Hammer to the face

Okay, a more substantial post coming SOON, but first I had to write a quick post to relate a story about my little sister's best friend's brother (got that?) who doesn't speak in full sentences very often and just got engaged to a lovely young lady we grew up with. When we were kids, probably about 8, we went to this camp called Adventure Playground where you build treehouses, and he was working on one with me on just about the last day of camp. He decided that he would tie a rope to a hammer and tell me to pull on it and ...

Yes.

A hammer landed on my face from about 10-15 feet up in the air. Fortunately, I only had a bloody nose and I got a popsicle out of it. So we were all winners! Except maybe it gave me minor brain damage, which is was a disappointing development for the rest of my life.

Also fortunate was that he did this before I was old enough to fully grasp the concepts of festering anger, immediate and violent revenge, and lifelong grudges. Because instead of an event that tore two families apart, it's just a funny story to talk about on a blog. Again, we all win!

Back at it

After the city slowly put itself together following the snow, the weather has been a consistent chilly + rainy for the last five days. And work for me has been extremely hectic. Most of my time has been spent working our working out, which I think is going to become the common cadence to my life here. Work is extremely busy and looks to only get busier, and I need to be as disciplined I can with exercise because I eat so much (at work anyway) and drink so much (pretty much all the time I'm not at work).

Last Thursday I went to Stockholm on a business trip, and before people get jealous that I get to go to Sweden on a moment's notice for work, keep in mind that I was there for all of five hours and I was in meetings the entire time. I hear Stockholm is a fun town to go out in - so hopefully I'll be able to go back with some friends for longer than a few hectic hours someday. Two things are for sure though - Swedish is a strange sounding language and the women there are incomparably beautiful. I always thought that was just an urban myth, but it's Northern European truth.

This weekend was a bit underwhelming - dinner and a movie with friends followed by a house party with a couple friends a bunch of strangers that included a couple of really great conversations and a multitude of conversations that ran the gamut of awful. Saturday I went to Soho to pick up some more groceries from ありがとう, my go-to Japanese grocer, and then headed over to Dover Market, Selfridge's, and got all turned around and ended up taking a train to the Monocle Shop despite being four blocks away. I didn't buy almost anything, promise. Afterward, I went to watch the second match of the 6 Nations rugby tournament at Henry J. Beene's on King's Road along with a completely shit-faced Tommy and his friend Matt. Afterward, dinner with another friend and his friends at an overly-trendy Japanese restaurant called Roka where way too much food was ordered and pretty much financially killed the night for me. I then headed off to meet Tommy and James around town for drinks in succession. And at one point ended up playing guitar with some middle-aged dude from Liverpool for like ten minutes. Fantastic.

Sunday - woke up and worked out, ate some 納豆ご飯 and then headed to the office. But instead I actually headed to Shoreditch to go to Brick Lane and finally find Rough Trade East, the larger of the two Rough Trade record shops here in London (there used to be a third I think in central, near Covent Garden, but it sadly closed up). It was nice to FINALLY go to a large-ish record shop here in London. There are a million record stores that are literally record stores, but since I don't have a turntable and speaker set up here or anywhere but my parents' house, those places are useless to me. There are also a multitude of extremely specific single genre shops around town. But there are almost no one-stop shops. Even the big-ass corporate stores don't exist: Virgin Megastore went under and was taken over and re-named Zavvi, which also just being a heaping pile of fail and was taken over by HMV, whose business is a gigantic music store chain and a UK-only bookstore chain. So I, uh, imagine they won't be around for much longer either. Anyway, Rough Trade was a solid experience, except they had some holes in their catalogue given the size of their shop, and they had sold out of the Animal Collective album ten minutes before I got there. This album is the hardest widely distributed album I've ever tried to find. Sad.

After that, I worked in the office for five hours, came home, picked up some Nando's, and then wrote in my blog. This is now a circular reference.

On to week six.

Frosty the Snow Bloke

First off, apologies for yesterday's post, which was probably the worst sample of writing I've ever produced. I haven't even read it for embarrassment, but I just remember feeling mentally retarded while writing it. This could be for a number of reasons:

(1) I was watching the Super Bowl and the combined exposure to both American sports and John Madden's speech probably were not conducive to writing coherently.
(2) I got what amounted to temporary brain damage in December - was this an aftershock?
(3) Being in an English-speaking country where they speak slightly different English than the US has actually screwed up my English more than being in a completely foreign country.
(4) I'm stupid.

And while we're at it, a couple notes on the Super Bowl:

(1) Jennifer Hudson's national anthem was one of the best I've ever seen. Her voice is like field artillery.
(2) The Cardinals probably should have won - fade to Fitzgerald! Come on!
(3) Mike Tomlin winning is awesome.
(4) Troy Polamalu was playing like a rabid dog. In every shot, he just like slashed by, missing tackles and landing on the wrong people or face down on the ground. Calm down, Troy!

So the snow from yesterday continued HEAVILY throughout today and might continue tomorrow (even though the news was predicting a big storm hitting tonight, that prediction fortunately didn't come true). Now, last month I took Chicago's weather with me to LA (the temperature dropped below freezing every day I was home for Christmas), New York (whose temperature just completely plummeted as soon as I arrived there, culminating in a New Years's Eve that was reproductive system-damaging-ly cold), and then, strangely, BACK to Chicago (Chi had warmed up when I left the city and froze solid the moment I got back). Now I dragged it here to London - to record setting levels! It's been freezing all January and it culminated with a snowy start to February that was the most snow this city has seen in EIGHTEEN YEARS. And considering about half the Underground shuts down every weekend for "improvement work" (a funny joke since your weekend was inconvenient and the tube is just as shitty come Monday as it was Friday), I didn't think this was going to be pretty. And sure enough - about 90% of the trains that service London were down and ALL the buses. So there was no transportation. It took me an hour to get to work, and that was lucky considering I have multiple friends whose commutes took 3+ hours. It of course was so jammed in one train I transferred onto that I was practically suspended in air, but at least I made it. According to one Bloomberg statistic today, 80% of the city's work force just chose not to go to work (which initially seems strange considering the Northern Line stop at Kings Cross had so many people waiting in it that the crowds were backed up into the tunnels leading to the platform, but makes sense when you consider the math of "20% of people working + about 3% of the city's total transportation system functioning"). That's the difference between here and Chicago - in Chicago, you get pounded by snow and the lake freezes and you're expected to be on time. London, 4 inches of snow falls and the entire city shatters into a million little Keystone Cops fragments

I went outside mid-day to get a coffee with the girl who sits next to me (well, she got a coffee; as usual, I watched) and dozens of grown adults who were only in the neighborhood for work (our office is in the area analagous to Wall Street or the Loop) were building gigantic snowmen everywhere. The Norwegian I sit across was not impressed with the snowmen until I reminded him we're in the middle of the effing city, but he brought up the snowmen from Calvin and Hobbes as impressive snowmen. Except in Norway it's known as Tommy og Tigern. Yes, Tommy and Tiger. After I explained why it was named Calvin and Hobbes, he said "we don't know about your philosophers." fair point. but I digress ... the point is, even the people who made it into work weren't working! One guy I saw walked by with a snowboard!!! In the middle of the city! When it had snowed 4 inches!!

I really admired and was entertained by all the fun everyone was having, but let's say it all together now - and these people wonder why they lost their global empire??

Snow London Snow

It snowed like crazy today here (by London standards; lightly by Chicago standards) and is supposed to snow more over the next two days. I thought I moved here to get away from this weather. Agh.

Night at the Roxburghe

I spent my Friday and half of my Saturday in Edinburgh, Scotland, which is the polar opposite from Glasgow and one of the most jaw-droppingly beautiful places I've ever seen. While I poured praise upon Glasgow the other day after the general consensus that it was a horrible city from most people I know, I have to say that I do not disagree with everyone's extreme love of Edinburgh. It is an incredible place. And this post is about 48 hours later than I was hoping to write it because the hotel I was staying at, the Roxburghe actually did not have an internet connection. And it wasn't because it was an awful hotel - it was actually very nice - but because, well, I was in the United Kingdom. And that's how it is here. It was remarkably similar to my apartment too - tiny living space + beautiful, beautiful bathroom.

I arrived in Edinburgh at around 4:30 PM and immediately went wandering around the city. My hotel was right between Princes Street (the main high street) and George Street (a street with a lot of restaurants and bars). The city is divided into the New Town and Old Town with the castle on a gigantic volcanic mound right in the center of the city. Old Town is, I believe, about 500 years old and New Town is about 200-300 years old. New Town is basically a grid layout with predominantly Georgian architecture. It's picturesque and has avenues with islands down the middle dotted with statues and monuments and open squares of trees and grass. Old Town, however, is the more fascinating half of Edinburgh - it was built upon craggy volcanic rock formations with little valleys carved into them that streets run down. The buildings and roads were built up on each other. This means the layout of Old Town is a fascinating and confusing maze of bridges, overpasses, windy roads, alleyways, and tunneled passages.

When you walk out onto Princes Street, the city opens before you like a pop-up book. There is a large park that runs through the center of the city in a basin beneath the castle and is filled with dramatic statues and surrounded by incredible architecture. There is also Scott Monument, a Gothic tower of opulent beauty, a black and gold blade plunging upward out of the heart of the city. There are several bridges you can use to cross over to Old Town, and the view from the bridges are also incredible - in each direction you look there are palacial buildings and castle turrets jutting out of hill sides. In Old Town, I randomly wandered around in the cold weather to try to get my bearings in the city and ended up exploring most of the city. At every turn, a new part of the city would unfold, almost always revealing something breathtaking.

After walking around, I asked my concierge for a recommendation on restaurants, and the best they could do was suggest "Brown's", a place near the hotel that had a completely uninteresting menu. It was like a nice Bennigan's (Oh, I also ran into some people from the business trip I had been on standing in front of Brown's, which was just sort of strange and awkward). So I did some of my own searching and ended up going to a restaurant in Old Town called Dubh Prais, a tiny Scottish Restaurant tucked away along the Royal Mile because I wanted to have as Scottish a dinner as I could. I ordered the haggis (haggis #3!), a dram of Cadenhead glenturret scotch, a Scottish lager, and venison medallions. It was incredibly delicious. I then went for a walk through Old Town again to get a sense for the nightlife and headed back to my hotel.

After changing, I ultimately went to a club near my hotel that my Scottish co-worker recommended, and had a decent time. One of the bartenders, whose girlfriend is American, took care of me, giving me some free drinks. I also met some insane Irish brothers and their friends and hung out with them for the night. The DJ, this guy named Jez Hill whose mixes were questionably described as "heady", was pretty great, spinning basically the greatest hits of dance music according to my own iPod. The club eventually got shut down due to a fire alarm going off. As everyone was waiting outside, I had to keep one of the Irish boys from getting slapped by some American girls after he introducing himself by telling one of them she had "beautiful breasts", and the conversation actually quickly went downhill from there. I went home shortly after that.

The next day, I woke up early and immediately went to take a bus tour of the city, which is of course my favorite tourist activity. After riding around freezing to death in the open top (exactly like my last bus tour!), I literally sprinted over to the castle to tour around. After almost freezing to death again in absurdly long ticket line, I did an abbreviated jaunt through the castle over 45 minutes and left to go meet the car taking me to the airport (and just a note: Helen, who was my driver for all the cars I had in Scotland, is the best driver I've ever had). On the way out, in what can only be described as an incredibly low probability event, I ran into my friend Beau, a guy I RA'd with at Penn. He actually lives near me in London, so we will be seeing each other soon I'm sure.

I was in business class on my quick flight back to London and gorged myself on chips, peanuts, and beers in the lounge before take-off. Upon landing, I went home, worked out, and then ran off to have some beers and pizza with Tom and Callum before the booze cruise down the Thames, another messy, messy Saturday night. At least my prediction for "vomiting over the side of the boat" didn't come true. A minor victory to be sure.