Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Power failure

Oh yes, and I was stupid enough to forget my UK plug adapter at the London hote

Monday, December 13, 2010

Very British

Travelling again... this time I took a small break between two meetings, and ended up in warm(!) and sunny(!) London. Main task, however, was getting a decent amount of sleep first, so I ended up being inappropriately lazy. Ah well... Saturday evening I went to see Stomp - a strange but fascinating hybrid of pantomime, percussion, and dance performance. Now I know what things you all can use to make a bang! A later highlight was an exhibition of advertisment poster art by Rene Gruaud for Dior. My personal favourite is the Flower Woman... See here for a nice review and the source for the image. unfortunately it's completely impossible to get poster prints for a reasonable price. Otherwise it was great again to wander through the City, well to be accurate mostly through the West End and surroundings. It's been such a long time, I had not even seen Millenium Bridge, Tate Modern, or the Eye yet. (Well maybe except for on Doctor Who.) It's still a vivid, beautiful, fashionable, young, and exclusive place, where something's happening all the time. When I left, at Leicester Square the red carpet was just rolled out for the gala premiere of Burlesque with Cher and Christina Aguilera. And I really started laughing when I went to see the crown jewels in the Tower, and one of the golden ceremonial maces was missing and marked not with "under restoration" as a republican foreigner might expect, but with "in use"... Monday finally was shopping day. (Not only for me but for a few million Londoners as well I guess...) Various museum shops, Waterstones, HMV, Harrods, ... I'm starting to wonder what the Lufthansa agents at the airport will tell me though. Anyway. Time to get to Britain more frequently again.