Back with a few more:

• Kew Gardens is right in the flight path of Heathrow Airport, so the whole time I was walking around airplanes were flying overhead. I took several shots trying to get the airplane right in the top third of the frame. Everytime I take a picture of an airplane landing, I think of the cover of Heatmiser’s Mic City Sons.
• The thing I like best about Kew is the sight lines. The garden is built so that you can stand at one point of the triangle and see a monument at the end of another. The pagoda stood at the end of the Palm house. Great stuff.
• Apparently, Sharpies only recently made it to the UK. I don’t know if that’s totally bullshit or not, but that’s what the guy at SoHo Square told us when he was trying to get us to take some pens from him and write on some rabbit-like creature in the park as a promotional thing. If that is true: How weird.
• The Oyster card, London’s version of the Metrocard, is quick, efficient, and easy to use. It’s thick, like a credit card, and has a no-contact scanning mechanism, two things that make it better than the Metrocard. That does make me wonder if there’s RFID in them, but for the convenience, I was pretty stoked.
• The Tube posts accurate times at every station! That’s mass transit at its best.
• We drank cask ales every night, mostly at The Fitzroy in Bloomsbury. Their bitter was good, and cost £1.78 for a royal pint. It wasn’t hand pumped, but it’s cheaper than I can get in Brooklyn, which is saying something for London. The Fitzroy is a pub that a bunch of writers used to hang out at, one of which was Virginia Woolf, I think.
• The only thing I’ll say about the conference: Great stuff, for the most part. I was wary that the Open Access people were going to get into a fight with the Traditional Publishing Model people.
• I almost forgot: Most regrettable purchases! I had to buy an ethernet cord at PC World to get Internet in my room, and it ended up costing me £15. Not only do I have about a million of those at home, but I also could have bought one here for half a quarter of the price. I mean, $30 for an ethernet cord is excessive.
• Second place: My new digital camera. The only thing I regret about this, is that I paid double the price for what I could have bought it for in the states. But so it goes — The camera is actually pretty great, and was necessary as I left mine at home (checklists only work if you actually check stuff of them). I spent the first weekend in London without a camera, and I tried to draw stuff I thought was interesting, but then remembered that I am horrible at drawing, nor did I have the time or inclination. I thought about writing about it instead, too, but the sentiment was the same. Too time-consuming!
• I didn’t get a full English breakfast until my last morning there, which is a shame, because I would have been scoping out different places for the best. Ours was good, I just love having such a hearty and savory meal first thing in the morning. Fried bread sounds delightful, but we didn’t find such a place. Instead, our sausage was a little cold in the middle, but everything else was tasty enough.

That’s about it. I’m relying mostly on pictures to remember stuff to talk about, and I’m through them all. I have all of our France pictures to comment on though, and maybe if I remember a thing or two there about London, I’ll interject. So: France, soon!

Doing daily reviews is just asking for boring filler. Lists are perfect for your (my) diminishing attention span.

• I ate a lot of sandwiches, including an egg sandwich on my first day. When I ordered it, I said, “egg salad,” the guy behind the counter said, “How about just egg?” I found £1 sandwiches the next day, and I think I also ended up getting egg, but this time with ham. I don’t know why I was so fascinated with egg while I was there. Now that I think about it, I think it was rather bland.
• (Aside: I just saw a commercial with Mates of State singing on stage, but it was for AT&T — I don’t know what they have to do with wireless)
• I didn’t have one burger my entire time I was in London and France. I had one Friday, though, from Schnack.
• I kept buying stuff and taking pictures of things that I didn’t think I would see in the States, but now that I’m walking around, I keep seeing them. Example: Pim’s orange cookies, Yorkie “Not For Girls” Chocolate.
• We saw some guy called the Lindo Man at the British Museum (which, like all the great museums there, is free). Lindo Man was bashed in the head, garroted, and thrown into a bog. His body was preserved by the bog and you could see the expression on his face and where his head got crushed. It was amazing and grotesque, just the kind of thing you like to see in museums.
• Among several interesting things I learned at Oxford, I learned that JRR Tolkien was the man responsible for revising the words in the “W” section during the first revision of the Oxford English Dictionary. Also, while the term “security blanket” was not coined by Charles Schultz, he is credited with the inspiration for the word.
• I ate Indian food while there, but not as much as I would have liked. It was good, though, which also makes me think that, boy, I love Indian food.
• One night, we met an Irishman that appointed himself our tour guide for London — Specifically Camdentown. He introduced us to roadies and falsely claimed the origin of San Miguel beer was Spain (I’m pretty sure it’s a Filipino beer). He was nice enough, except when he wasn’t, because he had a penchant for messing with people. Still, without him, we wouldn’t have met the Heavy Metal Italian, the Drug-Seeking Brazilian Rock ‘n’ Roller, or the Surfing German Documentary Filmmaker. He also antagonized a Brit by asking him, “Did you just get off of work, or is that a style?” referring to his bright red Sgt. Pepper doorman’s jacket. I heard he was in the circus or some such nonsense. In any case, that guy deserved to be antagonized, anyway. We were invited to a party the next night after our eventful evening at the World’s End. We didn’t go.
• I wrote a postcard to my mom, and it said something like, “They don’t let you walk on the grass at Oxford. Unless you’re Harry Potter, I guess.”
• They have these lawn chairs at Hyde Park that you can sit in, but if you sit in them too long, some guy comes up to you and tells you that you have to pay to sit in them. You don’t really have to pay him, you just have to say that you’re not gonna sit there anymore. I saw a couple of old people get pretty mad when they were asked to pay. They should just bring their own chairs, I think.
• Also about Hyde Park: People love skating there. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many people on skates. Rollerskates. They put cones up and everything. I wanted to see people dancing on them, sort of like that movie with Nick Cannon. What was that called? Oh, yeah: Roll Bounce.
• We were at 70 Whitehall, the building next door to 10 Downing St., when Tony Blair was on his way out. We saw the changing of the guard from a building within the courtyard, and could see the press and media camped out near where Blair was to exit. When we walked through, we saw people gathering around TVs, watching what was happening right outside the door. It reminded me of all the scenes in the West Wing, when they watch press conferences and everyone flocks to the sound of talking heads. A pretty historic occasion, and we were lucky to be able to watch it happen first-hand.
• At the National Archives, an obviously crazy man was in the cafeteria talking to his soup and crackers. We thought maybe he would deliver us a lecture later.
• Kew Gardens is humongous, and wandering it by myself while it was raining was a fantastic experience. I probably took way too many pictures of plants, but I think that’s okay. I couldn’t have walked it more perfectly, though, alternating sunshine with rain with vast grass fields and greenhouses, respectively.

That’s all for now, I will be back with more!

Everyone,

Meet my new favorite song.

[audio:July42004.mp3]

That’s Jason Anderson, the song is called “July 4, 2004.”

And here’s the bonus YouTube vid.

So, yeah, I got back on Sunday and am still fighting with jet lag, which really isn’t that bad, it’s just that I have a hard time staying awake after 8 or 9, which is a problem since we wanted to see a movie last night, but we both fell asleep. I woke up at 1:30 wide awake (but not really, as I fell right back asleep) and then woke up hi morning a around 6:30 without much effort.

Sorry about not updating; you know how it is. You wake up, and the next thing you know, it’s midnight and you’d rather just go to sleep than blog about it. But there’s lots of pictures! I’ll narrate or drop list-form recaps since that’s the only way I can write anything these days.

I just finished the last day of our conference and thus the end of my course here at University College of London. Oxford seems like a hell of a long time ago now, but it’ll probably be good for me to think about it a little bit at a time to decompress.

Note: I’m actually in France now, I never finished this post, and am not getting close to doing it. And now, wi-fi is going to get even more sparse, so I figured I’d just get this up, as complete as it is going to get for now. More after the jump.
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