London Exploration, part II

In terms of personal excursions, my first weekend back in London (I typed B-o-s-t before I caught myself there) after two weeks exploring the continent ended up as a Friday night-Saturday morning (with a headache) sightseeing trip. This past week was spent preparing for possibly the worst hell week of all coming up, in which I have four papers and a presentation due in the span of 4 days. Yes, I spent Thanksgiving, the one holiday explicitly centered on food, writing a paper that I didn't finish until tonight. Call me unpatriotic or a sell-out (instead of turkey or even something American I had what can best be described as a teriyaki chicken bowl).

Anyway, Friday night Ben Eng was in town, visiting London from BC for the holiday...well he was in town for a bit. Apparently Ben woke up at 5 to catch a train to Paris, only to come back at 10 later that night. (Only in Europe...). Fellow BCers in London, Andy and Carl also had siblings in town, so as a huge group of Asians (yes, I was with a huge group of Asians) we went out to the Absolut Ice Bar in London. 15 pound entry included a free drink, but in my opinion totally worth the cost (as a one time thing).

If you have never heard of an ice bar, it's exactly how it sounds. Everything in the bar is made of ice, from the stools to the walls to the glasses and the bar itself. The room is kept at a cool -5 degrees celsius, and they give you these sweet parka type things with gloves to keep you warm. To add to the allure of the place, all of the ice is made from water in the Torne River in Sweden and then imported to London.

BC '07 in London rockin the sweet parkas

Ice Glasses on an Ice Bar filled with crazy drinks with names like "Winter Kiss" (yes the drinks were really cold to hold, even with gloves)

Back to reality...the next morning I woke up and was not quite as determined to go explore as with Hyde Park, but I pulled myself out of bed anyway. Also unlike the previous excursion, I wasn't alone this time. My good friend Irfana, of Emory University also studying abroad at LSE, joined me in walking about 15 minutes to Borough Market. Some (John Finnegan) say that my not going to Borough Market until my 10th week at school is unforgiveable, and having gone I totally agree. Essentially it's a higher-end farmer's market, complete with everything from a stall that specializes in blueberries to a stall that specializes in ostrich meat. I've said it before, but if you know me, you know that I love a place like this.

Welcome to Borough Market

So much food, too bad I had a strict budget at this place...I plan on going back when my mom comes next weekend though

Brownies, and there were at least two other stalls that had comparable stacks

That's it for this week. I hope everybody had a great Thanksgiving and a quick shout out to Tristan for turning 21. Between Tristan and Harms the South is rising to power...

As usual if you're looking for more pictures click the My Photos link on the right.

Ramblings

Sorry I haven't been very good at updating this thing regularly, but I'm hitting a two week period of hell academically and adding in two trips on the weekend: Paris last weekend and Amsterdam with Bingo in a few hours.

Some highlights:

-We finished our first half of the basketball season this week with a win against Kent University. The Beavers are 2-3 at the halfway point, and even better, almost everybody has their jerseys! I should start hitting the gym because I'm losing my shot again, but it's getting hard to find time.

The jerseys are nice Nike Dri-Fits, but as one of my teammates pointed out it looks like we're sponsored by an investment bank...

-Upcoming trips include a week-long ski trip with the LSE Ski & Snowboard society to Tignes, a resort in France. Needless to say I'm very excited, but I'm also anticipating that nothing beats a great day at Alpine Meadows in Lake Tahoe.

-My mom is also coming to visit, an unplanned trip that my mom sprung on me a few weeks ago...so for a brief period I will be able to stop coming up with new ways to cook chicken. Shout out to mama Chu for makin the trek out here, and in advance for being the third fan we will have all season at one of our games.

-Also in the midst of planning a post-New Year's trip to Prague for about 4 days.

That's what's on the table for now...so everybody have a good weekend and with that I'm off to Amsterdam.

Paris

Last weekend Emily and Ryan welcomed me into their respective homes for a night each in Paris, so I'd like to start off by thanking them for hosting me. Paris is large, just like London, but every part of it looks exactly the same, unlike London, where I think every little neighborhood has its individual charm.

No pictures to show, but between seeing a solid DJ on Friday night with Em and Josh (another asian!) and a pretty cool band (despite the 5 Euro cover and 8 Euro beer) on Saturday, it was a solid weekend. And of course it's me, so I have to talk about how good the pastries, the croque monsieur, and the crepes were. Although I ate the nutella crepe on Saturday night at 2am way too quickly.

Some random stories from the weekend:

-While drinking beers on the riverbank, Finny, Natalie, Harms, Emily and I realized that nobody had bottle openers. So we all tried to find sharp edges to open our bottles, which were like junior 40s. I hurt my hand trying to hit the bottle too hard, and Ryan proceeded to laugh at me, which I deserved. Then Harms turned to his own bottle and hit it so hard that the entire neck of the bottle exploded...I sipped on my beer and laughed right back. Asians 1, South 0

-Emily and I were taking the bus to the center of the city when all of a sudden the bus driver slammed on the brakes. We figured a car just cut him off and he had to avoid an accident, but when we didn't move for about 5 minutes and all the pedestrians were staring and pointing at the front of the bus, we realized something was up. It turns out he either nearly hit or lightly tapped an old woman in an electric wheelchair. For some reason the old woman refused to move out of the way and let traffic pass through. People were yelling at her to move, but she just sat there yelling back, with what looked like a crying granddaughter in her lap. I don't know if she wanted the cops to come and record the incident or what, but eventually she zoomed off in her chair, which appeared to be turbocharged or something. Crazy Frenchies...

London Exploration

Inspired by a Ms. Emily Bell, and realizing I have much more time on the weekends than I first thought, I have decided to take weekly excursions to the different parts (and there are many parts) of London. Having walked with her and a friend through Regent's Park last weekend, I decided to continue the park tours while the weather's still ok, so yesterday I ventured out to Hyde Park.

First, let me say that the parks here are incredible: huge fields of lush, green grass (area-wise I think Hyde Park is bigger than the BC campus, if not close to it). Weather permitting, there are always people out there playing rugby, soccer or just picnicking, but the parks are so big that you can still find a quiet corner (or field) to yourself. It presents a nice counterbalance to waves of suits crowding the sidewalks of central London.

I spent about an hour just wandering the park, and didn't even make it all the way across. Since walking through a park is pretty self explanatory, I'll just explain some of the pictures to follow.

Panoramic of The Serpentine, a lake in the middle of the park.

What is people's obsession with feeding pigeons? They're just dirty ass birds...and now they carry a potentially catastrophic disease too.

Speaking of birds, the pigeons and ducks here are aggressive as hell. This one duck, which is bigger than some small dogs, was stalking me for a good 5 minutes hoping I would drop some crumbs.

I'm Lewis and Clark with an iPod.


You could walk for hours through this park and not know there is a city of 7 million people outside.

Overall my London exploration began very well: a huge, green park and gorgeous weather, all to the soundtrack of my ipod's choosing, what a great day. Unfortunately the weather is really going to suck soon, so I'll have to move indoors for the weekend excursions. And actually in the next two weekends I'll be going to Paris (Harms, E-Bell what up) and then off to Amsterdam (yo yo Bing), so those will take the place of my explorations for the next two weeks.

On a side note we won our first basketball game last week, by 36 points, a strong team effort all around, and an end to what could have been the longest basketball losing streak of my life. Yes I've been spoiled by playing on great teams...

Guinea Pig

The other day I received a very simple email titled "Decision Making Exercise" from the London Business School offering twenty pounds for participating in a one hour survey. Now not only is twenty pounds a lot of mony (~$35), but I also invite you to examine one aspect of my situation here in London for a moment.

I am paying for my own groceries. That means no eating at home (like in SF) or at the dining hall to save money...or actually to pass the buck to my parents. And I eat a lot, and often...so of course I am utterly excited by this email and I sign up immediately.

Today I went to the LBS to take the survey and found myself in a room smaller than my dorm room, divided into six mini cubicles. Now I don't know if any of you have ever done anything like this, but the entire process is a total mental trip, a constant mental battle between your gut instinct and what you think "they" are trying to examine about you. I scanned the room for cameras, made sure I had cell phone service, noticed how the pencils eerily lacked erasers (who buys those???), all while waiting for the door to lock and a mysterious voice to come over a speaker system telling us we'd been had.

Of course nothing like this ever actually happens, but between the three seasons of 24 I managed to cram in this summer and the desire to have something REALLY interesting to put in this blog, I expected and sort of wanted to uncover an enormous conspiracy. Maybe they were luring British residents in to test a highly unstable bird flu vaccine or something.

The first part of the survey was 40 multiple choice questions of completely useless information, like which animal has the biggest eyes (I checked the Blue Whale, but Giant Octopus might have been right) and when Kellog's invented Frosted Flakes. Of course there was also the question of Jon, Jane, and David's ages if Jon was six years older than the square root of David and Jane's combined age five years ago.

All the while there was something messed up about the questionairre. At first the packet I got only had page one of the survey, and I had to ask for another, not giving me nearly enough time to make a legitimate attempt at answering the questions. But they didn't seem to care. I, on the other hand, wanted my money.

Then in the next exercise my sheet was missing some more pages, leading me to believe that I had been singled out for some type of psychological analysis. I could imagine two doctors watching me through a camera discussing when I was going to get up and ask for a new packet.

Either way, the entire time I was trying to outsmart them with my answers to the other exercises, still suspicious of the entire process, and what was actually being "tested" of us.

After about 50 minutes we were shuffled out of the room to sign a sheet that had none of our names on it, only acknowledging that "Sample 1" had in fact received his twenty pounds. I was happy to be able to drop the mind games, but then I noticed my bill has a huge red X on it.

Just another day in Londontown...