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.