February 27th, Reel Big Fish

Thursday was a nice night in the pubs as usual. I need to remember to eat dinner before drinking, as dinner then becomes ginger snaps and potato chips. Which were awesome, but don't really make a meal.

Last night, we saw Reel Big Fish. One of those bands that I've "liked", own a few of their albums, but outside of Sell-Out, couldn't hum a lick of any of their songs. However, they're known for their energetic and chaotic live shows, so naturally they have been on my list for a while. Last night, I finally got the chance.

The show was awesome. A couple thousand kids just dancing. The more shows like this I go to, the less I want t0 see metal shows live.

Beforehand was a hoot as well. Caitlin wanted to take me to a couple of metal bars, so we hit up Garlic and Shots again, and devirginized a few who had never had the blood shots before. They were impressed.

After G&S, we made our way to Crobar, and had a Red Stripe in the streets. This pleased me much.

Then it was to the show, to the pub, and home to a bag of cheese balls. Life is good.

Pics.

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, boring

After a nice weekend, I knew I needed to get back to the grind hardcore. Therefore, the past 2 days have been anything but exciting, but have been quite work-productive.

I tried to go out and do some writing Sunday night from some pubs that were supposedly wifi enabled, but neither worked. Bastards.

Some interesting things of note:

* Lots of pubs have Thai food. I know, I'm not sure why.
* Fat Tuesday is called Pancake Day here. You eat pancakes before fasting.
* They really do love David Beckham over here.

February 21 (I forget the day count now)

So I spent the day in Notting Hill with my pal Nicole, watching the Chelsea vs. Aston Villa match in a pub. I'm not sure if the Notting Hill here has anything to do with the Julia Roberts movie, but I'm pretty sure it does, as evidenced by the extreme tourist population congregated here.

Chelsea won, which was a good thing. It made the vast majority of the locals very happy.

After football, we went back to Nicole's flat, which I must say was pretty sweet. She thinks it is small, I think it is huge. NYC has warped my sense of size.

After leaving her flat, I headed to Waterloo to meet up with Jordan and Rosie, where we drank and then went to an arcade to bowl. If you could even call it bowling. I certainly couldn't.

This is hard to describe, but the bowling pins were held up by rubber ropes, which pulled the pins up for resettings etc. The problem with this was that the sensors to determine whether or not a pin had been knocked down totally sucked. Twice I bowled strikes, only to have the lane set one pin up. We were confused.

Also, this bowling alley's ball-return mechanism pretty much threw the balls back at you, since the return happened aboveground and liked to hop the tracks.

We had a good time. That's all that matters.

More here.

I did a LOT the past few days

Katie comes, we tie one on London. This post will take a while. More to come.

Day 22/23 - Saturday is for Snakebites and Kiwis, Sunday is for Sunday dinner

Saturday was day 1 of Tommy's I am going to be productive working weeking. It started off well enough, as I got a few good hours in at the office. Eventually, I met up with Jordan and Rosie and their group of New Zealand friends, and also one Aussie. They warned me that these people enjoyed their drinking, and I wasn't disappointed.

We made our rounds in the neighborhood of Putney, which means I had to venture out via the overground trains, which was nice. Those trains are comfortable and quite spacious.

Apparently I had missed the best part of the evening, as one of the girls in the group had thrown a ciggarette (lit) at a guy in the street. Apparently this group of Kiwis likes to fight as well.

We ended up at a bar that serves a drink called a snakebite, which is half beer, half cider, and splashed with some blackcurrant liquor. It was too delicious. We went through several pitchers, after which some of us left and went back to the bar with the dance floor from last weekend, where we struggled through a last beer before calling it a night.

Sunday was another working day, followed by another delicious meal cooked by Rosie, followed by drinks at the local pub. Good weekend.

Day 21 - Friday Night in Sloan Square

Friday was spent boozing after work at TGIF, followed by some last minute work. Then it was on to Sloan Square to have a nice dinner with my coworker Ameet, who I worked closely with in NYC and recently moved back to London. Nice French brasserie that served a nice Irish coffee afterward.

The Sloan Square area is pretty neat, although it's a little too posh for my tastes. It was interesting rubbing shoulders with the Gramercy of London though. Maybe more Soho + Gramercy, but spoiled rich kids nonetheless.

Day 20 - Attack of the Pet Shop Boys

Today was a day filled with tons of work, and then plenty of booze.

Some old teammates decided to have a proper welcome Tommy to London night out, and I showed 'em how it's done. Well, we all pretty much showed ourselves how it was done, and ended up being a lovely group of walking wounded on Friday.

Apparently the Pet Shop Boys were also hanging out at our pub. Naturally the people who knew didn't tell us until after we had left. Whatever, I wouldn't have been able to point them out in a lineup anyways.

Day 19 - Cleanup continues plus work Hell

Nothing much to write about here. Work was an absolute bitch today, and I'm still cleaning up a bit after yesterday's flooding. It looks pretty good though, and my work is essentially done. What a rough couple of days.

Oh well, it's all looking up from here. I can't complain too much with a free place to stay in London.

Day 18 - Disaster Strikes

In a couple of ways in fact. Firstly, the neighbors water main exploded in the middle of the night, flooding houses, including this one, so I spent all day mopping up water, running heaters, soaking up water with towels, and essentially laughing at my misfortune, the only way to not drive myself insane.

Oh yeah and on top of that, I was up late as hell debugging production problems. So I'm in some kind of state right now.

I could go into more detail, but it'll be tiring. If you want the whole story, buy me a beer.

Day 16/17 - Snow Days

So I am blessed to be in London for the worst snow in 20 years. The city has completely shut down, and the transport remains in shambles and will probably keep the majority of the city at home yet again tomorrow. I am totally fine with that, since the quiet office always means I get a ton more work done.

So last night, after finally waking up and trying to get my life back together, I headed off to Greenwich to have Sunday dinner at Jordan's. The Jubilee line was down, so I knew it would be a hassle to get out there via bus, but I was cool with the bus ride, it's a pretty scenic and nice ride.

I knew I was in trouble when it took about twice as long to get there. And this was with the snow only moderately blizzarding. Along the way I have to note, a guy in front of a pub hit the bus with a snowball (before starting to throw them at cars), which scared the hell out of me.

I get to Jordan's we have some dinner and drinks, and then go to the local pub for a few. Dinner was amazing, chicken and scalloped potatoes and biscuits. Amazing.

We went to a really neat old place that apparently used to be a smuggling stop along the Thames. The Pilot Inn.

So I head home, and everything goes to shit. The bus, when it finally arrives, takes about 2 hours to get to Waterloo, and by now the tubes were shut down. I then wait for about 30 minutes for a bus, only to learn that I all buses were now shut down. So I get to walk 1.5 miles in the blizzard. FUN.

It actually wasn't so bad, minus the fact that it was so late (I got home around 1:30 or so). The city was actually pretty lively, as not many residents could remember having this much snow, so they were taking every opportunity to play in the snow, take pictures, and build snowmen. I saw some of the largest snowman pieces ever.

It was a pretty surreal experience. Like I said, today it felt like a ghost town, no one could get anywhere, it was just overall maddening.

More snow pics here.

Day 15 - Death by liquor shots (and concert WIN)

So thankfully, the Seasick Steve show on Saturday was in a completely different part of town from Friday and Saturday, so I had no worries of striking out on live shows for the week.

The day started nicely, and with a lot of promise for cool things. It started innocently enough. I printed out a ton of self-guided Jack the Ripper tour notes, so I planned on doing that (lots of good material for the Devil's Demons). I was excited, not only would I see a concert and have a fun night, maybe I could do something productive and creative before my capacity for thinking was greatly muffled by booze. So I made my way from home and started walking towards Soho, where I would need to catch the tube over to Whitechapel.

I cut through the touristy part of town, so I went past Buckingham Palace, through Green Park, and down Piccadilly Circus. I found an uppity shopping district with lots of cool hat and gentlemens' stores. I didn't buy anything. But there are lots of cool hats there to potentially buy.

Next I headed up Charing Cross Rd, and made a couple of cool discoveries:

1) Pizza Hut sells wine. That's just incredible.
2) There is a store called Fopp that sells cds and books etc. They were cheap. I bought all 3 Seasick Steve albums and a book of heavy metal cd covers.
3) There was a pub named the Marquis of Granby, and they had good beer. The bartender also had a Simpsons' ringtone. The British absolutely LOVE the Simpsons.
4) This part of town is also music store central, there were at least a dozen instrument shops scattered about the area. Now I know. And knowing is half the battle.

After wetting my whistle and purchasing a couple things, I started back towards the Tottenham Court tube station. Again, not thinking ahead, it wasn't until I was close to Whitechapel that I realized that entire portion of the tube was shut down for the weekend. So I hopped off at Liverpool Street and decided to try and walk.

Jordan called then. Basically, I decided to head to their neck of the woods, Greenwich, instead of the walk. Next weekend.

So I journey there, and meet Jordan near the O2 arena, which is this mammoth of an arena that hosts all kinds of events, is filled with clubs, restaurants, shops, it's ridiculous. We walk to Jordan's flat, which is awesome. It reminded me of IKEA but in a good way. Jordan says the cab drivers refer to it as the Lego apartments:

So we head into Greenwich proper, which is a really cool area. This is where the observatory is, where time is measured (GMT) etc. We wandered quickly through a really amazing market where several artists peddled their wares (return trip absolutely necessary) and made our way to the Gipsy Moth, one of the coolest pubs I've been to. It's right on the waterfront, and they certainly serve a good pint.

After a few here, we made our way to another pub, after which I headed back home and to Seasick Steve.

Seasick Steve was absolutely brilliant. The venue was packed to the brim, the energy was contagious, and the music fantastic. His stage set up was awesome, looked like a camp where a homeless guy by the river (which he was) would hang out:

I was so impressed by how many people knew his songs and could follow along. Even for someone who didn't know a song, it was easy to groove to. He was a real showman too, very refreshing. I thoroughly enjoyed myself. I have way too much fun by myself as well.

After the show, I made my way towards Waterloo to meet up at the Wellington, a massive pub-hotel which was. I dunno. Good?

Neat murals in there of battles. I was pleased by the fancy artwork. Especially as I started to down vodka sodas like they were going out of style:

After this place, we wandered down the street to some ridiculous Cuban place, packed to the brim. We were there for a bit, then ended the night at another place around the corner, where we danced our faces off. There are lots of fuzzy pictures here that end with Jordan and I in some sort of embrace. Bro-love.

That's basically it. We fell in the street at some point too. I think I might have had a shot or eight that night.

I thought I had lost my camera as well, but thankfully I had put it in Rosie's purse (for some reason). Whatever works I guess. We had a good night. I didn't feel particularly well Sunday, but that's what Sundays are for. Recovery.

Concert FAIL Part 2

Well I'll be damned. Same venue, same story a second night running. Power was still out, an intelligent person (which apparently I am NOT) should have called the venue prior to buying a ticket.

Quite funny actually. I had a good laugh about it. Then I went to the same bar(s) I went to the previous evening during concert fail #1.