London Day 7

(This is a part of a 7-day series about my trip to London.)

Date: February 17, 2008

My last day in London started pretty early because I'd gone to bed very early the night before (I think around 8pm). I woke up around 5 or 6 and couldn't fall back asleep, so I watched movies in bed (with headphones, of course).

Something weird happened around 6:30, which actually happened the day before, too. At 6:30am - A.M. - one of our roommates, an older woman got up, and opened up all the windows. Opened them up by physically opening them to let the cold - COLD - freaking air in, and opened them up to allow sunshine to shine into the room. WTF! This was incredibly inconsiderate -- especially given that the rest of the people were still sleeping (and clearly intended to continue sleeping), and that she'd never asked anyone. >.< I was quite put off by the act, and it also clearly woke several of my other roommates up, but we were all too tired/lazy to do anything about it. So, another inconsiderate act goes unpunished and uncorrected. Lame. The funny thing is that I bet she thought she was helping us out by helping to wake our lazy butts up. What a load.

After checking out, I set onto the streets of London for the last time. I wandered through shops for most of the morning, ending up at the National Gallery again. After a while, I began to get hungry, and happened by a kebab shop right around that time. To this point, I'd thought that while a kebab might be nice, I wasn't going to be too impressed by a shish-kebab (meat on stick), since the food in London (in general) hadn't been too good. HOLY SMOKERS was I wrong. The kebab, it turns out, was more of what we call a shawarma, or a donair (not really sure what the distinction is exactly), and was amazing. Kind of a curry sort of a flavour, and undeniably awesome. Being lamb, too, also helped. ;-)

The trip to the airport was pretty interesting. The tube was partially broken/in service that day, so I needed to take a detour. The detour involved heading to a weird random station, and then taking the high speed train to the airport. I was pretty excited about this until I saw that the signage leading from the trains to the actual terminals were not nearly as good as the signage from the tube. Basically, the signs in the underground subway give you hints about which Heathrow Terminal you should go to based on your airline and destination. No such signs existed at the train station. So there I was, trying to decide whether to stay on the train to go to Terminal 4 (let's say), or to get off and try to get to Terminals 1-3. I decided to go with the latter since that would give me a 75% chance of getting it right (of course, I didn't print out my e-ticket since the Internet cafe didn't have a printer, and I didn't think to copy it down -- stupid me). As I'm walking, the train zips off, and then I see there's another decision point: Terminal 1 is left, Terminal 2 is right. What happened to Terminal 3?! Uh-oh. I turned left (Terminal 1), since that sounded like a good choice, and one that I would direct loser tourists to. After a 15 minute walk (during which time the only thing I could think was, "Do I have enough time to walk the other way to go to the other terminals if necessary?"), it turned out I'd guessed right. Hallelujah!

Things did not look good when I got onto the plane and tried to get to my (aisle) seat. To make a long story short, the fellow that I had to interact with was an elderly man who didn't speak much English, but did a good job of taking up a lot of room in the middle seat, and convinced the both of us that we'd have to sit next to each other through the entire trip. At take-off, it finally became clear that he was supposed to be at the window seat, but preferred to be close to the aisle for bathroom access. I acquiesced, and traded seats. This turned out to be my downfall, not because it limited my access to my hand luggage and the bathroom (though that was an unfortunate inconvenience), but because he ended up getting my lactose-free meals! The first time the flight attendant came with the lactose-free meal, he of course put it in front of the old man asking, "Special meal?" To which the man responded (of course), "Yes, food!" Being the quiet guy I am, I didn't raise a fuss. This turned out to be my undoing as my lactose-containing meal ended up making me extremely gassy for the rest of the trip, and later got me sick (though fortunately I was home by then). Moral of the story: try to be born with a large bladder and not have a lactose allergy.

The last great story of my trip was the events surrounding customs. Somehow, Customs Canada apparently gets no notice of when flights get in to Vancouver. Somehow, YVR doesn't communicate that -- even when seven international flights arrive at YVR at the same time. This ended up as a 2hr wait for Customs at YVR. It didn't help to see people cutting into the line at random places. "Welcome back home," indeed.

London Day 6

(This is a part of a 7-day series about my trip to London.)

Date: February 16, 2008

I'm on my second last day here in London, so I won't spend time to write a report on today right now -- I'll save that for when I'm in the airport tomorrow...

Here are some snippets:
- free concert hall
- waiting in line
- missed theatre dilemna
- food that is hard to eat
- a good night's rest

---

Date: Feburary 18, 2008

So my 6th day in London isn't nearly as fresh on my mind any more. It would be interesting to try to figure this out from an hourly perspective given all the time zone changes and stuff, but suffice to say, it's a hazy mess now. It's a good thing I put down an outline. That always helps.

It was a bright, clear day out, but very windy and very cold as the day before. I knew it was my last day in London, so I wanted to make sure I got in time to enjoy the last few hours of my stay, and to see things I hadn't seen before. Each day in London, I kind of started the day near Trafalgar Square, Embankment and Leicester Square, because it was, as far as I could tell, the center of all things London. Lots of the theatres were centered around the area, it had lots of museums nearby, and of course, the place where I bought internet access from was nearby. ;-) As a consequence, I actually spent a lot of time killing time in the area, going to the National Gallery even for brief trips if I had to kill an hour or two. As you can imagine, it wasn't hard to find something interesting to look at inside!

My main goal for the day was to see the show with Jeff Goldblum and Kevin Spacey (pretty famous actors). I figured this should be a pretty manageable goal since I had nothing else to do. The thing I didn't figure into this equation was that it was a Saturday, and that I really should have considered how busy a weekend might be. The streets, which were already pretty busy on the regular weekday, were COMPLETELY PACKED. It was like nothing I've ever seen before in my life. Imagine the Richmond Night Market, but that rather than having all that human traffic focused in a small area that it was ALL OVER THE PLACE. Quite frankly, it was suffocating. It was so bad that I didn't actually want to go to try to get tickets, but I buckled down and headed to the ticket booths in Leicester square.

HOLY COW. The lines were waaay too long. None of them even said anything about the show either, which made me anxious: what if I waited in line, but when I got to the front was laughed out of the booth because they didn't sell tickets to that particular show?! I checked the time: I had two hours before the show. With that, I decided to walk to the theatre to get the ticket.

The walk was a pretty long one (a bit longer than I expected), but I did walk through Waterloo station, which is cool because it's featured in Bourne Ultimatum (a recent movie). I actually recognized large parts of it (given I'd just seen the movie), which was a plus -- I would have been pretty annoyed if I didn't recognize anything while being there physically.

When I got to the theatre, it turned out that the show was already sold out. I had to wait in "Refunds" line, which is the theatre's way of scamming even more money out of people: basically, if you can't make it to the show, you can return the ticket(s), but get charged some sort of fee. The theatre then turns and walks to the front of the theatre where they can sell it for full price to the rest of us chumps. Highly lame, but no one in our lineup was complaining! We all wanted in! Unfortunately, waiting for an hour didn't help -- the show started, and I didn't get in. Heck, I was still eighth in line when the show started. The line had shrunk by about four people or so while I was there. Moral of the story: buy tickets to theatre shows in advance -- especially if you plan on going on a Saturday. The real kicker of the story is that I actually had a chance to buy the tickets on Thursday (I'd checked in to see if any were available), but at the time I didn't buy them. I'm not even really sure why, which is what is so infuriating.

I spent some time at a random music hall (which was on the way back by foot). I sat there collecting my thoughts and writing some notes that had occurred to me over the past few days. While I was there, some random free concert started up! It was a piano recital of sorts, and the music wasn't very good, but while I was there, I was impressed with the space: a very large open area that was clearly free for everyone to be in, and to enjoy. Further, a free concert. How about that?

Heading into the evening, I figured I'd go back to the hostel and get a good night's rest. I knew the flight back (the next day) would be long, plus the flight didn't even start until 5pm, so it was going to be a long long day. While I wasn't particularly hungry, I decided that I should get some food. I hit up a Chinese street vendor (the only one I'd spotted the whole time I was there) that sold chinese buns and chinese donuts (long sticks of fried dough). While I was quite pleased with myself, the chinese donut turned out to be rather terrible. There's a saying in Cantonese that you use when food is really gross: "lahn sick." Literally, this translates "difficult to eat" or "hard to eat". And, quite literally, that described my experience with the chinese doughnut: rather than being crispy and soft, it was hard as a rock. Hard to eat.

I hit the sack early, trying to watch a bit of "When They Were Kings" before I fell asleep. I knew it was time to go to sleep when I kept drowsing off during the more boring bits. Jetlag finally caught up with me.

London Day 5

(This is a part of a 7-day series about my trip to London.)

Date: February 15, 2008

Today was c-c-c-cold. I have no idea how cold, but it was cold to begin, and there was a lot of wind, which made it even colder. Of course, it was also today that I chose to take a long walking expedition, thereby getting the chance to experience it full-on.

I spent the day walking across and then along the south side of the Thames river. I probably wouldn't have done this except that my maps made it look like a much briefer walk than it ended up being. During my walk, I passed by several famous sites: Tate Modern Museum, London Bridge, Tower Bridge, Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, City Hall and also the Design museum (not really famous, but important for me). Across the water, I could see St. Peter's Cathedral (huge) and Towers of London (visited this last time).

My visit to the Tate Modern lasted about an hour and a half. This is about how long it takes to walk through the place when you don't really enjoy much of it. As it turns out, I'm really not a big fan of so-called "modern art"; however, I can appreciate some of the sentiment and thinking that goes into these pieces. For many of these newer pieces, the importance does not really lie in the accuracy of the depiction itself; instead, the value of the work often lies in the technique/method that was used combined with the philosophical underpinnings of the work. There is therefore a much deeper focus on societal and artistic context in which the work was created. The Tate Modern, because of its size and ability to show a broad range of works, is able to convey much of this context to the viewers. While I am still not an expert in art history, I feel as though walking through the museum gave me a greater appreciation for a lot of the more modern work.

I was touched a by a few of the so-called "minimalist" works. I was particularly attracted to the philosophy of these guys, "It is what it is, it is nothing more." I can appreciate that, because it means I'm not missing anything, and I don't have to feel too stupid.

One of the pieces that really caught my eye was by an artist who spent six weeks working as a chambermaid at a hotel. She documented what she saw in the rooms in a room-by-room fashion, making inferences about the absent occupants based on the room contents or layout. She also took pictures of what she saw. Kind of creepy, but I really appreciated the piece. Remember: it is what it is.

After spending time in that museum, I headed toward the Design Museum. I wasn't really sure what I'd see, but I have often thought that with my interest in interface design, I still do have an oblique interest in all things that are design. It turns out I was right -- most of the things in the museum were of interest to me except for the fashion area which I simply could not appreciate (I think this part of my brain is somehow deficient of brain cells). It was also here that I experienced the first real incident of a stranger helping me for no good reason whatsoever.

Upon arriving, I was dismayed to discover that there was a £8 admission fee. I was further dismayed to see that there was a £5.5 admission fee for students, but that I'd left my ID card at the hostel! DOH! I debated for about 5 minutes whether to actually head in: on the one hand, I had actually done a good job of saving money thusfar, and so didn't want to break that trend; on the other, I'd walked for so long in the cold to get here, and the thought of going back outside was not at the top of my list of "fun things to do". Ultimately, I decided to go in. What's £8 compared having to relay the story that I really am cheap? While I was waiting in line, a random guy came up to me and offered his ticket (he'd just come out, I think)! The stars have aligned! It was an unbelievable feeling. I haven't felt so much gratitude toward another in a long time! I must remember to repay this favour to another stranger. Actually, a part of me wonders whether I got this ticket because my giving a stranger a used parking ticket/pass back at UBC actually set off a chain of "kindness" events leading to yesterday. It's funny to think of those kind of things.

The next thing in the evening was to meet up with Spencer. In spite of all the things that has happened to this guy, it turned out he was in pretty good spirits. This was really good to see. We ate dinner at a Korean BBQ place (where they cooked the food for you rather than your cooking it yourself), and ended up wandering the streets for two to three hours afterwards. It was actually quite enjoyable. Spencer's a really funny guy -- sometimes it's hard to believe he's making this stuff on the spot, but I guess that's the mark of a clever guy.

It turns out, for example, that the place he's staying at was built in 1880. "Almost older than Canada," he proclaimed. Kind of hard to believe, but true. The houses are built as a whole block of houses attached together, which means that they rarely ever get torn down and rebuilt -- it would displace too many people, and coordinating that would be insane. One of the implications of this practice is that "hotels" are often just converted homes. Most are not the tall buildings that we typically see in North America -- they're just old houses that the hotel company bought. Thus, the old stuff in the center of the city really stays old, and is never replaced by anything newer. London has always built outward, but people keep coming into the centre, which means that housing prices continue to go up, and it gets even more expensive to live here.

People are really used to crowding in London. The underground tube gets insanely packed during the rush hour. It's much much worse than in Vancouver. People are quite literally pushed against the glass on the inside -- it looks like something you'd imagine in a comic book. Anyway, for this reason, it's not hard to imagine why it there were such hysterics for the London underground bombing thing. There's really no opportunity to get away from it even if you had advance notice -- the best you can hope is those other peons around you can absorb the blast on your behalf.

I'll leave with a funny story from Spencer. He relayed this story when I asked if he'd heard of any overt cases of racism. So a Vietnamese girl (Spencer's friend) goes to a store. She hears some snickering to her right and looks over. "Ni how ma! Ni how ma!" -- a couple of little kids are sneering, laughing and pointing at her. The punchline (aside from her being Vietnamese)? They were a bunch of little brown kids.

The world is a weird place.

London Day 4

(This is a part of a 7-day series about my trip to London.)

Date: February 14, 2008

Today was a big day, because it has been the only day so far where I really had a plan of action. I went to two shows. Count'em: TWO! Woot woot. It was something I'd really looked forward to since my last visit here since I'd enjoyed the shows so much last time around.

It turns out that shows have a pretty long run at the theatres -- two of the three shows I saw last time (Avenue Q, Stomp) were still going strong (I imagine the third one (The Producers) has gone to the US somewhere and is touring). Some of the shows were into their third, fourth, and easily more years (though I don't remember which or for how long -- I just remember being surprised). Just to give you a sense, the tickets for these shows range from £20 to £60 (at least the kind I'm willing to buy) -- this translates in $40 - $120. While that may seem like a lot (still), one thing to note is that: (a) it is typically possible to get half price tickets to these shows (no idea why), and (b) since a decent meal is about £20, it's really not that expensive. Imagine being able to see these shows for the price of a meal at Boston Pizza -- suddenly, it's not really that expensive (especially compared to say the price of a Canucks ticket).

After scouring the review sites, I selected four or five shows I wanted to see. I bought tickets to two yesterday: The Importance of Being Earnest (comedy), and Cabaret (musical). Both were really good. Earnest was more of a language humour, so I really had to pay attention. I had to put on my "sophisticated hat" to try to understand some of the jokes, as well as my "universal translator hat" because sometimes it was difficult to understand what they were saying (since they were speaking so quickly). This show was really about old-time theatre, I think: medium amount of props, focus on dialogue and acting... It was clear which actors were really really good, and which were just starting out. It is a funny thing, but it really does fall along the age lines -- the older actors were far and away superior actors. It's difficult to describe why this is, but I'll give it a go: in comparison to the older actors, the younger guys just seem like they're yelling and going through the motions; the older actors really se em to be immersed in their character -- they really seem to be emoting, and have far greater range and control of how their voices and bodies are used.

Cabaret was more of a show, a production. Lots of lights, live band, but surprisingly, very little in the way of a set decorations or anything. There was lots of singing, but I think the thing I'll remember most is that there were nekkid people! Holy cow, I don't think anyone in the crowd was expecting it (me neither) -- there were lots of muted gasps and stifled laughter. It's good to know that even when I'm in one of the cultural epicentre of the world, people laugh at seeing pee-pees and hoo-hoos.

The hardest thing about this day was that loneliness really set in. I think it was in part due to the fact that it was Valentine's Day, so lots of people had flowers in hand, or a loved one in hand. The shows were filled with couples, or couples lined up to buy tickets together and so forth. I suppose the lack of meaningful conversation with another human being was also starting to get to me -- it's been about two days since I've had a conversation that lasted longer than an inquiry ("Can I get a samosa?") and a response ("That'll be £1.50.").

I broke down and bought internet access. At first, I had grand visions of sneaking around until I found an open wifi, or hacking into a network based on my brilliant password guessing skills. Heck, I would have even settled for a Starbucks, but as is always with these types of things -- Starbucks are seemingly plentiful and ubiquitous... right up until you start looking for one, and then they seem to be no where to be found. Anyway, I think I found a pretty reasonable deal: £10 for the next 5 days, so that's about £2 a day, or $4. The other nice thing is that they have lots of different locations ... unfortunately, I have no idea where these other locations are off the top of my head. I know they exist because I saw it on the map they have on the Internet; however, they didn't have a printer, and didn't have any maps to these other locations. The one that I started using was pretty good anyway though -- nice and central at Trafalgar Square. Incidentally, it turns out that the ability to get wifi access at McDonalds that we were all laughing about earlier last year is available in London. Of course, I didn't see that until after I'd paid for internet access. Next time.

Jet lag really set in today. My 2:30pm enjoyment of "The Importance of Being Earnest" was really hampered by my body's desire to be fast asleep, and so I acquiesced between Acts and napped while other people ate ice cream (seems to be the hip thing to do at these shows). That show ended around 5pm (very long!), and I only had 2h45 before Cabaret. I debated whether to try to find a public place to nap or to go back to the hostel to get some shut-eye. In the end, I picked hostel, and got about an hour and a half of decent Zzz's before heading out for Cabaret.

I found one street corner where a Chinese girl was selling some buns and things, so I bought a chicken bun. Not bad. £1 was the going price, so Jon, the $2 chicken bun you like at the dim sum place is about the same cost -- that bad boy has many other kinds of meat in it though. On the way home from Cabaret, I had a lamb samosa, and that was it for dinner, really. For some reason I didn't ever really feel hungry in the evening, so didn't really eat dinner. I don't have a good explanation for why this was, it just was.

When I got home, the fashion show party downstairs was in full swing. It seems as though the Baden Powell Scout House, which houses this hostel (not exactly sure of the relationship), whores itself out to these private groups. The fashion group was insane and there was much partying going on. I took some photos of the thing, but it doesn't nearly capture the chaos or the amount of alcohol that was being consumed. Really something. Fortunately, four or five floors really does a good job of deadening that racket -- we didn't hear a thing up in our room.

I've begun to get a funny feeling while staying here. It's not overt racism, but it's kind of like a clear unease around "The Orientals" such as me. The perception of "The Orientals" is clearly based on stereotypes. This is not simply directed toward people like me though, it's really everyone -- they view Germans in a certain way, the Turkish a certain way, the Persians a certain way, the French, and so on. The only thing I can brealy be sure of is that no one really goes out of one's way to talk to strangers that look different. How can they be so xenophobic when the "xenos" are already inside?

London Day 3

(This is a part of a 7-day series about my trip to London.)

Date: February 13, 2008

Today was the first day I have had where I was truly "free". No commitments, no jobs, no assignments, nothing to do: instead, it could be all Tony, all the time. While that might sound like riveting television or a relative good time, I can tell you straight up that while it seems pretty good in the beginning, it gets pretty boring pretty fast -- especially when Tony is in a land where things are twice as expensive as he's used to.

The morning started auspiciously enough: full English breakfast -- four pieces of toast, a pooched egg, ham, sausage, roasted tomato, and beans. The beans I have always thought were a bit weird, but they're surprisingly easy to eat and pretty tasty in the morning. They add kind a pretty different, but tasty texture to the regular morning meal. I don't think it's something I'd start doing regularly at home, but there's really nothing wrong with them.

During breakfast, the owner of the bread and breakfast, Simon, brought me into the kitchen to show me how he made poached eggs. It turns out there's nothing fancy about it at all -- the trick is to be open to losing some parts of the egg. I thought the whole egg had to stay together, which turns out to have been fallacy. New knowledge always tickles my brain -- I can't wait to get home to pooch some more eggs.

With that, I started off into the London daylight-- some money in my pocket, and excitement in my heart. The first stop was Buckingham Palace: home of the queen, and on off-days, the place where they would be doing the Changing of the Guard. This, it turns out, is exactly what it sounds like -- the four guards at the front of the place swap spots with four new guys. The thing that makes it quite a spectacle is that it's accompanied with a lot of fanfare... literally. In addition to a marching band, there were "fans" watching the whole procession (I was one of them). The crowd was probably five or six people deep, and unfortunately, most of them were over 6', which means that it was difficult to see anything. I actually got there early enough to get a good spot, but I kept switching because it wasn't clear where they were going to show up, so in the end, I ended up with terrible viewing areas. If I go again, I'll know where to stand, but for now, I just have some bad pictures of other people's heads (in true London fashion, I held up my camera above my head to try to get a good camera shot, but ended up mostly getting pictures of the backs of people's heads), a vague memory of some marching band and guards with really big guns, and the thought that I should just watch this on TV.

This whole fiasco (including the waiting) lasted in the order of an hour, so with an hour wasted in the day, I started off again into the heart of London on foot. I traveled along the streets, checking out architecture, but rarely going into stores. Admittedly, the stores that I did go into were primarily the little food convenience stores to see what they sold for food, and how much it cost. These food convenience stores are extremely plentiful, but they're something we don't really have in Canada. Many are like just the sandwich and drink aisle of a 7-11, and a lot of them don't open past about 6pm or so (they're primarily for grabbing food on the go). Judging from how
many of these there are, I'm not sure that Londoners really sit down for many meals -- eating doesn't seem to be a big ritual for them.

Wandering the streets stated to get me kind of hungry, but I was antsy about paying £2.8 or £3.8 or £4.5 for a baguette with some meat and cheese when I wasn't sure that I'd even enjoy it. Just to give you a sense, it would be the equivalent of paying $5.60, $7.90 or $9.00 for one of these things. There were some Cornish pastries and meat pies that looked appetizing, but again, the cost seemed exhorbitant, and so deterred me somewhat. In the midst of my battle with hunger and cheapness, I suddenly found myself in the middle of Chinatown.

I have to say, the smell and sight of roasted duck, roasted pork and chicken were imcomparably intoxicating. After about five steps into Chinatown, I decided three things: (1) no matter how bad the Chinese food was, they probably couldn't mess up a roast duck, (2) I didn't really care how much that stuff cost, and (3) I had to eat something eventually! So I set out in Chinatown looking for some cheap eats! I settled on looking for places only with BBQ pork and roast duck visibly in the window -- this would allow me to weed out the "Chinese restaurants" catering only to Caucasian crowd, and were intended for the Chinese folks.

The meal of roast pork and BBQ pork ended up costing £4.8, which, for the comfort I felt afterwards, seemed well worth the price. It was an interesting thing being in a Chinese restaurant. For one, i could speak Cantonese, and I felt an immediate connection to these guys. For another... this will sound strange, but of course, the Chinese people don't have an English accent when speaking Cantonese. Those things came together to make me feel pretty comfortable in there. It's an interesting feeling to sort of feel "at home" when you're clearly
away. Very satisfying.

The rest of the day was also spent wandering around downtown. I ended up at the National Gallery again, and was again reminded of how cool it was to see art up close that I'd only seen in pictures before. It's definitely a cool feeling.

I spent the evening with Brad, who incidentally knew even less of London than I did. Jet lag kicked in around 4:30 and lasted about an hour and a half -- I could barely keep my eyes open. I fought through and made it to see Brad (for dinner). As we were wandering around, we saw a big commotion and hurried to see what was going on. It turns out that there was a big premiere for a movie, and some big names were going to the premiere. I'm told that Uma Thurman was in the mix, but the only picture I got was of someone's back who was wearing a red dress. I'll have to inspect it more closely later to see who it was.

Like at Buckingham Palace, the throngs of people were probably six people deep. It's kind of an interesting thing in London to see how differentiated the really really rich people are from the commoners. They really are THAT MUCH richer, and the commoners really do feel common next to them, but are really THAT EXCITED to see these people. The level of feverishness is kind of hard to describe. Perhaps it's just curiosity -- and the curiosity is fueled by two things: (1) there are so many OTHER people are looking upon the spectacle, and (2) there's just not enough room for everyone to see, creating the illusion (?) of demand.

Anyway, enough with trying to learn something in London. Tomorrow, I'm going to see a show.

London Day 2

(This is a part of a 7-day series about my trip to London.)

Date: February 12, 2008

Well, today was the big talk, and it actually went pretty well. There were a lot of famous people there (well, in the HCI research circles, anyway), and it was fantastic finally meeting some of them. I have to say that sometimes it's kind of surprising to finally meet these people to see what they really look like. Often, they're nothing like what you imagined. Two of the guys, named Christian Heath and Paul Luff were nothing like I imagined. I thought they'd both be very stuffy English guys, but they turned out to be pretty gregarious guys with big personalities and big voices. I kind of met them before in Banff at a previous conference, but I guess maybe they were a bit jetlagged at the time - they didn't really say much to me that time.

Breakfast was a little uneventful -- I just ate eggs sausage and toast, and I took photos of those, but as I said, it was nothing really spectacular. Heading out into London in the morning was pretty interesting -- the crowds were extremely intense. I couldn't believe the number of people who were out and about, heading to work. It was already 9am, which is what made it very weird, because the place was still completely packed! As it turns out though, people head into work up until 10am or so.

The talk itself went okay, but not as well as I'd hoped. The jokes I built in were received with only titters from the crowd, and I stumbled at a few places. Nothing terrible though -- some of the folks around me told me I did a good job, which was good to hear. Getting a chance to hear the other talks was very good though, I really enjoyed some of them.

By the end of the day (around 4 or 5pm), I was feeling really really jetlaggy. My body was starting to sweat at unreasonable times, and I was pretty much completely pooped. I excused myself, and headed back home. Unfortunately, the fish and chips place I'd spotted earlier in the day (and had planned to go for dinner) was closed, so I doubled back to some random steakhouse. There, I ate the "mixed grill", which had a sausage, a not-so-tasty chicken steak-thing, a not-so-tasty beef steak, a big hunk of bacon, some fries, and three onion rings. The onion rings and sausage were the best part of the dinner -- the other bits were not really that tasty. I actually didn't finish it because the chicken and steak were so bland. :P

It turns out that there are a lot of little places that sell sandwiches and other pastries and stuff, and this is where people grab their lunches. I'm going to try that today.

By the time I got home, it was around 7 or 8pm, and I knew I needed to stay awake to battle some jetlag. I watched two movies (Bourne Ultimatum and Idiocracy) and stayed up until about midnight or so. I really wish I hadn't watched Idiocracy -- I felt much stupider after watching the movie.

Tomorrow is a big day out on the town. I'm not sure what I'm going to do, but it will involve a lot of wandering around on foot!

--tony

Day 1 in London

(This is a part of a 7-day series about my trip to London.)

Date: February 11, 2008

Well, Day 1 was pretty crazy -- it really just felt like a very very VERY long day.

I didn't sleep much on the plane, and instead watched two movies and worked a bit on my talk.

When I got in to London, it was around 2pm, and so I was wandering around in a daze trying to find my hotel. The thing about London is that there is very very poor street signage. Thus, it's hard to findout what street and intersection you're at. I did figure out a trick though -- most of the big buildings have an entire street address on a sign (e.g. 1010 Buckingham Palace Rd.) instead of just a number. That helped a bit, but I still twirled around for a while before finding this place.

London is a very busy place... always people walking around and going somewhere, always someone who's busy. Everywhere you look, it's people people people. It's also not very homogeneous -- everyone is SO different from the next. It's kind of hard to describe, but even
their clothes are different from one another. Everyone has their own sense of style and sort of goes about their business on their own.

That's one thing that's pretty interesting. In Canada we pride ourselves on multiculturalism, but it's peanuts compared to the number of different kinds of people there are here. For instance, when was the last time you saw a black person in Vancouver?! It's orders of magnitude different.

Another interesting thing I noticed was that they just put their garbage on the street. It stinks! I never noticed how useful those garbage bins we have are until now. It's interesting they put it on the streets -- they're not afraid of wild animals. I guess there aren't any wild animals maybe? I also haven't seen any pets now that I think about it. I guess the houses are too small? I will have to enquire about this.

Back to my day, so I got to the hotel around 4pm -- about 1hr after getting off the plane and out of the airport. I then fell asleep for 2 hours, and then it was off to dinner. We went to a pretty neat place -- Turkish food. This is a good choice if you are both lactose and gluten (wheat) intolerant, it turns out. We had a person in our party who was like that -- tragic, really. Anyway, the food was okay -- apparently, Turkish is synonymous with "lamb", so I had that. Not bad, but frankly, not enough for what we paid! For a group of 5 of us, it cost £120, which is around $240. Divided by 5, I guess that's like $60. At Hons, that could feed a family of four at least two times, if not three times. Heheh

After dinner, I came home, and it was around 11pm, and I worked on my talk until about 1am. I slept for a few hours, but got up a 6am because I couldn't sleep any more... Talk is today.

Hopefully goes well, then I can relax a bit in London here!

Cheers
--tony

7 Days in London

I was recently asked to give a talk at Challenging Groupware: Emerging configurations for distributed interaction. This was pretty cool, though I admit the predominant thought I had when deciding whether to speak was, "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool that to speak and remove all doubt."

In the end, I decided that it would be better to be a fool and to have gotten another chance to visit London, than to be thought of as a fool and not get to visit London.

I documented my trip in a series of 7 emails back to loved ones. I figured I may as well share them. They're probably not the most interesting bits I've ever posted to this blog, but this blog is for me too, right? :D

Insights into Grad School: Productive Procrastination

Productive procrastination is the act of doing something that is ostensibly productive in the hopes of fooling oneself (and/or others) that one is actually doing something productive instead of just procrastinating from another activity.

Productive procrastination is extremely common in the grad student community (particularly PhD students), though I don't know if it is unique to grad students. Some great examples of this activity (I am guilty of all of these):

• Browsing Lifehacker to get "tips and tricks [in order to get] things done" more efficiently
• Carefully choosing fonts and slide designs instead of creating the actual slide presentation
• Checking email, one's RSS feeds, the weather, and then the news obsessively

I think productive procrastination is common among grad students because, in my estimation, PhD programs seem to attract a certain type of person: someone who is probably somewhat competitive, and someone who doesn't like to fail. Since these people are competitive, they never want to seem to stop working -- lest others get ahead. PhD students get into a state where they're paralyzed by uncertainty, and don't (or can't) really do any productive work on their real thesis stuff -- the theory being that "if you didn't do anything, you didn't really fail."

The confluence of this circumstance with the competitive personality flaw (feature) results in extreme attention to seemingly meaningful things (but are ultimately utterly useless when it comes to trying to finish one's thesis): the grad student doesn't have to feel bad about doing nothing (and therefore "really" wasting time), but ultimately, s/he's really doing what s/he is just to not to do real thesis work (and therefore is procrastinating).

As an exercise to the reader, determine whether my writing this blog entry is an example of productive procrastination.

Hint: I have to give a presentation soon that's only half written.

Conferences

My version of a conversation I recently had with K.

K: I registered for a logging conference at the Forestry building next month.

T (thinking): K has a variety of interests. She must have seen this while she was walking through the Forestry building one day.

T: Huh. Interesting.

K (apparently taken aback by the lack of enthusiasm): Yeah, it'll be great. Just outside my research area, but should be interesting.

T (thinking): I guess she's studying architects. Maybe logging resource planners work in the same sort of way.

T: I didn't know you were so interested in that stuff.

K: Of course I am! Blogging, social media, all that stuff..

T: Social media? ... Ooh! BLOGGING! You're going to a BLOGGING conference.

You can read K's interpretation of our conversation on her blog.

Link