Jun 2008

Everyone knows that it is dangerous to cross the street. Doubly so when the cars are coming from the other direction than you would expect. Such it is in the United Kingdom, where they drive on the “other” side of the road from North America. Luckily here in London at many places the London government has painted “LOOK RIGHT” or “LOOK LEFT” on the road, so you know which way to look to see the cars coming.

Even knowing which way to look, though, doesn’t ensure safety. The danger is tripled here in London, where cars coming off side streets don’t actually stop like they do in North America, instead they just yield. Crossing the street is a much more co-operative venture here. Instead of a pedestrian in North America who can walk out at a corner knowing that the “rules of the road” prompt drivers coming to the intersection to stop, here you and the driver need to make eye contact to determine who should slow or stop, and who should go (and maybe even hurry up).

It was thus with great interest I watched a public service announcement from 1976 to help people cross the road. I saw it on a TV program that showed funny or very effective commercials. Unfortunately for me, someone looking for help in crossing the road, this commercial turned out to be funny.

(If for any reason YOUTUBE decides to delete the film, you can see it at the UK National Archives at this link)

SPLINK?

There is nothing about that advert that makes any sense to me. The acronym SPLINK doesn’t even really conform to the advice given. I mean, they use “I” for “If traffic is coming, let it pass.” Shouldn’t they use something that would remind children more about the “passing traffic” then the conjunction used to start the sentence?

Anyway, geekier readers may recognize that the voice over and actor at the end is Jon Pertwee, who played the third incarnation of Doctor Who. I know at least half of the people reading this blog probably know that already.

I must say that the completely ineffectiveness of this PSA reminds me of the current campaign being waged in the UK called “Know Your Limits.” The campaign is trying to get people to not drink too much a day, and not binge drink. They use a very complex concept though, that of not having more than 4 units per day, and that 8 units per day is a binge drinking session.

Now, I have never walked up to a bar and said, “Barkeep, give me 2.3 units of whiskey in a dirty glass.” If you have, let me know, both what the barkeep said about ordering in units as well as asking for the dirty glass.

A unit of alcohol is defined as a 10 ml of pure alcohol in a drink, which means that the number of “units” depends both on the alcohol by volume (ABV) and the size of drink. There's a unit for every percentage point of ABV in a litre of drink, so a 1 litre bottle of vodka at 37.5 % has 37.5 units of alcohol.

What does this mean to you when you are out drinking, thinking to yourself “are you drinking too many units of alcohol?”, all you need to do is add them up. A pint of beer is between 2.3 and 3.4 units of booze, assuming of course you aren’t drinking any low alcohol or super strong booze.

So, depending on the type of beer you’ve had, you can have anywhere from one to two pints of beer.

All very clear. That’s why people keep writing into the papers about the campaign. Makes sense to everyone.

"Okay then, a pint of cider at 5% ABV is 2.8 units, but the bartender didn't fill it all full, and some spilled out as I was walking out to the patio, so let's call it 2.65 units. Yeah, that makes sense."

I woke on this morning at 6:15 AM feeling the sun on my face, just like most of the past eleven mornings. The sun coming up in the sky every morning is not that unusual an event, as it has been doing something similar for some billions of years, and probably will for a few billion more. What is unusual is that I have been able to feel the sun rays hitting my face, rather than the early morning rays getting blocked by grey, thick clouds. This is unusual because the BBC has told me every night when going to bed that I should expect to wake up tomorrow to a grey, raining day.

Every day it is the same thing from the cute little blonde girl giving the weather report. “Well, today is shaping up to be a sunny but cool day in London, but tomorrow the rain will move in and we’ll have a day of clouds and showers,” she will say. The next morning, I will wake up, turn on the BBC and hear the same report. Somehow those showers that are going to move in keep deciding to move somewhere else. Judging by the weather map, it looks like the rain is having a fine time up in Scotland, and has decided to spend the summer there.

Perhaps the rain likes hiking, I here it is good up there, and judging by the Scottish people I know, they’d welcome the rain on their hikes. Anything to make their hikes more miserable seems to make Scottish people happier. “Ay, the weather was bad. The temperature was just above freezing, and the rain was coming at me vertically. The path was not more than a craggy ditch which was soon flowing like a broad river, but I made my way to the top of Gilchesterbladderfrangtoppertoopcrop, the tallest of all the crags in county Carooooooooon. Five hundred and three feet.”

For whatever reason the rain is deciding to stay in Scotland, I’m not complaining. It makes for nice days, at least for the part of them that I am awake.

This morning, like all the previous mornings the sun’s early rays have woken me, I smiled, rolled over to face the dark side of my flat, pulled the covers over my head and went back to sleep.

The past eleven mornings have gone a little something like this. I wake up with the first rays of sunshine, roll over so the sun isn’t shining on my face and promptly go back to sleep. Every hour or hour and a half, I roll over and am soon awakened by the light and heat on my face. I then roll over and go back to sleep. This cycle repeats until it is about 11 o’clock, when I drag myself out of bed and decide to finally face the day.

I’m not surprised by the sleeping in, after all there is a five hour difference between Toronto and London. Last time I was here in London, I found myself sleeping late as well, not getting up until noon, which is 8 AM in Toronto.

What is strange about this move, though, is that unlike my last visit, I am not staying up until four in the morning. I am going to bed at eleven at night, and not getting up until the big hand has made a full circle on the clock.

At first I told myself I was just catching up on all the sleep that didn’t seem to come my last month in Toronto, when the impending move out of my apartment and my impending move to London kept me awake at night mentally running through checklists of things that I really needed to do, though of course not things I could do anything about at the time so it was a little unfair of all those tasks to keep me up. Tasks not yet done, however, seem to have little in the way of respect for time.

However, now that my twelve hour sleeps have lasted for almost two weeks, I am starting to think that perhaps I am just being lazy.

Now, these two seemingly unrelated things, my recent tendency to sleep away the day and the BBC’s inability to actual forecast the weather with any sort of accuracy combined this weekend to prod me to change.

On Saturday, I spelt like most mornings until eleven. I woke up, showered, and as I was getting dressed clicked on the BBC as I got ready to go out and hit the town. On BBC 1 they were showing a large parade with a bunch of soldiers outside of Buckingham Palace. Turns on that second Saturday in June is when the Queen’s birthday is celebrated, and there is a large parade of the armed forces dressed in all their finery for the Queen to inspect, as well as a fly over by some of the RAF’s best and loudest.

I had no idea, because I had been not exactly avoiding but not really paying much attention to the media, and as I had slept in and it was already noon, the festivities were coming to their conclusion. By the time I would have made my way down to Buckingham Palace, I would have missed everything. Instead I wound up in the Docklands, lunching on a piece of fat and bone disguised cleverly on the menu as a £10.50 pork chop and seeing an exhibit on the Jack and Ripper which managed to make one of the world’s first serial killers seem boring and made me feel guilty for having any interest in the story.

I did manage to spend the rest of Saturday walking a large, rambling path from Canary Wharf to the Tower of London, checking out a number of potential neighbourhoods to live in along the way, including the funnily named but potentially reasonably priced Wapping.

Sunday I slept in and spent the day reading, and so had no idea until I went out to find a store to make an international call to my Dad for Father’s Day that George W. Bush was in town, and that the entire centre of town was crippled with traffic due to both the police presence and the roving protests that follow President Bush around like a dog follows around a child holding a hamburger that is about to fall out from between its loosely held buns.

All this sleeping in and missing things was making me feel a bit guilty that perhaps I was taking for granted my opportunity to move over here to London and LIVE in another city, so I decided to do something about it.

Firstly, I decided to figure out what events were coming up in London and the area so I wouldn’t miss them, at least I wouldn’t miss them because I didn’t know about them. I have now marked up my calendar with the Royal Ascot (happening this week from Tuesday until Saturday), Wimbledon (happening in a few weeks), a Polo match late in June that a Canadian expats club is attending, and the British Grand Prix in early July.

Now, I may not make any of these events. The Royal Ascot, which is the first up, has tickets available, but I don’t quite have a morning suit available to wear and with a couple of interviews tentatively scheduled but changing on the whims of potential employers this week, I think the ride up to Ascot will have to wait for next year. The rest of the events I have vowed to research this week, which means I will most likely do nothing until the day of the event, and then curse myself for my inability to follow through on any of my planning and get tickets for things.

But at least I was able to manage to change one of my behaviours this morning. When the sun woke me up again at 8 in the morning, I didn’t roll back over and go to sleep, even though I wanted to. Instead, I got up, showered and dressed in a nice shirt, a clean pair of jeans and a pair of nice, black dress shoes. I headed out and got on the tube station, heading towards the city so I could finally open my bank account.

I had decided to open my bank account at a branch down in the city rather than up in Willesden because I don’t see myself living Willesden for long, and would prefer not to have to drag myself out to the north-west end of the city every time I need to visit my branch. I figure I will most likely end up working somewhere “in the city” (the area that I would have called “downtown” in any North American city), so at least my branch would be relatively close to my workplace.

Getting onto the tube, I grabbed the free Metro paper and read through the news, sports, entertainment and business headlines, skipping over the weather as the Jubilee line lurched towards Westminster station, where I transferred to the Circle line to Mansion House station.

The tube was filled with a bunch of other people dressed smartly and heading off to work. I felt like I fit in, though, as I was wearing jeans, most were dressed smarter than I, but at least I wasn’t wearing my shorts-t-shirt-hiking boot-camera get up that identifies me immediately as a tourist.

I was dressed up, I was up at a decent hour, I was off to conduct some business. I had my laptop bag slung over my shoulder and I was flipping through the pages of the Metro. I was one of the crowd, one of the many heading off to work. I felt like I was part of the great structure that runs this city (even though all I was doing was opening a bank account).

I will admit that most my life I haven’t much liked being a faceless cog in a great machine, but something about being an anonymous face on the train today, heading into the heart of the great post-industrial beast that is the City of London, I felt great. For a length of that tube ride, I was part of London.

I may be complaining in this very blog in 3 months about how I feel so lost and small in the masses of those that run the industries that run the world, but for today, it felt like I belonged here.

Today I wasn't just a tourist. I wasn't just floating on the surface of London, or even just dipping in my toe. Today, at least for a few hours, I finally felt like I belong in London.

I just got in from Notting Hill and boy are my legs tired!

That joke really works much better with flying and arms, doesn't it?

The weather has been sunny and cool, which is excellent weather for walking for long periods of time. As I am still scrounging around on the job front and now that I have most of the logistical stuff sorted out, I have used this week to hit the streets and check out what London areas to live in.

Unemployed and wandering the streets? Why, some might even call me a Pikey, which is a pejorative slang term used in the United Kingdom. The BBC says that According to the Oxford English Dictionary, its first use in print was in the Times in 1837, referring to strangers who had come to the Isle of Sheppey island to harvest. Later that century it meant a "turnpike traveller" or vagabond. But in more recent years it has become a term of abuse and in the eyes of the law using it can even be deemed a racist offence, given its association with Irish travellers and Roma Gypsies. The word has been in the news alot recently as Martin Trundle, commentator for ITV's coverage of Formula 1 racing, used the term to describe some workers laying down new tarmac at the Montreal Grand Prix. So while I'm not Irish or Romanian, if Martin Trundle can use it to describe Canadians in Canada, I guess an unemployed Canadian in the UK could be a Pikey.

Enough with insulting myself and probably getting myself blocked by firewalls throughout the United Kingdom. On Monday, after checking out the Telectroscope, I started heading north, through "The City" (the area of tall buildings and financial businesses just north of the Tower of London) and checked out the area of Barbican, Clerkenwell and St. Pancras. They were nice enough areas, but a little sterile for my tastes - the streets seemed empty of life. They are very close to the city though, which would make it potentially possible to walk to my job (once I figure out where that is).

Thursday, on the advice of a friend of a friend, I checked out Belsize Park, Camden Town and Islington. Much more to my liking, especially Camden Town which is a very funky, hip area. Of course, I am neither funky nor hip, but it's always nice to live around those people.

Today I wandered from Paddington station through Bayswater, North Kensington, Kensington and Notting Hill. North Kensington is about the only of the places that I could actually afford to live in, and while it has an excellent selection of Kabab shops, it seems a little run down. Bayswater was very nice, but walking past a real estate place and seeing STUDIO apartments renting for £450 a week left me thinking that I was probably looking in the wrong part of town.

Tired from all the walking, today I grabbed the tube to Convent Garden and went and checked out London's Chinatown.

I was disappointed at first, because it is actually quite small. When compared to Vancouver, San Francisco, New York or Toronto, London's Chinatown seems puny and lifeless. Then I realized that why London wouldn't have developed a large Chinatown. England used to have the biggest Chinatown of all - Hong Kong. When you think of it in that context, it really puts all other Chinatowns to shame. I mean, Hong Kong is pretty big. I guess that means that now China has the best Chinatowns. I suppose that is the way it should be.

While today's wandering left me in Chinatown, the other two days of wandering both brought me to the same place - King's Cross and St. Pancras stations. King's Cross is both a tube line station as well as a national rail station, while St. Pancras is the new international station and terminus of England's High Speed 1 rail line, as well as serving some national trains. High Speed 1 is mostly used at this point to service the Eurostar trains to Paris and Brussels. I took Eurostar to Belgium from London back in August of 2007, but at the time the trains left from Waterloo station, which was cool, because I had just days before seen the Bourne Ultimatum, which has a really cool scene in Waterloo station.

In November of last year, however, train service moved to St. Pancras to provide better tube connections to London and provide a quicker ride to the continent. The King's Cross train station is currently undergoing renovations and so is the historic St. Pancras hotel, which will open in 2009 as a five-star Renaissance hotel run by the Marriott Corporation.

Now, if you are a regular reader you will know that I have an unhealthy love for fast trains, and so it was cool to check out that station, especially seeing as you can see the Eurostar trains through a glass partition.

I was tempted to buy a ticket for the next departure to Paris, but realized that I had left my passport at my flat, and as the UK hasn't signed the Schengen Agreement, there is no crossing the border into France without it.

The station hall is beautifully restored, with an amazing glass canopy and a huge clock.

At the end of the station is a giant statue of two lovers embracing. It is unclear whether they are greeting each other after one has been away on a long journey, or saying goodbye, but it does capture the passion that hellos and goodbyes can bring.

Running along the side of the Eurostar platforms is what is billed as Europe's longest Champagne bar, at 90 metres in length.

The bar is pretty pricey, with the cheapest glass of bubbly clocking in at around £7.50 and running up from that to £33.50 glass of Krug, but I had to have at least a quick drink. I got an £11.00 glass of the Champagne of the month, and sat reading the free London Paper, trying to look like I was casually waiting for a train and not just some train-geek loser who had wandered in and was now indulging in some weird trans-continental express fantasy.

There was a French guy sitting beside me, who had bought a whole bottle of champagne, but had to run for his train. The bar staff wouldn't let him take his half-drunken bottle with him, so he offered me some. However after a light lunch and a day of walking, the one glass I had was already going to my head and knowing how the bubbles will really knock you on your butt if you drink too much, I declined. The French guy shrugged, picked up the bottle and turned it upside down, emptying the Champagne into the ice bucket. He was so cavalier about it, pouring out half a bottle of what was probably a couple hundred pound bottle. One must admire the existential attitude of the French, non?

As I was leaving St. Pancras, I started to wonder where the world's longest Champagne bar was. I assumed that if St. Pancras billed themselves as Europe's longest Champagne bar, there must be a longer one somewhere. Perhaps a 100 metre long Champagne bar in the American Hotel in Abuja, Nigeria? Maybe there is a 120 metre long Pisco and Champagne bar in the Hotel Reina Cristina in Cusco, Peru? A 115 metre Vodka, Caviar and Champagne bar in the Count Vronsky Bar and Grill at Russia's Bellingshausen Station, Antarctica?

I have not found anyone else in the world claiming any length records when it comes to Champagne bars. Someone suggested that perhaps the labelling is just a Euro-centric reflection of those of us on the continent - who cares if there are longer bars elsewhere in the world, if it isn't in Europe, it isn't chic and it doesn't count.

Perhaps there is a longer Champagne bar somewhere, though. If there is, please let me know. I'd hate to think that I'd miss out on an opportunity to drink at that bar.

In 1884, after a very hard sea voyage from London to New York, inventor Alexander Stanhope St. George had a brilliant idea. What if there was a way to travel to New York without having to endure the long sea voyage? Alexander set out on designing and building a tunnel between the two cities. He soon came to realize, though, that travel through the centre of the earth would be just as arduous a journey as the sea voyage, but that even without providing the means for a comfortable journey between the two cities, the tunnel could be used for a practical purpose.

Alexander designed a device which would allow London and New York to see each other without having to leave their own cities. The invention, called the Telectroscope, was a powerful optical device using mirrors and lenses to magnify the image on the other side.

Starting on an island mid-way between the two cities in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, Alexander St. George and a crew of men started digging the tunnels in both directions. Work started in 1890, but after a breach in the tunnel which drowned 15 men, work eventually had to be stopped in 1894, the tunnel incomplete. Alexander St. George fell into madness, and died in 1917 in an insane asylum in Bethnal Green.

The partial complete tunnel sat unused and forgotten until Alexander Stanhope St. George's great-grandson Paul St. George found technical drawings for the Telectroscope among some paper's in his grandmother's attic. Intrigued, Paul set out to complete his great-Grandfather's work, and on the 22nd of May of 2008, the tunnel was completed and the Telectroscope installed.

I wandered down to the British end today, and checked out New York City. The device is amazing. A massive Victorian machine of unparalleled beauty and function. It is the best of what we human's can invent.

The Telectroscope and London City Hall

Getting my ticket from the automated dispensing machine. What will they think of next!

There's New York on the other side. Hello New York!

Now, some in the "traditional media" have suggest that the tunnel doesn't really exist, and is instead, "a trans-Atlantic broadband network rounded off on each end with HD cameras, according to Tiscali, an Italian Internet provider handling the technical side of the project." Of course, these are the same people that deny the existence of UFO abductions, the faking of the moon landing, the Nazi moon base, or that Paul was killed in a car accident and replaced by one William Shears Campbell of Ontario, Canada.

Truly, what seem more realistic? That some Italian internet provider would be willing to set up a couple TV cameras on other side of the Atlantic for some hippy artist? Come on - hippies and big corporate pig-dogs don't work together. Obviously the simplest, and therefore the correct conclusion is that in fact there was a tunnel partially built underneath the Atlantic Ocean, and that it has recently been completed. Occam's razor, people!

Anyway, whether you believe that it is a tunnel through the earth, or some sort of technical trickery using high-bandwidth trans-atlantic cables, if you want you can check out more detail on the Telectroscope website, and get directions to the locations in both London and New York if you want to check it out. It'll cost you £1 in London, but is free in New York. The exhibit runs until the 15th of June, when I guess they close up the tunnel or something. Who knows?

Maybe you can even catch these two trying to keep up with the Yoga guy on the other side of the Atlantic.

I went down today to a sports bar near Piccadilly Circus called the Sports Cafe, which is an eerily similar name to my favourite bar in Toronto, the Sports Centre Cafe, which I wrote about before leaving Canada. I was heading down to watch the Formula One Canadian Grand Prix from Montreal. I know what you are thinking, why would I travel all the way to London just to watch Canada on TV. But the cars go vroom-vroom and go real fast! It's cool.

The bar was mostly filled with Croatians and Austrians for the Euro 2008 match between the two countries, but there was a small group of fans who huddled around the few TVs showing the F1 race. It was impressive to see people not just watching the race, but applauding a well-timed and executed pit-stop during a full course yellow. These people knew their stuff, and made me (who was often one of the few people in Toronto who could speak at all about F1 racing) feel like a bit of an idiot for not knowing more.

What was interesting, I found, was that when UK-born Lewis Hamilton, then points leader of the F1 season crashed, there weren't groans of disappointment. Instead, there were cheers. It seems that Lewis Hamilton is not very popular with the folks that were at the Sports Cafe this Sunday. Damon Coulthard, a fellow Brit, was applauded when he finished third, however. Not sure why the animosity towards Hamilton, it is something I will have to explore in the future.

As the race wound down the next Euro 2008 game started up. The game featured Poland versus Germany, which was interesting to note because Poland's Robert Kubica finished first, ahead of Germany's Nick Heidfeld. The Polish fans in the bar were cheering both for Kubica's win and the start of the Euro game.

Soccer (footie) I can understand - two teams kick a ball until one puts it in a big net. Racing I can understand - people drive cars really fast until one guy crosses the line ahead of the other guy. But some English sports escape me.

The following conversation took place during the interlude between the Austria-Croatia game and the Poland-Germany game.

Man, looking up at TV screen. "Oh my, van Barneveld beat Taylor!"

Woman, sounding shocked. "No, but Taylor had that 9 darter yesterday."

Man, shaking his head. "Look at that! It was 9-9! Can you believe Taylor lost?"

Woman, looking forlorn into her beer. "Unbelievable."

They were talking about darts. Seriously.

And while I don't understand the appeal of watching professional darts, at least I understand that concept of darts (throw sharp things at target). Don't get me started on cricket, where the TV announcer will stay stuff like, "Left-arm quick Sidebottom, who finished with figures of six for 77, routed the New Zealand lower order on his Nottinghamshire home ground, but it was fellow fast bowler and man-of-the-match James Anderson, with a Test best seven for 43 in the first innings. Meanwhile, Mike Hussey had 74 no out, with a top score of 244."

Huh?

I think I'll stick to the soccer and the racing for now.

- - -

After the sports bar, I took the tube home from Piccadilly Circus. Some of the tube stations in London are really far below ground, and you have these really long escalators down to the platforms.

I arrived at one of the escalators to find that no one else was on it. I had a completely clear moving stairwell just for myself. I started down, and soon found myself running faster and faster down the stairs. I could feel the wind coming up against me. I started laughing and put out my arms, just like when we were kids pretending to be airplanes. I could almost feel myself taking off.

Things have been pretty hectic that past week, trying to get my new life in order, and that is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. This Sunday, though, was a free day - nothing to get done accept watch some sports and act like a little kid on the tube line. To feel the wind on my face, to feel myself starting to lift off the ground thanks to the wind underneath my arms.

It was a reminder that once all this work of settling in settles down, I'll have a whole new world to explore.

The very thought lifts me up.