Insidious' World

A number of friends of mine that blog haven't been, for various reasons, writing much over the past week or so.  On the other hand, I've posted more in the past week than I have in some time.  Is there a conservation of blogging law?  Perhaps a corollary of the conservation of mass law?

Slightly more random note: I always seem to run out of spoons before any other utensil, at a rate approaching 2 to 1.

This isn't really part Two of August Travels yet, but I was going through and tagging some of my pictures from my trip to London, and thought some of these of the London Eye (a.k.a. the Millennium Wheel) were pretty good.  It is the tallest Ferris wheel in Europe.

Pictures from this post are available via Flickr at 20080803 - London. Other sets from this trip are available here.

Note: This was written on my weekend abroad, August 9th, so obviously I'm really bad at keeping my blog up to date.  Hopefully people will think it was worth the wait.

It’s time for another update to my too long ignored blog. This past week I’ve been traveling in the UK on business, but fortunately I’ve had plenty of time for sightseeing along the way. I’m on the last part of my journey on a one day stopover in London where I am playing tourist by myself as my colleagues are on their way directly home. I wanted one more day to sightsee so I moved my flight to tomorrow, Sunday, and booked a room at the Park Lane – usually more pricey than I would go for, but I wanted to be in central London to maximize tourist opportunities and as a plus Captain Kirk managed to get me a good rate. The only downside is that my room wasn’t available when I went to check in (1.5 hour wait), so I dropped off most of my luggage at the bell desk, keeping my carry on with my various pieces of fragile consumer electronics and wandered a few blocks to a Starbucks for a taste of home and to catch up on my blogging (offline at least) before checking in and setting out on my day’s adventures.

I suppose I’m getting ahead of myself a bit. Let’s start at the beginning.

I flew out from Seattle last Friday night on a NW airlines flight to London, arriving Saturday afternoon GMT. By the way, if you ever get the chance to fly business class on someone else’s dime, I highly recommend it. It’s the only way to travel on those long international flights. Again, I’d not pay for it myself, but as long as uncle Bill is picking up the tab (and it is corporate policy to book business class on flights over a certain length), why not? Saturday night, my manager Dave and I wandered around central London a bit, taking in the sights. Or at least I was. Dave has been here a number of times, so he was able to play tour guide. Some of the sights were more notable than others. For example, we found ourselves in Trafalgar Square where a crowd had surrounded a street performer whose costume consisted of what appeared to be an athletic cup held in place with elastic straps which looped over his shoulders. Mercifully, the crowd blocked most of the view but he appeared to be doing something with a ball of some sort. Maybe he was playing cricket. I didn’t go in for a closer look, nor did I take any pictures of this event as I felt certain this might result in being detained for trafficking in pornography.

Despite having this image in our brains, we decided that we were getting hungry and set out in search of an Italian restaurant that Dave had enjoyed on past visits. He knew that it was near the opera house, which we’d passed, but by this time hunger and jet lag had started its numbing affect, so it took us some time to locate the opera house. It didn’t help that at least one of the signs that claimed to point to the opera house was bent and pointing in the wrong direction. Eventually we were successful and we found the restaurant, although I have no idea how Dave found it originally. It was down an old alley with a rather subtle sign at the entrance to indicate that Giovanni’s could be found down the alley. Despite thinking venturing down dark alleys is not a good general survival strategy in most parts of the world, dinner was quite tasty and gave us the strength to find our way back to our hotel.

The next day, Sunday, we had the day to try to get onto local time and sightsee, so we started the day by getting tickets for an open bus tour. I should probably try to set the scene a little, I suppose. The weather was fairly cool when we arrived, and gray. If the temperature has gotten to 70F during this trip, I would be surprised. I brought two pair of shorts that unless it warms up tomorrow will return directly to my closet unworn. When we started on the bus tour, the day was no different, and shortly after pulling away from the curb, it started to rain lightly. Fortunately, I was prepared for this, and the tour really wasn’t too uncomfortable despite the light rain.

If you’ll indulge me for a moment, I’m compelled to offer a short aside on my current surroundings. I’m at a fairly busy Starbucks, and it appears to have started raining in earnest since I’ve sat down. (Another reason I thought I’d wait before wandering too far with my laptop in tow.) I’m honestly not sure if there are any native Londoners here right now, although there are snippets of accents I can hear in the background that sound like London. But there is also some Spanish, Chinese, and others lurking in there. I think there are at least four other nationalities represented here, possibly more. The song playing in the background is a haunting rock ballad that I think may be named Hallelujah (that is at least the chorus), but I’m not sure who the artist is. Maybe I’ll look it up before I post this. I’m struck that I could easily be in a city in a dozen different parts of the world. Is that sad, or is it some testimonial to how places like this make the world seem smaller and more familiar somehow?

Back to touring London: if you only have one day to see a city and they have one available, I highly recommend the open bus tour. Ours, for the bargain price of 15 pounds sterling, took us all over the city, allowing us to get on and off at any one of the stops throughout the day as well as including a river tour on the Thames. We got to see all the sights, Big Ben, Parliament, the Tower of London, the London Bridge, and so on. We even took the river tour all the way out to Greenwich where we were able to visit the Royal Observatory and actually straddle the prime meridian – literally having feet in the West and East hemispheres simultaneously.  By the time we were done tooling around Greenwich and got back on the boat to return to London it was raining in earnest so we opted to take the return journey below the open deck. When we got back to London, we stopped at a Chinese restaurant chain called Wagamama which strives to get food to you as quickly as possible, so they bring it to you whenever it is ready – doesn’t matter if it is a starter or your entrée. It was okay – better than your China Express type food, to be sure, but probably quite a bit more expensive. Everything in London is expensive, in fact. I’ve no idea how people afford to live here.

The restaurant was next to the Tower of London, but it seemed pretty crowded, plus the jet lag was starting to kick in again, so I opted to forgo taking the tour, and instead we headed back to the tour bus and made our way around the city again, working our way back to the hotel.

Palace of Westminster and Clock Tower (a.k.a. Big Ben)	Tower of London from the River Thames

Two other colleagues joined us that night and we went for dinner at a restaurant named Goucho’s, but not the same as the Goucho’s in Seattle. They served steak though. In fact, the only reason I mention it here is how proud they were of the fact they were a steak restaurant. The walls were upholstered with cow hide, as were the chairs. It was just a little strange eating a steak in those surroundings. Glad were at the top of the food chain, that’s all I have to say.

Well, the room should be available in a few minutes and it is looking like this place is getting a little crowded, so I suppose I should pack this in for the moment, head back toward the hotel, and give someone else a place to sit.

More to come…

Pictures from this post are available via Flickr at 20080803 - London.  Other sets from this trip are available here.  At the time of posting, I haven't added details or tags for these photos, nor done any editing of the photos themselves.  Sometime I'll get around to this and make some collections of the good ones...

I've been batch uploading photos to Flickr today and getting ready to start my posts about London and Dublin, but it's going to be a while longer.  With the exception of a few photos from my cell phone, I'm pretty much caught up with photos from previous trips.  Well, I haven't added tags or descriptions, but they're up on Flickr.  Tags and descriptions can happen another day.  Check them out at http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelkimbro/sets/.

I'm uploading the last batch - my photos from the aforementioned trip.  There are 391 of them, and most of them are probably crap.  I'm a big believer in shotgun photography.  I'm pretty happy if five percent of them turn out to be okay.

While you are waiting on that, here are some photos from when H was visiting from Denver last month.  H, Anne, JB, and I met up for lunch and wandered down to the Ballard Locks to enjoy the sun and watch the boats.  We waited a long time to watch them fill up - kind of anticlimactic, really, but it was a nice day and it was definitely fun to spend time with friends. 

Patiently waiting for Anne	H watching the boats pull in
JB wondering why we are watching boats	They really pack them in...

I was taking pictures with my cell phone that day.  Wish I'd had a real camera.  Somehow I never did manage to get a picture of Anne, but she was there, really.

I've not gotten around to finishing up my blog about my San Francisco trip, so here it is.

After getting our bearings at a local tourist bureau, we headed up to Calistoga to go to the Sterling Vineyard.  I wish I'd brought my camera, but forgot it when I headed down to San Francisco.  The vineyard is accessible by a tram ride up the hill.  Normally, I'm sure the view was astounding, but we had a bit of haze from all the wildfires (though none were in site of this area).  They have a very nice self-guided tour at Sterling and we got to see quite a bit on the process of making wine, even including how the barrels are made.  We tooled around and sat in the tasting room long enough for one of us to be convinced to join the wine club.  It wasn't me - I've spent far too much on punishment CDs/DVDs from Columbia House to get involved with a wine club.  I was tempted to buy a bottle, but I still have plenty from the last Woodinville Wine Passport weekend.

Next, we headed to our second, and as it turned out, final winery of the day, St. Clement.  It was a much smaller operation than Sterling, but the wines were just as tasty.  One of the highlights from our tasting was an Oroppas, a varietal I was unfamiliar with.  I'm not sure which vintage they were pouring (I should have taken notes), but I almost bought a bottle.  It seemed to me that although St. Clement was the opposite of Sterling in terms of size, they were its equal in terms of the quality of the wine.  Plus, they weren't trying to get anyone to join a wine club.

Finally, we ended our day at the Pizzeria Tra Vigne.  Tasty pizza and a nice way to top off our wine tastings.  Next trip, I'm definitely going to plan to hit a few more wineries, but this was a fun visit and gave me ideas for the next one.

Okay, I know that I post only sporadically, and much of what I have to say here is probably pretty boring, but it's been over a week and only two people have commented on my last post.  Should I just call it quits?