Apologies for not posting so frequently for the past couple of weeks - work/life has been very hectic (even more so than usual) and doesn’t look like it will let up for a few weeks yet. That said, I will endeavour to get a few posts out starting with this experiment I made recently…
A couple of weeks back I moved rooms in the house where I live to the top floor “penthouse” which one of my previous housemates had just vacated. Aside from having its own ensuite bathroom (a major plus!) and a balcony it also has great back and front views. Whist enjoying watching the world go by I decided to try creating a time lapse video with the inbuilt camera on my MacBook Pro. Above is my first attempt which I captured using an open source program called Gawker which took a picture every 20 seconds and then mixed together in iMovie ‘08. The music is “Red-Eye” by The Album Leaf and the view is looking towards Canary Wharf which you can just see peeking out from behind some of the houses in the foreground.
Although the picture is fairly compressed it’s nice to see what you can do with the tiny camera in a MBP and I hope to be doing some more experiments in the near future.
The higher floors offer amazing panoramic views of east London with the river Thames snaking its way around the Isle of Dogs. On a clear day you can see for many miles and it’s striking just how flat London without a hill in sight! It’s a shame there is no public viewing gallery but presumably fears of terrorism have curtailed any possibility of that.
There’s a lot of construction taking place around this area at the moment, mostly luxury apartments (like Pan Peninsular) but also various infrastructure projects to prepare for the Olympics in 2012. Part of this includes the lengthening of Docklands Light Railway trains which is causing mass disruption for anyone trying to get to and from central London at the moment (i.e. everyone)!
I’m a little late in posting this but on Tuesday I was lucky enough to be in central London at the same time as the RAF (Royal Air Force) was celebrating it’s 90th anniversary which included a cool flypast of the Red Arrows and Typhoon fighter jets. I watched from London Bridge which gave a great vantage point as the planes appeared seemingly out of nowhere over Canary Wharf leaving coloured smoke trails in their wake.
It was all over in a matter of seconds but I still managed to snap a couple of OK pics with my iphone - more from the BBC. Not a bad way to spend a weekday lunchtime
Despite London’s large Chinese population, finding good authentic Chinese food at a reasonable price is somewhat difficult - China Town is OK but generally expensive and the quality/hygiene questionable. However, when you scratch beneath the surface, there is the odd gem to be found and sometimes in the most unassuming of places. One such place can be found south of the Thames not far from where I’ve been working and over the past year has become a popular haunt for Friday lunch of almost mythical proportions. One of my colleagues has kindly written a review which I thought I might share (complete with my iPhone photos) -
An unassuming blue building at the Elephant end of Walworth Road - Indian Cafes, ropey B&Bs, the world famous Ivory Arch nightspot. Not necessarily where one would expect to find a restaurant of any true quality, but then life is full of unexpected pleasures. At the far end are a set of doors that would not look out of place along the Great Wall and behind them lie sublime culinary delights not of this world.
The Dragon Castle menu has all the regular Chinese restaurant favourites - sweet and sour chicken, crispy duck etc - and some unusual but tantalising specialities, but the real draw is the dim sum. The highlight is the scallop and coriander cheung fun - juicy scallops and fresh coriander wrapped in a sheet of glistening cheung fun. Other favourites include the Vietnamese spring rolls, beef balls, sesame prawn rolls - a far cry from the usual sesame prawn toasts. The dumplings are a real treat, steamed or fried, pork or prawn, or both for that matter - I am salivating just thinking about them.
The dim sum specials menu has just been updated with some truly delicious new ideas - mixed seafood dumplings and honeyed venison puffs are the star attractions.
You might think that all this is sounding a little pricey for lunch, but amazingly no matter how much you order the bill is never above £15 per head - perhaps this really is some magical realm!
So go, go now and try some of the joys that I have mentioned, and some that I have not, but make sure you get there by 5pm, because that’s when the dim sum chefs knock off.
I’ve noticed on recent trips outside London that being a “Londoner” tends to make you a bit of a snob towards the rest of the UK. A few weeks ago I visited a mid-sized town approximately 1.5 hours north of London. Upon arrival at the tiny railway station there could be seen a group of around 10 middle-aged men all looking rather dishevelled and bored. OK, I thought, they must be waiting for the next train out of this middle-of-nowhere hole. Two hours later when I returned to take the train back to London I was surprised to see that they were still there - upon closer inspection I noticed they were all carrying small notepads and some had cameras - this could only mean one thing: Trainspotters, otherwise known as Anoraks (persons with unimaginative/dull hobbies). What brings people to spend their free time watching trains and record useless trivia about them I will never know but unfortunately this sort of activity only reinforces the idea that there isn’t much life outside the capital (even though this isn’t really true… with a few exceptions)!
In Japan they have a word for similar sorts of behaviour: Otaku - a term used to refer to people with obsessive interests, particularly in anime and manga, but can also refer to any fan of, or specialisation in any particular theme, topic, or hobby. The author William Gibson defined Otaku as “pathological-techno-fetishist-with-social-deficit” which is an interesting take on the way people collect data as opposed to objects in the information age. There are of course different extremes to which this can be taken and I guess we all are collectors to an extent…
I’m off to Amsterdam tomorrow but will be back later next week and will hopefully have a bit more time over the festive season to post more frequently
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