Foto Finish

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.

Update on the Uploads

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!

The Little Differences

Remember that bit in Pulp Fiction where John Travolta is talking to Samuel L. Jackson about the "little differences" between America and Europe, like how they put mayonaise on French fries and you can get a beer in the movie theatres in Amsterdam? Here are a few of the little differences between the States and the UK:


It's autumn now (but we call it "fall" cos it's the time when stuff falls from the trees), and there are horse chestnuts all over the ground. In the UK, they're called "conkers," and they're bigger and heavier than our American variety. Conker tournaments are an old pastime, and one is still held in October on Hampstead Heath. Kids poke a hole in the chestnut and tie a string to it, and then try to smash their mates' conkers with theirs. The last conker hanging on a string wins.


The snail population of the UK is out of control. They are everywhere, and people whinge about how they crawl all over their garden and eat their plants. I told my mate Maggie that we didn't have snails like these in Massachusetts, and she offered to give me some from her garden to bring home. I declined. The ones in this picture are casting their long shadows on a gravestone at St Mary's Old Church in Stoke Newington.


Stinging nettles grow wherever the ground has been disturbed by humans, and graveyards are prime places to find them. These are in Abney Park Cemetery. The leaves have hundreds of tiny hairs on them -- if your skin comes in contact with the hairs, it will sting something wicked. Fortunately, nature has provided a handy antidote -- a plant called dock often grows where stinging nettles are found (but there's none in this picture). You can soothe the sting by crushing the dock leaves and rubbing them on your burning skin.

Of course, there are many other differences -- like French fries are "chips" and potato chips are "crisps" -- but we all get conked on the head just the same when stuff falls from the trees. Happy autumn, mates!

Back in the Tofu Valley

Hey mates! Another long travel day yesterday. I got home about 8:30 p.m. Eastern time, but my body thought it was 1:30 a.m. Exhausted as I was, I woke up at around 4:30 this morning and couldn't get back to sleep. So today, I'm taking it easy -- doing laundry, catching up on e-mail and Facebook, adding links to my blog posts, and dumping all my pix onto my computer.

I still can't believe that I didn't have a drop of rain the entire time I was in London. I'd like to think that I brought the nice autumnal weather with me from New England, but I think the UK was just due for a change in weather pattern after all the rain they'd had in August and early September.

Hope you enjoyed reading about my adventures and my little travel tips on how to do London on the cheap (my total out-of-pocket expenses were £165). One last tip: Your shoes don't matter so much as your socks -- buy good hiking socks if you're going to walk as much as I did. Whatever blister guard^® is, it really does work. I probably wouldn't have gotten the blister on my little toe if I'd been wearing my bestest socks on Saturday.

Watch for my photos as I start to upload them to Flickr.

Open House, Part 2

Well, mates, it's happened. I've run out of steam. I've just gotten in from my last day of adventures, and I am truly knackered. Thankfully, the blisters didn't start to appear until yesterday, and I had a pretty easy (right!) day planned for today. We had 11 index cards for the day, 10 of which were in the City and one in Tower Hamlets (just east of Tower Hill, where Whitechapel meets Wapping). We made it to 9 of the 11, plus one that wasn't on the original list:

• The Daily Express Building (or what was the Daily Express; not sure what's in the building now -- might be Goldman Sachs -- but it's still an Art Deco gem and we were able to see the lobby)
• Apothecaries' Hall (one of the best preserved 17c livery hall interiors; I took some pix of jars that held leeches and various herbs and potions)
• St Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe (Wren's last church in the City)
  
• Painters' Hall (bombed in the war and rebuilt afterwards)
• St Helen Bishopsgate (parts date from 1210 and it survived the Great Fire)
• Bevis Marks Synagogue (built in 1701; it's the oldest synagogue in Britain)
• Old Turkish Baths (late Victorian; now a pizza parlor where we had a nice lunch)
• Guildhall (Grade I listed medieval civic building, dating from the 12th century)
• St Bartholomew's Hospital (founded in 1123; Grade I listed Georgian building where we saw the Great Hall and a staircase decorated with huge canvases by Wm. Hogarth)
• Wilton's Music Hall (dates from 1859; the oldest music hall in Britain and possibly in Europe; if you saw the movie Casandra's Dream, you caught some glimpses of the interior)

Spooner's favorite from today was the synagogue, while mine was Wilton's. I got some pix, but in many places you either aren't allowed to photograph or the lighting is so dim that it wasn't possible.

When we got back to Belsize Park, we went to Budgen's supermarket to get things for dinner and for our respective journeys (Spooner's with some kids from his school to Scotland tomorrow and mine home to the States). Oh joy, oh joy! HobNobs were on sale -- buy one package for 99p and get the second free. Brilliant!

Pedometer reading: 18,700 steps, 7.6 miles

Expenses:

• £5 for my half of our pizza at Ciro's
• £1 for a piece of cake at Wilton's (a bunch of oldies off a bus tour were having tea and cakes in the cafe and I grabbed a piece of ginger cake)
• 99p for two packages of HobNobs
• £9.49 for a bottle of wine for Spooner's household
  

I think I'm ok for money on my Oyster to get to Heathrow tomorrow. Spooner and his flatmates will be leaving before dawn for their school trips, and I'll leave the house around 10 for the long journey home. It's been a really wonderful trip -- I saw a few new areas as I fill in the map of London, I got to spend some time with Flickr mates -- new and old -- whose company I totally enjoy, I saw sites that a regular tourist rarely gets to see, and (I hope) I got a few good pix in the process. I'm especially happy that I got to spend a fair amount of time in the East End (Hoxton, Shoreditch, Spitalfields and Whitechapel) because I missed that patch on my last trip. Watch for the pix to appear on Flickr -- after I rest, play with the cats, and do a mountain of laundry.

Thanks for reading about my adventures. The next post will be from Stateside, when I will tell you all about conkers, snails, stinging nettles and dock. I'll also go back to my older posts and drop in photos and links.