Finally, I can say that I've finished uploading my photos from London. 287 of them, to be exact. It's been a chore, but I've enjoyed revisiting all these spots as I edited, uploaded, tagged, and geotagged everything. And it's been lovely to receive comments from my mates on many of them. I'm particularly chuffed when a Londoner tells me that I've captured something in a new way, or introduced them to a place they haven't been. By the end of this trip, I no longer felt like a tourist. I'm not sure if I'm an honorary Londoner yet, but I'm closer to that than to tourist, that's for certain.
There might be a few more photos that I'll upload and post to Guess Where London, but my Flickr set is essentially complete. If you haven't looked at it for a while, give it another look and let me know what you think.
I imagine that my four loyal readers must be wondering what's up with the promised pix. Well, I never got around to adding any to the posts I wrote from London, but I can report that as of this morning there are 167 photos in my London, Sept 2008 set on Flickr. (You can see them flash by in the wee slideshow on the right side of my blog.) I've been trying to upload in chronological order, more or less, and I'm now up to mid-day on Friday. You'll see tons of graffiti, several boot scrapers, and lots of things from my walks east and west along the Thames. The shots from Friday afternoon will be more street art, and then it will be All Things Architecture from London Open House Weekend. This is taking me for-fucking-ever because I'm meticulously -- ok, compulsively -- tagging and geotagging everything. The cool thing about that is that you can see where I've been on the map of London. That link takes you to a yahoo map, which is good for the overview but pretty much rubbish on the detail. Underneath each individual photo I've given a link to Google maps, which let you really see down to the street level. I was actually able to locate the two trailers (caravans) I photographed near Surrey Water.
So, check out the pix, leave me some comments, and be patient as I finish this monumental task. I should be done in another week or so. Cheers! ![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=10ddbea1-7c5b-47d5-b2cc-61e340fef118)
How did I ever manage before the internets, especially Web2.0? My social life -- minimal though it still is -- would have been nonexistent. I would have spent hours in the local libraries, or a fortune on books. Instead, all my needs are met while sitting in my study wearing my jammies or slacking off at work. I still think that LiveJournal and MySpace are useless wastes of bandwidth, but I've softened my tone on social networking considerably. Here's what I've been up to lately, particularly stuff related to planning the April trip to the UK:
- Put info about my mini-meetup to volunteer at Southbank Mosaics (see previous post) on Upcoming. I've now got three other Flickr mates who will be joining me, and a couple of maybes.
- While I was noodling around Upcoming, I learned about a Flickr meetup at Borough Market on the Saturday when I'm there. I'm watching that event.
- On Ravelry, I read a while back about a yarn shop called I Knit -- it's the UK’s only yarn store with a licensed bar and late night knitting 5 nights a week. When I first read about the shop, it was located in the uncharted territory of South London somewhere. I just found out that they've recently moved to Lower Marsh Street, Waterloo, which I already have on my itinerary as there are several funky vintage stores there. I need to buy some metric size needles that aren't available in the US.
- Used the 24 Hour Museum and London is Free sites to find out about exhibits and other things going on while I'm there.
- Added Londonist and Diamond Geezer to my blogroll on Bloglines. I read them every day to find out about events, restaurants, politics, crime, etc.
- Put a seed in the brains of other members of the Guess Where London group on Flickr to schedule an all-GWL pub meet while I'm in town. Someone else in the group has found a venue and the discussion thread is full of people's replies that they're coming (and, sadly, several who will be out of town).
- Researched potential destinations for a daytrip with two of my Flickr mates who I met last fall. They're letting me choose where we'll go -- I'm thinking of Kent, to the seaside in Whitstable if it's nice weather or to Canterbury if it's not.
- Listened to podcasts on London Walks and followed the routes on Google Earth or aboutmyplace. I've taken notes on a couple of walks that I might do (Wapping, Islington, Chelsea and Clerkenwell). It would be really dangerous for me to walk around London with my mp3 player plugged into my ears. I already have too much of a tendency to walk into traffic. I also joined the London Walks group on Facebook so I can keep up with new info.
- Speaking of maps, I installed the Minimap Sidebar extension for Firefox. It's really useful because it lets you open a sidebar to find a location in Google Maps without leaving the webpage you're on.
- Started a Flickr group for London Reflections. I'll try to concentrate on taking reflection shots for the pool, along with all the hundreds of other photo ops that are out there.
- Used Google Documents for my spreadsheet of all the places I want to go, sorted by day to make an itinerary, with address, URL, nearest tube station or bus route, hours and other info.
- Imported my events from Upcoming into my Google Calendar.
- Used Google Notebook to clip things I found on the web for future reference.
- Checked rail schedules and fares on the National Rail website.
One disappointment is that Transport for London won't let you top up your Oyster card from outside the UK. It would be so much easier if I could transfer money to my card before I leave home. I've used the Journey Planner a lot, however.
If any of my three or four faithful readers finds this stuff useful, please friend me on whatever social networking sites we both use. I need all the friends I can get.
Two of my photos have just been chosen to be on websites in the UK. I won't get paid for either one (professional photographers probably look on this as scabbing by amateurs who give their stuff away), but I will get photo credit -- with my meatspace name on one and my nom de Flickr on the other.
The sculpture above, called You (a.k.a. Red Man) is by Antony Gormley and it sits atop the extension on the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm. Spooner and I were coming home from a long day of many adventures, starting with the Pearly Harvest Festival (below), including the Charles Dickens Museum, the Inns of Court (but not the Temple Church because it was closed), St Bride's, St Paul's, etc., etc. We took the tube back and got off at Chalk Farm, one stop before Belsize Park where Spooner lives, to look for Banksy's French maid. I happened to look up and see this sculpture and then had to get Mr. Fast Walker to stop and wait while I took a pic of it. I only got one shot, and it was a good one. Right now, there's a massive exhibit of Gormley sculptures, with 31 of them placed on the tops of buildings in central London and Southbank, and there are exhibits of his work at the Hayward Gallery and the Wellcome Trust. The 24 Hour Museum website has an article about Gormleys on public display in the UK -- the author asked me for permission to include this photo and I said yes. It's a dot org, and a website that I use as reference often, so I feel fine about the lack of compensation.
This photo of the Pearly Society's Harvest Festival is going to be included on a website called Schmap. They do guides of different cities, and this will be on the Soho and West End events page of the London guide. I recognized names of some other London Flickrers among the photo credits, so I figured it's probably ok to let them use my photo without compensation. This one is credited with my Flickr name (Trailerfullofpix). Anyway, as the Brits would say, I'm chuffed.
It was a year ago today that I created my Flickr account, just after giving myself the digital camera for my birthday (I'm still accepting this year's birthday greetings until the end of this week -- hint, hint). Here's a snapshot of my stats as of today:
Number of photos: 338
Number of sets: 13
Number of contacts & friends: 23
Number of groups: 29 (Guess Where London is my favorite)
Views of my photostream: 4930 (My goal for my anniversary was 4800)
Flickr inspector number: 1483 (I'm not entirely certain what this means. It's some kind of relative number based on your photos, views, comments, favorites, etc.)
If you haven't looked at my photostream in a while, check it out. Leave me some comments if you're so moved. If you have a Flickr account, add me to your contacts and I'll do likewise.
...no matter how long you stay in London, London will wear you down and wear you out. London is intractable, insuperable, inexhaustible; the tourist is hapless, cowed, puny, and ultimately penniless. -- Joe Queenan, Queenan Country
I'm starting to plan my fall trip to London. It will be the third time I've been there. The first was a one-day lightning-round on a double-decker tour bus. I got off a couple of times to see a few sights and some less-popular (i.e. no queues) museums -- The Museum of London and the Design Museum. I discovered Postman's Park all on my own, WAY before anyone had seen Closer or heard of Alice Ayres. On my second trip, I was there for a week and saw a combination of tourist traps (Windsor Castle, the Cabinet War Rooms, the National Portrait Gallery) and low-cost, no-cost oddities like the Museum of Tea and Coffee, John Soanes Museum, the Geffrye Museum (housed in an old alms house), and took a trip to the end of the Victoria Line to see the William Morris Gallery and an old workhouse museum in Walthamstow.
The Queenan book is the first thing I'm reading as I begin my research for the upcoming trip. It's rather funny, but the thick overlay of crankiness that he's trowelled over everything is a bit much. He recounts his day trip to Liverpool, where a cabbie drives him around to see various houses and clubs associated with the Beatles, while avoiding anything to do with Sir Paul who both Queenan and the cabbie agree is overrated, treacly and full of himself. The cabbie tells Queenan of his friendship with John Lennon who was his best man at his wedding. Queenan has a fabulous time, but his bubble is burst when he returns to London and learns from a friend that the cabbie's stories couldn't possibly hold water. Quickly recovering from the disappointment, Queenan realizes that, truth or no, it was still a great day with marvelous company. The lesson here is this: England is a land of a thousand tales, many of them contradictory, apocryphal, or downright lies. This doesn't matter, however. Tourists need only find the stories they love, then immerse themselves and savor the experience. Who cares if it's shite!
Here's what I'm thinking of including in my itinerary:For further research, I'm planning to order a couple of books of walking tours, and I've joined the London-alt Flickr group (lots of interesting pix there). I'm open to all suggestions, tips, advice, etc. Leave them in the comments, okay?
