Well, there you have it, Mate...London in 24hrs. Literally.
As the first stop in our 2 week whirlwind tour of Europe, London didn't fail to impress. My last visit to London was even shorter, a mere few hours spent in the hotel before waking up early in the morning to catch a flight back to the states. This time, the lenght of stay has at least been doubled -- which is not saying much, but definitely headed in the right direction.
Climbing out of the St. Paul tube station, we had no trouble finding our hotel -- Club Quarters St. Paul's, which is just 50 feet away from the grand cathedral and exactly where Google map showed it to be. The hotel is nice, very nice and contemporarily furnished. The staff is friendly and helpful. The room is...shall we say, cozy? ;) but again, it's all very modern looking and nice. Of course, for roughly $100 a night, you can't do much better than this centraly located hotel that's a brisk 2min walk to the tube -- so yes, I'd recommend it (thanks, TripAdvisor :)
After freshening up, we headed out to find Millenium Bridge -- it's only a few blocks away, but perhaps I was still a little disoriented from the 12 hr flight, we ended up taking quite a detour before we finally arrived at the river bank...but nevertheless, we found it. The bridge connects the City and Southwark, which used to be the industrial part of the town and nowadays is home to places like Tate Modern. Our Knopf pocket map guide (which I love) recommended this Anatolian (Turkish) joint called Tas Pide right across from the Globe theater, so we headed straight there. It turned out to be a really cool place, nice ambiance, packed and great food. For £18, we had a wonderful dinner with 6 tapas style dishes from one of their set menus -- even though it was basically vegetarian, I actually loved it. Again, I would highly recommend it. After dinner we took a stroll inside Tate Modern. I've always been fond of modern art, though not too knowledgable, it interests me and for the most part, I enjoy it -- Wei, on the other hand, is not a big fan of it. She went along with it for a good while, bless her heart...but when we got to this strange lil peace called 'double no' -- she finally cracked. After staring for a good five minutes at these 2 tv's stacked on top of each other, top one inverted, both displaying the same clown jumpin up and down shouting 'NO, NO, NO, NO...' repeatedly -- she bursted out into laughter. I can't blame her, it was really a strange lil thing...on the way out, we tried to avoid eye contact with the guard.
We had originally planned to go to Ministry of Sound for a night of hardcore disco boogie but soon realized that it was too ambitious of a goal. Tired and with a full day ahead of us, we headed back to the hotel to get a good nite of sleep.
In the morning, we woke up bright and early to go see what every tourist must see when they come to London -- Changing of the Guards. We arrived at the Buckingham Palace shortly after 10am, since the event doesn't start until 11:30, we strolled down Mall Street to Trafalgar Square only to see Nelson's Column is under rennovation -- but they did cover it up nicely with a rendition of what it will look like when the work is complete just like all the other under-construction projects in London. Odd but kinda cool. With a couple of croissans and coffee in hand, we made our way back through St. James park towards possibly the most elaborate 'clock-in, clock-out' ceremony. The event started right on time, and for the next 30min or so, the soldiers walked back and forth, shouting indistinct things, every now and then, the band played, and then, they walked back and forth some more. I got in quite a few good shots after I climbed up on the Victoria Memorial, but to be honest, it was kinda over-rated. But oh well, we had to see it.
We left the ceremony before it ended, partly because we were bored and partly because we didn't want to face the mass crowd trying to leave the event all at the same time. We walked down towards Big Ben, took a few post card shots and marched onwards to the Eye. The London Eye was built by British Airways and it's currently the tallest wheel in the world at 443ft, although my peepz back in China is already working on beating this meaningless record by erecting a 525ft high Star of Nanchang -- I know, I'm so proud of them. Anyhow, after about an hour of wait (getting tix and waiting in line to get on), we were finally 'flying'. It was a beautiful day and you could see all the way out the edges of the city, which made for some great photo opps. The ride was relaxing and quite satisfying -- much like my last BA flight.
After coming back down to earth, we headed to Convent Garden -- an old fruit and vegetable market with cool arched gallery that dates back to 1832, of course, now it's actually a shopping center with crowds of tourist from all over, street performers, street vendors and punk kids...but it made for a nice spot to sit down and enjoy lunch after walking around all morning.
Of course, we needed to burn off some calories after lunch, so it's back on two feet and walking again -- this time, we strolled down to Piccadilly Circle and Chinatown (cleaner than the other Chinatowns I've been to) before hopping back on the Tube to head towards Tower of London. We didn't actually step foot inside the famed tower...with a few photos outside, we contiuned onto Tower Bridge -- as much a symbol of London as Big Ben, the bridge was quite impressive but I must say I was a lil bummed that we didn't get to see the movable bridges in action; but since it didn't look like any big boats were about to come rolling down the river any time soon and we were getting hungry, it's onwards we go. LondonTown.com recommended this lil place called FishClub for some classic fish&chip, which is just what we needed to wrap up our event-filled day. It was kinda hard to find since the directions were very clear and we had to navigate between subway and bus, but we finally found it and it did not dissapoint. The chef, whom also happened to be the owner, gave his recommendations and they turned out just perfect. A cold beer, some perfectly fried battered Haddock and thick fries, I mean...chips -- just superb.
Well, that's about it...tomorrow, it's onto Paris -- I will blog pending internet availability. All in all, I'm quite fond of London, I would even go as far as saying I could see myself living here at some point. Despite the weather that can be dreadful, the city is great, historic yet modern, laid back and energetic, the people are friendly and polite, and you just get the feeling that you will never be bored here.
p.s. We are doing pretty well on our $40 a day (per person) plan. Breakfast=£3.50, Lunch=$10.05, Dinner=£20.10 -- Total (for 2)=£33.65. Even with the horrible exchange rate, we are still well under -- Not bad for a notoriously expensive city like London.
If you look up that word in the dictionary, or nowadays, on Wiki...they should have a picture of a late model Toyota pickup truck next to it. Why? watch this video and you'll see.
It's been a while, and I gotta say, I miss it. But after my brief Autoblog tenure, I felt really burnt out about blogging.
It all started off being something really exciting...as somehwhat of an early adopter to the whole blogging thing, I started my first entries as mass emails to my friends during my first trip back to China in 2002 since I left the motherland 10 years prior -- basically, I just didn't want to have to re-tell my story like 10 times :) upon returning, I discovered Blogger, and it made sense to transfer my travelouges there so I don't accidently loose them to my email trash bin some day...and they sorta just sat there...until, when I decided to move down to SoCal, I started blogging again...this time, just more or less a journal of my new SoCal life.
Then one day, it occured to me since I'm such a car buff and I spend all this time online everyday reading about cars, I should just blog about them -- in comes AutoWonder. It was really a labor of love, I would spend hours researching on a story, find the best picture to post, discover the hidden angles, writing and re-writing each paragraph to get to that perfect delivery. The site got an early traffic boost when one day a friend sent me a photo he snapped while he was in NY, it shows Donald Trump presenting a brand new silver SLR McLaren to his supermodel wife Melania -- I did some research and put together a lil story on it, the story got picked up by a bunch of big blogs such as Jalopnik and Luxist, and next thing you know, I got over 10K page views that day and the story even made it onto radio. Yep, my 15sec of fame, sorta.
After that, I figured out that if I submit unique stories to the bigger car blogs, I can drive traffic to my site, and the one advantage I had was the fact that I can read Chinese -- so I started scouring Chinese auto sites for car news, translating them into English and then tipping it to Autoblog/Jalopnik. Yep, I found a niche, and I was able to sustain a pretty health following of readers. When I think back, those were the funnest days of my blogging career (if you can call it a career).
Then one day, I read a post on Autoblog that they are looking for new bloggers -- I thought, what the hell, I'll give it a shot. So I submitted what I thought were some of my best pieces, and sent it in. About a week later, I got a call from Randal, whom asked me to start blogging for Autoblog. WOW!!! this is Awesome! (yes, Awesome with a captial A) I felt like I just got discovered or something. Riding on my excitement, I started blogging feverishly -- something you might not know about blogging for Autoblog (and the rest of blogs on WIN, likely) is that you have to meet monthly post quotas, 120 was the target I was given, and yes, that would mean you'd have to pump out 4 posts per day, EVERY day of the month. And oh by the way, you get paid $4 per post -- do I sound a little bitter? I suppose I am. Here's why: while it's like extra gravy that you actually get paid to blog about your passion that you would normally just do for free (or a lil bit of Google AdSense $$), at WIN, quantity was far more important than quality. The focus is on making sure there are enough posts to go live every hour, rather than the writing is good and stories are well-researched, or a topic you are really passionate about for that matter -- in a matter of weeks, I found myself dreading the chore of having to check through Google alerts, bloglines etc for the stories that I can turn into a post the quickest, ideally something I can churn out in about 30min, thus making $8/hr. LOL. I found it to be insulting to be honest. Why do that when I can do some consulting work on the side which I enjoy almost as much for like $50/hr? (actually, that's what I ended up doing later ;) Oh, ya, and there were the commentors...that is the one thing I definitely did not miss, those nasty comments from losers just have nothing better to do. To make a long story short (and I just realized, this has turned into a long post, I only meant to say, "hello world, I'm back", but look what I ended up with...), I stopped blogging for Autoblog after a few month. I've had enough. It just wasn't fun anymore. Since then, I've been pretty jaded about the whole blogging thing...Slicksta has on various occassions tried to convince me to jump on the blog on blog idea, but I just didn't feel motivated. Recently, I wrote a few pieces on a new domain I purchased -- Roboa, but that's pretty much where I left it.
So why now, you ask? what changed? Well, it's my upcoming Europe trip that got me all excited again. One of the things that I'm already excited about the trip is I get to write about my experiences...and this time, not in a lil journal bought in Amsterdam like on my last trip, but on a blog. So there you have it, my long-winded re-entry post.
yep, that's right, we moved to Irvine -- the Chinese capital of Southern California. and it's no exaggeration by any means: according to the census of 2000, 30% asian; there's this HUGE chinese temple on Jamboree and mind you, TWO ranch 99's within few miles of each other; and you won't go a whole day without overhearing someone speaking chinese at places such as the circuit city next door.
whenever i tell someone i had just moved from santa monica to irvine, they usually look perplexed while resisting the urge to ask "why the hell would you do that?" i know, it might seem like an odd choice to most ppl our age -- moving away from the fun, hip Santa Monica to the boring planned community of Irvine. But for me, it's the right choice. 1st, the job...a really good opportunity for me to further develop with plenty of room to flex and learn about other things i'm interested in; 2nd, at this point of my life, having been thinking and planning on buying a place to settle down, OC is the place to be; and last but definitely not least, something that's always been in the back of my mind -- the car biz...with so many car companies hq'd in the OC, i am now one step closer, at least geographically, to my dream.
It seems like every year we go thru the same dilema...should i go all out partying or should i just chill on NYE? as most ppl would say, and as experiences have proven, big NYE parties are often over-rated -- shouting out $100 for a tix, dealing with traffic, parking and the amature crowd...
so needless to say, when it came time to decide what to do on NYE again this time, i was on the fence...at first, it seemed like it was gonna be the Giant Village party in downtown LA: the fact that digweed is doing a 6hr set, paul van dyk, mark farina, crystal method...it just sounded too good to miss; but i was really dreading havin to deal with a massive crowd of 12,000 ppl and once i realized it might rain on NYE (given it's a mostly outdoor event) -- it was an easy decision to call it off.
so we decided to go see Tiesto at the Palladium -- a much smaller crowd at a mere 4000; with Tiesto, the #1 DJ in the world; and best of all, indoors!
fastward to NYE, I pick up Tom and Emily, and with surprisingly little traffic, we get to the Palladium in record time...once we figured out the right line to be in, it actually took no time before we found ourselves inside the palladium -- and what a stunning venue it is:
the party seemed to already be in full swing by then -- Tiesto is on the decks, go-go girls on the plaforms shaking their tail feathers, a pumped-up crowd filling the grand circular concert hall, lights going in every direction, graphics flashing on giant plasma TVs and projector screens
about 11am today, we all got an email saying there's a mandatory all-team mtg in 5 min...and when i looked over to the mtg area, i saw our HR director dressed up as a cop standing over a table with white table cloth covering what appears to be a big pile of CASH!!!
Bonus Time
a crowd quickly gathered around the table with an enthusiasm never-before-seen at any all-team mtg's...after our CEO gave the much anticipated "we had a tremendous years,thank you all..." speech and everyone gave a roaring round of applause (really just to warm up our hands to grab our share of the cash), the cover was lifted to reveal...guess what -- a BIG pile of cash!!!
Now with a thick stack of cash in our pockets, lunch arrives -- it's fried chicken, salmon, mashed potatoes and grilled vege's...and it was delicious.
Just as we are sitting back in our seats completely bloated, another email comes thru -- it turns out the lunch we ordered for tomorrow showed up TODAY! so on top of the great food we just ate, we now have 30+ pizzas sitting in the kicthen!
a few minutes later, I have my dinner, a sausage/peperoni pizza, sitting on my desk smelling wonderfully...
This morning, I woke up to the invigorating sounds of what i consider to be one of the funniest ad campaigns in recent times -- Starbucks Glen.
I know, I know, this is old news already, but I still love it nevertheless...it has much staying power with me.
Not sure why I didn't think of it earlier, but yesterday, it dawned on me I should get the mp3. So I googled "Starbucks Glen mp3", downloaded the tune, bluetoothed it to my phone, set it as my alarm ring tone, and waaalaaa, this morning, I was brought into consciousness by the sounds of "Glen! Glen-Glen-Glen! Glen-Glen-Glen....Glen's the man! goin' to work..."
I woke up giggling -- can't think of a better song to wake up to and get ready for work...
anyway, if by chance the brains behind the "Starbucks Glen" campaign is on this site -- THANK YOU and NICE WORK!
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