gone living

after a truly excellent time in cambridge catching up with some great friends, i headed down to london today with a 1-way ticket to kings cross and a travelcard.

thanks to my friends and their generosity helping me with contacts when i give 24 hours notice that i'm arriving in a scandalously expensive city without a place to stay, i ended up landing at a friend of a friend's house, where i'm currently taking up temporary residence for a few days until i head out to paris on monday afternoon. my sincere thanks to danny for letting me stay at his flat with only one day's notice and never having met me before, and supplying us with leone 70 rum and coffees, which are a powerful way to begin the way. now i'm off for a night of powerful bank holiday weekend drinking around london with danny, his brother dan, and their friends.

oh, and hello to the UK branch of the suicide girls -- somehow 5% of my traffic is currently being driven from a message board on the suicide girls UK website! since i'm not a member of the site, i can't read the message, but the attention is flattering nonetheless. hi girls!

i've now spent several days in the south london apartment of my two english/italian hosts, where life is a series of delicious homemade meals, drinks, watching movies (including dave gorman's excellent googlewhack adventure and national lampoon's european vacation), going out to pubs, and sleeping in. the hedonism of it all has been simply delightful -- while i've only managed to see one museum, i've had a great time.

the one museum i did make it over to was the tate modern, who have an absolutely stunning collection of modern art. most of my favorite artists (including electronic sign artist Jenny Holzer) were represented, along with several new artists whose work i hadn't seen before. all this and it's free!

in addition, we checked out the notting hill carnival, a cacophonous event complete with ridiculous amounts of drinking... i hadn't seen a block party on that level since halloween in san francsico.

and finally i checked out a play at london's rebuilt globe theater, where i saw the comedy of errors in standing room, where a mere £5 buys you a ticket where you stand directly in front of the stage. you can't beat it for entertainment value, especially if you're an english major who always was a shakespeare fan.

next stop, paris!

somewhere there must be a list of the great parks of the world. and somewhere near the top of that list must be hyde park. from the sinuous curve of the serpentine to the duck-feeding madness of round pond, this park is simply superb. (i'm writing this on a park bench overlooking the italian fountains at the top of the serpentine, having just gotten up from a lazy nap in the sun on one of the lawns.)

during my return to london, i also had the chance to stop by the london branch of trader vic's and enjoy a suffering bastard at trader vics while waiting for my crab rangoon. nothing like an occasional taste of home, and this also was an opportunity to visit another trader vic's in my quest to visit every trader vic's in the world.

i'm staying in a different flat than last time -- instead of the more dynamic neighborhood of streatham, i'm in the rather gentrified yet fairly hip neighborhood of islington just off upper street. my host is a venture capitalist with an amazingly redecorated flat who somehow doesn't mind having me take up space on his sofa for a week, so i've also been exploring the many restaurants, bars, and other locations in the neighborhood with him and his friends.

it's been great to return to london -- with my oyster card firmly in hand, i now finally have the chance to visit many local sights that i hadn't seen before, such as riding the massive ferris wheel that is the london eye, attending an evensong service at westminster abbey and hearing the the choir's voices echo off off of the magnificent vaulted ceiling, roaming through the dinosaur skeletons at the natural history museum (some of which were discovered at the gobi desert locations i'd been to in mongolia!), and seeing the treasures of egypt and mesopotamia at the british museum. in addition, my "regular" bar in the depths of soho welcomed me back with open arms, and it wasn't long before i was deep in conversation with my friends there and throwing down pints of london pride once more.

my wonderful canon powershot sd550 accidentally turned itself on in my jeans pocket this afternoon, which jammed the lens barrel when it tried to extend itself inside my pocket and was blocked by my wallet.

since canon's engineers, unlike the makers of every CD-ROM drive on the planet, never anticipated a situation where the camera's extending lens might be blocked by something, instead of retracting automatically when it hit an obstacle, the camera promptly jammed the lens barrel inside my pocket and broke itself.

i'm going to try and either get the camera repaired in tokyo when i arrive in a few weeks, or buy a new camera and try and sell the broken carcass of my old camera for what i can get for it.

in the meantime, i'm switching over to my 2-megapixel cameraphone for all photos, the totally amazing HTC TyTN smartphone. i just got this gadget a few days ago, and have been having a great time with it. plus it can upload to flickr with shozu via any wi-fi connection! good stuff.

my apologies for the lack of image quality in the meantime, but it should only be a few weeks until you start getting images from a 7+ megapixel camera again!