London List Part II
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!