Weekend roundup

So lets recap what I actually did this weekend:

Friday

• Ministry of Sound

Saturday

• Walk around the London Bridge area

Sunday

• Windsor Castle
• Stonehenge
• Oxford

In case you read my last post... you may notice that we did not make it to the Tower of London. But more on that later... lets go in order:


Ministry of Sound


Prolly the most awesome club I have been to. 4 separate rooms + a VIP area. Each with a different DJ and each with its own environment - totally independent from the others. Simply amazing.


London Bridge

As I said... we did not make it to the Tower of London,. Why? The placed closed at 4pm... and we were not ready to leave until around 3-ish so it was pointless. So I just went back to bed while the rest of the group went somewhere (no clue where), woke back up at 5pm and decided to randomly walk around London. After walking about about 50min (and a few tube stops later), I found my self in the London Bridge area.
Many people confuse Tower Bridge with London Bridge. Let me clarify this for you: Tower Bridge is the fancy looking bridge, while London Bridge (as seen in the picture above) is a simple plain old bridge. London Bridge, how ever, does have an amazing view of Tower Bridge.

Me, standing on London Bridge with Tower Bridge in the back

Windsor Castle, Stonehenge and Oxford
This was part of a tour. Left around 9am, got to Windsor at 10-ish and stayed there for about 2 hours. Then off to Stonehenge for about 50min then Oxford for 1 hours 30 min.
While all 3 places were nice, what I loved the most about the tour was our guide. His name was Fill (or Phill?)(or so he said). Very British, very talkative, very informative.
that's him (in the hat) talking about the first coal-powered train in London and some history about Windsor.

Stonehenge was a bit over rated in my opinion. While it is amazing to see such HUGE stones in such an elaborate formation... at the end of the day they are just a bunch of stones. Also.. they are not AS big as they always look in pictures.
Oxford was the last place we visited. I felt like I could spend all day walking through Windsor Castle... but I would have loved to spend the night in Oxford. It just has a great small-town feeling - very cozy and comfortable. Not to mention that it has 19 college, all which make up Oxford University. So many little streets and such beautiful looking buildings. OH! There was also an open street market in Oxford for the weekend... and the food... good lord the food... it all look SOOO GOOD.


A booth at the open market. Yes... it smelled as amazing as it looks. anyone know where I can find one of these in the US?



This is an entrance to one of the 19 colleges in Oxford. They all look as magnificent as this one.




So that was my weekend in a nutshell. If anyone still wants more pictures, the rest of them can be found over at my Flickr page - so feel free. Most pictures are 8 megapixel, but a few are 5 (not many) so you'll be able to see every little detail if you really want to ;-)


Till next time mates.
Cheers,

Maurice W.


PS: sorry for changing the font style on this post... but Flickr seems to have removed the 'Font Family' option from their WYSISYG editor. Oh well.

The weekend is upon us

Finally Friday, and what a weekend I have ahead...


Friday:
- Ferry Corsten @ Ministry of Sound
Saturday:
- Recover from the night before
- London Tower and London Bridge
- Triplet house party in Hackney (tentative)
Sunday:
- All-day tour of Stonehenge, Winsor Castle and Oxford
- Some how still have energy to go to work the next day


On the flip side... every time I check the gaming news... I feel nostalgia from being away from consoles in such AWESOME times...
Here is a list of all what I won't be able to play until late December (if I still have money) ;_;

• Mirrors Edge
• Call of Duty 5: World at War
• Little Big Planet
• Resistance 2
• Guitar Hero: World Tour
• PixelJunk Monster trophies patch
• High Velocity Bowling trophies patch
• Fallout 3
• Gears of War 2
• Xbox 360 interface upgrade (NXE)
• Motor Storm Pacific Rift
• Rock Band 2 DLC (new Foo Fighters album)

*sigh*

Oh well... this is first in my short but frequent blog posts... and I'm glad for that 'cause I need to go take a nap before we go to Ministry in about 2 hours. Also... expect some new pix for Monday of my crazy weekend travels.

Peace out homies
- Maurice W.


PS: sorry for no pix this time around... but I'm too hyped about Ministry and I need to sleep. I'll make up for it by the time the weekend is over - I promise ;)

Life on the tube

First off, many people have commented about the lack of pictures in blog as well as the low-rate I post things. Since I’m a big believer in customer service… I will cater to both of those comments. First off, I’ll try to add pictures when possible (this post is still all text) and second, in place of long infrequent posts I’ll do much shorter much more often posts. Which means that this will (or should be) the last long post (and I mean long…)

It’s been about 2 weeks now and London is yet to loose its magic. Leaving home at 8am on the other hand has gotten quite old quite quickly. Luckily taken the tube (aka: subway) every day provides me with vast insight to the British commuting culture and I have came up with a few rules to follow while commuting in the UK (a survival guide if you may)

1) Entertainment is a must:

Probably the first thing you’ll notice while commuting on the tube is that 80% of the white-collar travellers are reading. Many opt for the free newspapers (which actually reports REAL news, not just phony tabloid junk) but others have real books, magazines and a few seem to use e-books (I’ve seen 2 Sony digital readers in the wild and a few people using iPods). The amazing thing about this is that nothing seems to break their concentration… reading while standing, walking, talking or even gripping the handle bars for dear life – THEY NEVER TAKE THEIR EYES OFF THE PAPER.
About 18% (where I fall in – podcasts make a 40min commute THAT much better) opts for some sort of music player. iPods are super common (no surprise there) but CD players are not as rare as you would expect them to be.
The other 2% is usually playing with their phone – which is always a BlackBerry, Nokia or iPhone. Some commuter must have a serious addiction to brick-breaker at this point.

2) Silence is golden:

Maybe this is just a consequence of everyone having some form of entertainment or maybe the entertainment came about because of this…. But which ever came first… the fact is that nobody… I mean NOBODY says a word in the tube. If you need somebody to move out of your way, simply tap them of the shoulder or nudge them with your elbow. I once said “thank you” to somebody for moving… and they looked at me as if I had gone mad.

3) Each white-collar for them self:

Just the other day…as I waited for the Jubilee line and watched people pack into the tube like canned lemmings, a guy had a little roller back which got stuck in the doors. As the poor guys struggled to get the doors open and his bag in… 2 other fellow commuters helped him. The joint effort did indeed manage the for the automated door open…but as soon as that happened, the 2 guys who were helping simply crammed into the train with total disregard for the person they seemed to be helping. So while it appeared as if they were helping this guy get his bag into the train… their true intentions were just to get the door open so they can squeeze into it as well. As of course, the other 300 people who were queued up for the train had no reaction (or comment) at all.

Of course…. These rules only hold place during rush hours. On the weekends it seems to be a free-for-all. People are a lot friendlier when to commuting to/from work too. Last Saturday night…I actually had a lady join our conversation on the tube, which I found quite refreshing :-)

For those interested in what my commute is like (distance wise), here you can download a PDF version of the tube map…. And below is my commute route marked in red (from Sloane Square to Canary Wharf)

Cheers,
Maurice W.