Waiting...

For Jorge to get home so thought I'd take the opportunity to write a new post. Jorge is coming home tonight from Portugal for 2 nights and then he's leaving again for two weeks. Rose (our flatmate) was supposed to move out Monday, but she decided to stay the rest of the month. So in August she'll be leaving and I'll get my own room.

I'm feeling more settled here, starting to get a sense of the layout of the city, how to get from one end to the other. Here's what I've gleaned from my limited understanding of London so far: The West end is the 'posh' area with beautiful townhouse-style homes and wide streets with shopping and cafes and parks. The theatre district is also West. The center area of town is where Soho is, with lots of restaurants and shopping and throngs of tourists. Parts of it (mostly Oxford St) remind me of Broadway, where you're just pushing through crowds and everyone is trying to get to H&M and Top Shop and the big department stores like Debenhams, Marks and Spencer, and Selfridges.

If you head East from the center of town, you hit Holborn, where I work. It's a pretty area, but it's mostly offices and business people. There are some nice residences and pockets of shopping, but it seems mostly a 9-5 area and the shops and restaurants cater to that crowd. A little further East of that is the section they refer to as 'the city', which was really confusing when I first arrived, because in NY 'the city' obviously means Manhattan. So when everyone kept saying 'that's in the city' or 'that's closer to the city', I was so confused, like aren't we in the city? But it turns out the Wall Street-ish corporate banking and stock market area is called the city.

Jorge told me it used to be the main marketplace section of London, so the streets there are actually named with what traditionally was sold. So there's a Poultry Street and a Threadneedle St, etc. There are some really funny names, but the tone is definitely all business. In the morning when I look down from the top of the double decker bus, all I can see is throngs of people in their dark business attire darting around to get to work. It's industry in the flesh.

Further East is Shoreditch and that's pretty much my area of town. It's still very business-heavy until you get to Liverpool St., which is a grandiose commuter rail station. There's Old Street with a lot of bars and clubs, and then you come to Spitalfields and Brick Lane, where all the markets are, and where I live. Brick Lane is predominantly art galleries and vintage stores, and where all the Bangladeshi and Turkish and Pakistani shops and food are. It was historically a Jewish area of town, and there's some remnants of the culture, most notably the two bagel shops near me that are very famous. People go late night and get bagels (which on the shop signs are spelled Biegel, I guess that's the old world spelling) in brown paper bags. The bagels are smaller than NY bagels so people usually get two. You can get them with just cream cheese, with cream cheese and smoked salmon, or with salt beef and mustard.

They have stacks of them already prepared and you just say what you want and they throw them at you and it's only like £2. The salt beef are basically huge chunks of pastrami-style beef that's crazy salty and greasy and they slap on this mustard that is super spicy. Like Jewish yellow mustard but 5x spicier. I'm sure they're incredibly fattening but people love it, especially at 2am when they're drunk, there's lines out the door. They're really good, but not something you'd want to eat too often.

If you go further East from me, it seems to get more residential and the predominant culture is Bangladeshi & Pakistani, at least as far as I've gone. The area of South London I've been to has mostly just been by the Thames. There's the London Eye (the giant ferris wheel), Tower Bridge, the Saatchi Gallery, and the new Tate Modern Museum, which is housed in an old power station and is really cool. There's also Shakespeare's Globe Theatre where I'd love to go see a play sometime. Wimbledon is also in South London. There's a kind of stereotype in London that the North is more snobby and they look down on the South. South London is supposed to be tougher and more blue collar I guess. Which is hard for me to understand just yet because the areas of South London I've been to by the Thames are really nice, and the areas of North London I've been to, like Camden Town, are pretty sketchy. But that's the historical stereotypes of the areas, so who am I to argue?

The area of North London I've been to the most is Camden Town. That's where a lot of music venues are and it's also kind of like a punk rock area. It reminds me of Sunset Strip in LA, just in terms of there being tons of little punk rock stores and record shops and tattoo shops and headshops and stuff like that. There's also lots of sketchy dudes out saying 'weed' 'weed' as you pass by, which reminds me of the old days in Washington Square Park when the dealers would walk around going 'smoke' 'smoke' to everyone. Camden Town seems cool but I definitely never feel safe walking around there at night. I've also been North of Camden Town a little and it's just pretty, quiet residential neighborhoods.

My friend Hans showed me around Stoke Newington on Sunday a bit, and I definitely want to go back. It's considered Northeast London I guess. At first I was apprehensive because it seemed really ghetto. But he showed me around a bit, and it's crazy, in the middle of this really urban area there's this giant beautiful castle randomly on one of the main roads. He said it was there for a long time, and it actually sits on a huge lake that's behind it, which I couldn't see from the road. It was honestly like being in the middle of Bed Stuy and just seeing this huge castle with a lake, like an apparition. I guess they decided to use the castle as a climbing school, which is even more bizarre. So now you can go and climb there. I want to go sometime! Although I have no idea how good I'd be at climbing, probably crap. I definitely intend to go back and see the lake though. There was also a really old cemetery there which was closed at the time, but I'd like to go explore some day.

One of the funny things I've noticed about London is that it has all these beautiful little parks and green spaces tucked away in every section of the city. Often you'll be walking along a really urban area and come upon a pretty little park or garden or small lake and you're transported to a really pleasant, tranquil space. There's also often a little area with animals. So you can see sheep and deer just hanging out in the middle of the city.

Now that I'm starting to get past some of the transitional pains, I'm starting to get excited about all the things there are to see. I know the English are famous for their gardens and I've heard there's several botanic gardens in the London area, so that's something I really want to look into. I also heard there's all kinds of different cool movie theatres in the city and some of them you can even buy alcohol and order food and stuff.

I actually went this past weekend to see the new Harry Potter movie, which I really liked. There were too many kids there since we went to an afternoon show, but other than that I was happy. I met up with my friend Sabina in West London near where she lives and we got some lunch and walked around for a bit before the movie. I really like it over there, it's beautiful and definitely more of how I always pictured London to look traditionally. I think it's near the area of town where we rented the Mews house when the whole family came to stay in London for a week during the Holidays when Adam was on leave two years ago.

Sabina is an old friend of mine from Boston, she was Mary's roommate in college and she also moved back to NY around the same time that Mary and I did. She works for Grey Advertising, for a division called G2 and she moved to London about a year ago. She was able to get transferred here by the company, which is cool because they pay for everything, they pack up and move all your stuff, help you find a place to live, etc.

I found out that Sabina was in London through Mary and we got in touch awhile back. Last week, besides going to the movie with her, I also met up with her for her birthday earlier in the week. She was having drinks with a bunch of friends at one of the bars at this hotel, the Sanderson. It's a pretty fancy hotel, and the bar in the outdoor garden is really nice, with cocktail waitresses and food. Sabina was there with her sister, who was visiting from NY, and a bunch of her friends and colleagues. I knew it would be expensive so I only ordered two drinks on my card (they make you open a tab). After a few hours, one of her friends suggested we check out this salsa club in Soho.

When we asked for the check, the hostess informed us that out table was £500 pounds minimum and we had only spent £200 on everyone's bill combined. It turns out that they had mentioned the minimum to Sabina when she booked it, but she overestimated and figured it would be pretty easy to meet. They told us unequivocally that we were going to be charged regardless. So we all offered to split it, but Sabina felt bad and convinced everyone to let her make up the difference and said she had gotten some money from her family for her bday. I felt horrible about her paying that kind of bill on her birthday, but financially I wasn't really in a position to do much about it. So we stayed and ordered a bunch of bottles of champagne and wine and lots of food and more cocktails and got nice and drunk and had a fun time.

At some point in the night, I wandered inside to the front bar. There were some really surreal looking women in there; fake boobs, orange spray on tans, bleached blonde hair, stick thin. There were also a ton of black hip-hop guys who I swear were all from NY and looked like high rollers, although in what profession I have no idea. They seemed like they were having a ball, I guess that's the place for a rich hip hop dude from Brooklyn to pick up skinny white English bitches, who knew?

When I sat back down at the table I remarked to Sabina's friend about the scary women, and he told me they were looking for footballers. He said they all live with their mothers and spend every cent they make on clothes and boobs and fake tans and stuff trying to catch a rich footballer. I asked him, does it work? And he was like, I'm sure, footballers are pretty stupid. Point taken. I was fascinated though. A whole new trashy segment of society I've never seen before! I went back to stare at them for awhile, the people watching there was incredible. I'd like to go back again, maybe minus the £500 minimum table though!

So what other news? I've seen Joao's band, the Fabulous Penetrators, play two times recently, once in Camden and once in Dalston. They're really good, straight up old school-style rock and roll. They're pretty bad-ass but they lean towards the schtick-y side, the singer has lightning bolt shaped sideburns and he dons a furry bear head throughout part of the set, which I find amusing mostly because he drinks pints through the mouth of the mask. He also has this sparkly silver bull horn thing he wears. They all dress in red & black suits. The music is great and fast and always gets everyone dancing, so good times.

Last week we had a photo shoot at the flat. Joao's friends who he used to work with at MTV have recently started a video production company. They were working on their website and they wanted to take a black and white still photo of a girl in kind of a messy room. They were using it as the main page to navigate throughout the site and were going to turn aspects of the photo into navigational objects, like a polaroid camera would be the link to the pictures section, a stereo would go to the music section, etc. So they scoped out Nuno's room the week before and then came back to do the shoot. They were here for a few hours and then we all went out for drinks afterwards. All the guys and the model for the shoot were really nice, and they bought me beers to thank me for letting them use the place (Nuno is away but they left him a bottle of whiskey). Joao and I spent most of the time playing around on Facebook and Myspace anyway, so it's not like I actually did anything, but no reason to turn down free drinks!

Everyone here is way more into Facebook than MySpace. I always thought Facebook was mostly for college students, but I guess as soon as they opened up access to everyone, it became really popular over here. People kept asking me if I was on it, so I finally joined. So if you're on Facebook, look me up.

Weirdly enough I kind of need to know about stuff like that for my job. You can't be in Online Marketing and not know all of the channels that people use to reach their markets, especially one as popular as that. Even if I don't use Facebook or MySpace to promote the brands I work on, I need to understand what the demographics and opportunities are on spaces like that. Not that I'm defensive about being on social networking sites, I actually quite like them, just think it's interesting that I actually need to be on them, or at least understand them (and all Web 2.0 sites/functionality) for my job. Anyway, I digress.

This past Sunday I had a great day. It started out crap because as usual it was torrential downpour for half the day. I found this amazing jewlery store called Tatty Devine a few weeks ago. When I first got here, I saw someone wearing this really great plastic name necklace and I asked them where they got it. They said there was a store where these girls custom made them and they're really popular. A few weeks later I was walking down the street from my flat, and it turns out they have a store right near me. I ordered a black one with a little lightning bolt charm hanging off the corner. It took them a few weeks to make it, but it was finally ready on Sunday so in the morning I went and picked it up. I guess the designers are pretty well known by now so 'hip' people in London might think it's passé but I don't give a shit, I can just plead ignorance because I'm a NYer and I totally love my necklace. I know when all you ladies come visit you're going to want one...

So I got my necklace and I was happy. Hans had invited me to go to a festival in Finsbury Park, so I told him I would meet up with him. I know Hans because he's Jorge's old flatmate and we've met a few times when I was visiting. So I thought, it will be nice to go to the Park and maybe the weather will get better. But I just thought it was some kind of small festival with a band or two playing. Before I left to meet him, I looked it up online and then I was really excited. It turns out it's this big free festival called RISE that they've been doing every year for the last few years to promote anti-racism and multi-culturalism. There were tons of performers, including St. Etienne and Kelis, and best of all... the Skatalites were headlining! I was super stoked to see the Skatalites.

So I met up with Hans and it was pouring rain. The buses to get to Finsbury Park were not coming and when they did come, they were so packed they wouldn't let anyone on. So we waited in the rain at a bus stop for like 45 minutes and then decided to walk. We eventually got on a crazy packed bus and everyone was yelling at each other, but then we arrived and it was like - whoa. There were thousands of people in this huge park, with carnival rides and 5 stages and tons of food vendors and merchandise and all kinds of stuff. We got some cans of cider and water at the corner store (what we call a bodega) and no one bothered us to look in our bags and take away our drinks when we went in (which was a really refreshing and welcome change from NY). We walked around and watched different performers. There was a Cuban stage but the band on was terrible and totally drunk. We met up with some of Hans' friends, these Japanese girls, and they had a mat so we all camped out with a view of the main stage.

The rain had stopped and it was sunny and we watched Kelis and drank cider. Hans got a bunch of food, fried plantains and fruit and some jerk chicken. We ate and drank more and this guy who was the winner of the human beatbox competition did some cool stuff and entertained everyone for awhile, and then finally... the Skatalites. The Skatalites are credited with inventing the rythms of reggae, ska, and rocksteady and they are living legends. I've seen them play many times before, and they are now quite old, but they keep on going. Some of the members have died, and they are so revered in Jamaica they give them State funerals. I've met them before and they are just the loveliest most amazing people. Some of the band members that have died have been replaced by their children, which is really cool.

The Skatalites played and they sounded amazing. Doreen Shaffer must be in her 70s, but her voice still sounds like honey. They played a really good set and I have to say, nothing makes you feel more at home in unfamiliar surroundings than hearing the music you love. Watching all the people around me, truly an international community with people from probably every single race and culture in the world, all digging the Skatalites, made me feel that being here is an experience that will really matter to me. It's been really hard to be away from everyone I love, but I'm starting to glimpse some of the stuff I came here looking for, and starting to get excited about exploring London and Europe.

So on that note, I hope everyone is well, and send my love.