The Hank Perspective

So, what's London like? A massive ball of people, cars, shops and buildings. Since I mostly speak English (American at least), things have been fairly easy.

London is a city of discovery, which really appeals to my ADD addled mind, which leads to many hours of just roaming around the city in search of something interesting. Walking in London can lead from aged churches to sex shops in a matter of seconds.

My favorite discoveries so far:

• Rough Trade Records
• Sister Ray Records
• La Casa del Habanos (fantastic selection of bourbon and Cuban cigars)
• The Umbrella Store (sword canes)
  

I also discovered the Holga 120cfn just before we left for England. This little wonder is a cheap, plastic medium format camera. Your average photo geek would sneer at the lack of macro or lenses the size of cannon barrels. While I do love our SLR Digital, the Chinese built Holga produces some amazing images and encourages playful photography.

The shot above was taken in a underground station with multi-exposures and a tad bit of hand movement. I think this shot hits the heart of my feelings for London. Colorful. Bright. Fleeting. Things are always in a state of flux.

Check out my Holga shots on Flicker


As to concerts, music is plentiful here in London and it is nice to be able to light out on a week night in search of some sounds. My first London concert (well, unless you count back in March for the Fonal Records Tour), was the recent Sunn o))) show. RUMBLE.

Hopefully Danielle and I will be seeing Pram Halloween night.

So far, London has been great.

Only where I work... (part 1 of many)

... do you see a developer riding a Segway to get something from the printer down the hall.

Stuff

Stuff - we have it now. Specifically our stuff, at least most of it... our surface shipment with the rest of our clothes, shoes (ooh, how I missed my boots), DVDs, a zillion of Hank's CDs, and just a *few *cooking items arrived this Saturday. I swear I was unpacking this one large box of cooking tools for a solid 40 minutes - it was bottomless! Unpacking took up the majority of the weekend, but it's nice to have this place feel more like our home. And now I can start doing some serious baking - yay! There is one box of stuff that seems to be missing - I am for now assuming it was mistakenly put in storage rather than lost somewhere. But if you see a couple of cast iron pans and a large stock pot looking somewhat lost between London & California, please let me know.

This week Hank and I will be flying to different countries for a couple of days (wow, it is strange to think about that). I'm headed for Dublin for work, and Hank heads out to Germany for a boardgame convention. It's a close race as to which of us is geekier at this point, I think. We're also trying to get in a long weekend in Brussles in the next few weeks. Mmmm.... chocolate....