Dificult takes us a day; imposible, a week

Hurray! The beast is dead!


And by “the beast” I mean my sucky room and by “dead” I mean that I moved. But yes! After dodging all the naw-sayers and much bureaucracy… Martin (my roommate) and I made it out of our shitty 1st-floor room (room 110) up to the 8th-floor (room 805).

Life on the 8th floor is a blast. Our view has changed from a plain white wall of the building next to us… to an amazing view of Chelsea and the London Eye. But that is just one of many benefits. Here is a table comparing changes (yeah... it's a screenshot from Word):

So it’s pretty obvious why 805 is so much better.

We also secretly kept a key-card for 110...which means we have access to 2 kitchens... so we can go into their kitchen and take dishwasher pellets when we run out.
Thanks to this, I was able to get back in the dreaded 110 and take a few pictures. As I was doing that... my camera died...reminding me that both my battery charger and card reader were in the US. So I went out and spent about £30 on a USB multi-card reader and a battery charter (not THAT bad since the charger came with 2 AA and AAA batteries).

Anyhow... I’ve been wanting to do an in-depth observation of my (not so) wonderful accommodations IES provides to us. So I think I’ll go on a picture-taking-spree tomorrow and blog about that.

Until then!

- Maurice W.





PS: here is an e-mail from work I found pretty funny - lol

On Friday 31 October there may be an anti-capitalist demonstration around Reuters Plaza, Canary Wharf, commencing at around 5.00pm. Participants of this event intend to congregate outside the main entrance to the Jubilee underground, adjacent to Reuters Plaza. It is not known how many people will take part but it is possible it could involve large numbers. Participants may be wearing Halloween-themed fancy dress to conduct 'trick or treat'.

Please note that if this event does take place on a large scale, it may be covered by the national and international media. Due to the potential crowds there will be an enhanced police and security presence on the Estate.

first 48 hours in the future

Welcome to (+5h into) the future!
I've broken down my first 48h here in 3 sections for easy reading ;-)

The flight
Getting here was not as fun as it could have been due to the +3h delay Virgin Atlantic had. First they claimed the baggage count was "off by one" and they were not willing to leave with out solving that issues. After about 45... they announced that they now ran into a "technical difficulty" which also had to be fixed (does that mean that the missing bag was stuck in the engine?). Long story short... we left JFK around 12:40am in place of 9:35pm.

Amenities on the flight were amazing. There was this 9" screen in front of each seat which had a variety of movies and games to select from. Staying faithful to the geek within, I ended up playing a little over an hour of "In-Flight Tetris". The foo was less than stellar, but the booze were free so that kept me happy :-)

Day 1 (right after the flight)
Once in London (12:30pm GMT +0 time), out of Hethrow and at my temporary residence in Chelsea... I found my self assigned to what is the smallest room I've ever had to live out of (Pictures and additional comments about that will be left for another post...). And to top it off, they can't turn on our ports until Monday or Tuesday - the suggested alternative was to plug into the common rooms.

Mt initial impression of London is that it's a lot like NY. We walked around Chelsea for about 3 hours while popping in and out of shops gathering some essentials. (yes, I'm judging the ENTIRE city based on the 3 streets we walked down - lol). Prices were not as bad as I expected them to be, but I'll get into details about that in another post since this one is already getting long.

While hanging out in the common room with my fellow WPI-ers, we met a Brazilian kid who has been living in London for about 7 years now. As a way to celebrate our first night in the UK we decided to go to a Bar (no, not a Pub but a Bar). And I must say, bars around here are not as rowdy as the ones in the US. It was quite a pleasant experience.

Day 2
First night in London started off with a bang...actually more like a really high-pitch "BEEEEEP". At 11am the fire alarms went off waking both me and my roommate up. We were not alarmed at all, but more annoyed if anything else. The first reaction was "how do we turn this shit off", his answer: "can we just take out the battery?". But we decided that it would be a better idea to leave the building in case there really was a fire.... So standing outside (in the rain) we discovered that somebody burnt food on the 7th floor kitchen and opened the kitchen door which then set off the entire building alarm... thanks a lot DOUCHE BAG!

Now that we were already WIDE awake... my fellow WPI-ers and I decided to go have a English breakfast. Sausage, 2 sunny-side-up eggs, toast, ham, baked beans, hash browns and a glass of OJ - not bad for about £7 if you ask me. With a full belly, it was now time to obtain means of communicating with each here - so to the cellphone store we went. Fortunately all 4 of us have non-US or unlocked phones and SIM cards are free here... so we just needed to add money to any pay-as-you-go plan. Pretty nifty if you ask me :-)

daily meal: check, communication device: check, living essentials: check. Only thing missing was food for the rest of the week. There are food-stores around, one bigger than the other (I can't remember the names so I'll get back to you on that later). Since we had time to kill, we went to both of them. It was really nice to see hard-alcohol and beer being sold in supermarkets :-D I also think I'm going to get into the habit of drinking wine with my dinner, since some of theme were pretty cheap and it will make me look classy.

Conclusion
In summary, my first 48h were not action-packed by any means but it was very relaxing and enjoying. I have, how ever, spent about £60 at this point which is more than I would spend in a normal weekend in the US... but that includes eating out twice, going to a bar, buying a bathmat and other 'room essentials' plus enough food for a week so I don't think it's that bad.

I promise that my future posts will not be anywhere as long as this. It's just that there i always a lot to see during the first 48h. But now I must end this since it is 6:54am and I need to be at my project site by 9am (which includes a 40min tube ride).

Cheers everyone

- Maurice W.