westerns, where the injun speaks in toddler-English ("Me Tonto. You ugly.") in a grunty, gutteral tone. I don't think they were being ironic.

It was funny in parts tho, but doesn't deserve the awesome reviews it's had. The best part was Slater at the bows, motioning for the audience to give him a standing ovation... which they (mostly) reluctantly did. Sad. Very sad.

Hotel Nicole, pt2

Yesterday, 3/4 of my family arrived (parents, and the younger sister) for a visit in London... which means I'm camping again, only this time, it's in the living room, because they've taken over my lovely bedroom. Sigh...

I met them yesterday post-work in Trafalgar Square, and we wandered around, had a pub dinner on the Southbank, took a convoluted bus route (oops...) to Oxford Street and Regents Street, and then walked around Picadilly Circus and down to Leisceter Square...

...where everyone's favourite actor, the midgety Scientologist Tom Cruise was working the crowd ahead of the premiere of Mission: Impossible 3. We didn't get to see him with our own eyes; he and his adoring fans were behind tall security fences. We had to watch on a big screen, which is probably good -- who knows, maybe Tommy boy is like the Medusa of Scientology... you look at him directly and start to worship L Ron Hubbard? Or maybe they were worried Cruise would try to escape their Scientologist clutches? Naah...

A very nice man tried to lift me up on his shoulders... you can imagine how well that worked out. I suppose it's a good thing people think I weigh less than I do, but yeah, he could have really hurt himself.