This post is a bit late so I apologize for that and promise to do a second update later today or tomorrow to catch up with the rest.

I  made it safely back to the states for Christmas, not sure why they decided to let me in :)

The week prior to going home was a haze of running around trying to finish my projects up and get them turned in, which explains why I started packing to come home an hour before I had to walk out of the house on Wednesday.

A few weeks ago it was the 60th birthday of Clyde, one of our regulars at the pub. So I headed down after class to have a birthday drink with him. It's a good group of locals that we have and keeps the place fun and exciting, especially when they're trying to get Clyde to dance on the bar to Johnny Cash.

Friday before leaving Andrew and I walked down to Covent Gardens to see the small Christmas market they had there and grab a drink before I had to head to work. There is a small Cornish pub that is on the second floor of one of the porticos with outside balcony space so we sat up there and watched all the passerby's from a distance. It was surprisingly not as cold as you would expect sitting outside. Then it was time for me to head off to work. Not an overly exciting evening at work, crowded but fairly low-key. 

Saturday night I finally got together with my uni friends from the Welcome Program. I haven't seen most of them in a few weeks because we have all been so busy and we're spread throughout the city.  Besides them we were joined by Andrew and my friend Jemma from work who quickly bonded over their geographical location (Andrew is an aussie and Jemma's a kiwi). We all went in to Leicester Square, one of the main club areas downtown, to Zoo Bar, which we managed to walk right past while we were trying to find it and ended up circling all the way around the square to get back to it. All my fault, of course, cause I was sure I knew where I was going....yea, that's how it normally goes with me.

Sunday was a day full of work at the pub, where I got to stuff my face with a nice lamb Sunday roast, so yummy and it makes you so sleepy.

Monday was a day full of course work, just trying to get as much done as possible, and then a bit of relaxing going down to Westfield Mall with Andrew and then wandering down to Oxford Street to see all of the pretty Christmas lights, we didn't stay there too long because it was cold and that area gets very crowded especially now during the Christmas season.

Tuesday I dropped off one of my prints for uni to be mounted and then after doing more course work (see the trend, course work, course work and more course work) Andrew and I headed over to Embankment to see another Christmas market that was going on along the river just down the street from where I used to live last time I was in London. Since we were done there earlier then we expected we had time to go grab dinner before I had to go to work. And I was excited to get in to work because Rod was working with me Tuesday night and he and Liv had just gotten back from their week vacation in Egypt, so jealous. So I got to hear all about their trip and be jealous of Liv's tan. I think Egypt is starting to sound like a very nice idea.

Wednesday was an early morning, as they all have been recently. I grabbed my mounted print from the printer, headed up to campus loaded down with my workbooks, images and other things I had to turn in. I hung up my image and then proceeded to try and find out where the workbooks were supposed to go. Luckily I ran into my friend Petter while I was frantically searching and he agreed to find out where they go and drop mine off with his since I had an hour and a half during which I had to get home, pack, try and shower and get out of the door to my bus. I gratefully agreed and hurried for home. 

I actually managed to pack incredibly quickly and way too much, no surprise there. I had checked in to my flight when I first got up and happily discovered that I had been upgraded on my flight to second class (British Airways has 4 different classes, World Traveler being the normal on that people get, World Traveler Plus, the special one I got). I made it to the airport in more then enough time, much of a surprise there as I normally get there with only minutes to spare. There were huge queues to get through security so I was glad to be in so early. I killed some time wandering through duty free before getting onto the bus (this is how big the new British Airways Terminal 5 is, it has 3 different sections A,B and C which seem like separate terminals on their own and they also bus people to some of the planes). So the bus took us down the road a bit and onto the tarmac where we got to climb the stairs into the plane.

World Traveler Plus doesn't look like it's that different from the normal seats, it's just a few inches of difference but it felt so nice. I didn't feel squished at all. So I spent the whole flight watching movies (Ghost Town and Hancock), plus some tv and playing a bit of games on the tv. Getting off the plane was quick, getting through the border went fast as well, waiting for bags and getting through customs took quiet a while, it's always that last little bit of the journey when you're almost done that seems to take the longest, just to torment you a little bit. I finally made it through to get to Mom and Dad on the other side where they had a calzone and a sunkist (which you can't get in London) waiting for me, a very nice welcome back to the states.

The next post will follow the holiday home and New Years Eve, wait in anticipation until it comes along.

I'm a one-man idiot

Trying to think of what has actually happened this week and it hasn't been much.

Nothing exciting at uni, this coming week is our last week of classes and then next week we have workbooks due in two classes. I have a crit Wednesday for my major project which I really need because I'm stuck on which direction for the images to go with. It's good that we have break soon because I'm fairly burnt out and am having a hard time focusing enough to actually get my work done, no good.

Friday night Ellie and I spent Friday night making chocolates like Mom used to have Jess and I make at Christmas time. It was a nice way for us to spend the evening, eat chocolate, watching some tv, drinking some wine.

Saturday I met up with my friend Andrew at his hostel and we wandered across the city through Trafalger Square and down to Hyde Park's Winter Wonderland before I made it off to work.

Fabulous image of Winter Wonderland taken by Andrew (he wanted to make sure he got credit)

Creepy laughing Santa at the funhouse

More of Andrew's fabulous photography

More Winter Wonderland (this one by me, you can tell the difference between the amateur and professional, or so I tell him :) )

Andrew and I (what a smirk)

Things were uneventful at work as well, the place wasn't very crowded until right when I was getting off work and all the American students decided that 15 minutes before the bar closes is a good time to come in, order drinks and sit around. The way pubs work here is at a certain time we lock the doors but we keep staying open for a while if there are people inside. So with all those people showing up I had to stay on a bit later and then still help out from the other side of the bar.

Sunday I went to dinner at The Texas Embassy with Andrew and two of his friends from the hostel, an American named Nick and another Aussie named Jordy. It was quiet interesting being out to dinner with 3 guys, definitely a different experience. The dinner was so tasty and we were all in a bit of a food coma by the time we finished our meals, very worth it. We decided to walk back across the city instead of being really lazy and taking the tube. It's been nice taking walks through the city recently, incredibly cold but nice anyhow.

We don't want thousands of people wandering around here willy-nilly, leaving orange peel on the petunias and frightening the corgies.

My lecture was on Wednesday, it didn't go terribly. I realized that I'm not as smart as some of the other kids in my class, to be fair most of them are older, have been doing this for longer and got a bachelors degree in photography. It still wasn't the best feeling in the world. Luckily the lecture itself was good, I needed feedback from my tutor about where my paper that comes from this lecture is going. I got really good feedback from her and my paper is going really well from there. And after the lecture one of the guys in my class, Peter, who is one of the incredibly smart ones came up to me and told me that he really enjoyed my lecture, he thought it was really good. That made me feel a whole lot better.

Thursday we had a critique for one of our classes. Mine went really well. Everyone enjoyed the concept and thought the image was really good, I'm just going to re-shoot to put the image at a higher quality and see if I can get a more intense light.

Friday Ellie and I went down to Camden market so she could get a hat and I could buy my pretty new red converse (they're so nice). Later I took it upon myself to make Thanksgiving dinner for my flatmates. I cooked from 3:30 until 8:30, when we finally sat down to eat I was so tired from all the cooking that I barely managed to eat. Most of the time was spent making cinnamon rolls from scratch like Mom makes, it was hard but they turned out pretty good, not as good as Mom but good for my first attempt at making them by myself. I couldn't get a whole turkey and was kind of glad for it because that would have been too much for me to do. Instead I had turkey steaks that I seasoned and cooked in the oven. Ellie helped by making mashed potatoes and keeping me company in the kitchen, we had a lot of fun.

Cooking my little heart out

The boys while I'm slaving over a hot stove making them dinner, jerks

Thanksgiving dinner

Saturday James and Ellie went with me to meet up with Rod, Liv and Tyler (who just got back from 20 days traveling around Europe). We went down to Hyde Park to their Winter Wonderland for some ice skating and wandering around looking at the different Christmas market stalls.

Sunday was a day of epic proportion. Since Tyler just got back we all wanted to go out and celebrate. We started off by going to Church, not the kind most people go to on a Sunday. It's a club that is only open on Sundays from 11-4. It's in an old theatre where they show concerts. Instead of buying drinks at the bar you buy drink tickets and each ticket is worth 3 drinks which you have to get from the bar all at once. The place is pretty much a dump with stuff all over the floor, it's dirty and grimy and so much fun. Liv and I met up with Tyler and a bunch of people from Tyler's tour group. There was a lot of dancing, people in crazy contest and weird drinking games played out on stage.

Drinking games on stage at The Church

From Church we followed what has become our typical routine and headed over to WalkAbout.We met up with some of Liv and Rod's friends at WalkAbout which means, yet again, I was surrounded by Aussies with a few Danes thrown into the mix. Liv's friend Matilda brought us girls mustaches to wear. Liv and I did a lap of the first and second floor to see what kind of reactions we'd get from people. It was great because people had to keep doing double takes and had the funniest looks on their faces when they spotted the mustaches.

After a while my mustache started to come off so this kid Derek and I decided it would be funny to put it into our friend Andrew's beer. This kept us occupied for about 3 hours as it took Andrew forever to realize that it was in there, and even once he did he'd either put it into one of ours or we'd sneak it back from him and pass it between us to get it back into his beer without him noticing. It was quiet a good way to spend the evening.

Mustache gangLiv and I rockin' the mustaches

Andrew in my mustache

Derek (my co-conspirator) and I

mustache in the beer

Liv and this New Zealand rugby player

Andrew making faces for the camera

Liv and Rod

Today Ellie and I went to get our fake Christmas tree and decorate it, it was a very nice way to spend our evening.

That is all.

I've wiped the file? .... I've wiped all the files? .... I've wiped the INTERNET? I don't even have a modem!

Another crazy week of classes, as usual. I've finally been writing my lecture, and I think I have the best line ever in it: "When you're expecting a cow, a dinosaur takes you a bit by surprise"

It should be a good lecture.

I borrowed the Phase One Hasselblad which is a 27 megapixels digital camera. It's so pretty :) I'm using it because with it I can print images that are 40inches x 55inches, very 

very exciting. I printed the other day one of my images for coursework, it's A1, which is 23inches x 33inches, poster size, it's huge :) I've been getting very excited doing large prints,

 it's just so much fun and I've never done images this size before.

Karoly and I on the bus to Greenwich

Saturday my friend Karoly and I decided to go to Greenwich for the day. We took the bus out there which allowed us to see all different parts of the city and it didn't cost anything extra from our travel cards. The temperature was in the teens so we decided not to spend tons of time outside. We did walk up to the top of the hill for some nice pictures and to see the Prime Meridian. There is also a camera obscura (which is a large room that is a camera)

 so it was neat going into that, I've never seen one before.

From top to bottom: 24 hour clock with all the measurements on it; Prime Meridian and exact time clock; Royal Observatory on top of the hill; 2 views of London from the top of the hill in Greenwich Park

After we hurried back down the hill we wandered the streets a bit, wandered through a market and had some hot mulled berry wine. It was pretty tasty. After that we grabbed some late lunch and headed back to the city to get ready to go out for the night.

Karoly, Aude, two of her french friends and I met up downtown to go to this really cool club Tiger Tiger. It was way to expensive, to get in and for drinks, but we had a great time. It's spread out over five levels with different music in each space. We were down on the very bottom floor dancing to house/trance music, which I've never danced to before. It was a lot of fun and I was exhausted by the time we left around 1:30.

Yesterday Liv and I decided on an impromptu meet-up to go to Westgate for a little bit and then over to WalkAbout for some dancing. As always we had a lot of fun and now I've got lots of coursework to catch up on and I'm finally getting more hours at work so it'll be a fun and full next few days.

A bit quieter this past week and weekend. Uni as usual, things generally don't change much with that. I'm getting better at color printing, it's still very hard, especially when you can't see the incredibly subtle slight hue of green cast but I'm making due.

I haven't been working as much, which is good for uni but not so good when I'm trying to make money for traveling. I did work on Saturday in time to watch the Australian rugby team beat England soundly. It was my first time watching a game and it was so exciting, I have to say, better than American football. Since the pub is Australian that's who we were cheering for and it paid off. 

After the game was done most of the boys headed up to our function room for a poker tournament which left kiwi Jemma and I to hold down the bar ourselves. Luckily it didn't get too crazy so after 9.5 hours I was finally done and could sit down for a drink of my own, which was very well deserved.

Sunday I decided to not lie around in bed all day so I headed over to Shoreditch

 (A north east area of London in which I've decided I want to live when my lease is up. The area is still a little down right now but i

t is very much up and coming with many warehouse conversion flats. There are tons of little indie like shops, pubs, restaurants which will be perfect for weekend brunches, and lots of studio and gallery space). I went to go see a show a Scottish photographer by the name of Rankin who did a summers worth of polaroid images at the 

Macallan distillery. He did a lot of work there with his muse, Tuuli, pictured above. They are releasing special bottles of scotch to accompany this, so if anyone has an extra $1400 lying around this would be a good investment. There are going to be 1,000 bottles of 30 year old Macallan scotch, in special boxes, each label will have a different one of the images on it and inside the leather case it comes in the original polaroid will be included.

It was an interesting exhibition, especially due to the fact that polaroid film has, sadly, been discontinued this year.

After the gallery I took the bus into the middle of London and got see many interesting sights as I went along. That is my favorite part about running around London, everything you get to see from the second level of the bus. I saw a pimp, this little Mediterranean man in a grey suit that was stripped with more shades of grey and shiny, it reflected light all over the place. To go with that he had a grey fedora, a big gold pinky ring and a gold chain with jewel encrusted note hanging off it. And the most important part, he had the swagger. I almost laughed out loud when I saw him. I also got to see a film in the making, I'm not sure what it was but there was a courtyard closed filled with horse-drawn carriage and people dressed in victorian costumes. 

After a day full of running around Ellie and I decided we'd go see a movie Sunday night. She and I walked to the high street to see "Zack and Miri make a porno", the new Seth Rogen movie. It was much funnier than I expected it to be, and a nice evening treat for us.

All-in-all a good week. I've moved all my images to my newly created flickr site.

I don't go looking for trouble. Trouble usually finds me.

Looking across the Thames at night. The tall building is St. Paul's with the Millennium Bridge coming across the river on the right.

Fall appeared overnight for us. What yesterday was green and lush has transformed to an array of golden colors that are quickly drifting to the ground. I already long for the warmer weather of springtime.

It has been a crazy weekend with parades, rain and much fun. My Uncle Scott was in London for the weekend so Friday night he came by the pub for dinner and a drink. He went to briefly introduce himself to one of the owners Beven and it turns out that Beven's friend Harry works for Uncle Scott's company. Everyone got on very well and Uncle Scott invited Beven and Harry to a party we were going to Saturday night.

Saturday it rained, and rained and then rained some more. Uncle Scott and I went down to the Thames to watch The Lord Mayor's Show Parade, it's a tradition that goes back roughly 900 years where the Mayor goes down to the Royal Courts to pledge his loyalty to the crown. It's done every year, an interesting little parade, mostly charity work and clubs that march in it.

This is what politicians do in London when they get bored
(they have puppets in case you can't see)

After that Uncle Scott and I quickly ate then changed to get over to the HQS Wellington where we met Coco, Beven and Harry for some wine, fancy hor d'ourves. The party on the ship was for the mayor so I got to go have champagne with him and about 15 other people in a small room, kind of cool, champagne with the mayor :)
They had a barge go by on the river shooting off fireworks, it was a really good display, almost makes up for the fact that I don't get to see fireworks at the lake this summer for the 4th.


After all of that we went out for a delicious late dinner with a few of Uncle Scott's colleagues, it was so yummy, I almost fell asleep on the tube on the way home.

Sunday I took the day off from work because Sunday nights are good for these two clubs here so I went I met my friend Liv (who is the girlfriend of one of the guys, Rod, that I work with) at the nearby tube station at 5 to go out for some drinking and dancing at the Australian club WalkAbout. Most people who go to WalkAbout on a Sunday go to a club called The Church first. You can pick these people out of any crowd because they are loud, have been drinking for a while and are in crazy costumes. I think my favorites were the Smurfs, white pants, white hats, no shirts but painted blue. Apparently they do this regularly as they are fairly well known. There were also people dressed '80s style, guys in dresses, there were even some gladiators running around. Next time I have another Sunday off from work Liv and I are talking about getting dressed up and going to Church as well, just to see. It was lots of fun and since WalkAbout closed at 11 (everything closes early on Sunday nights) we still had plenty of time to get the last tube home.

That is about it for my wild weekend, more to come soon.

Top to bottom:

Liv, Tyler and I
Rod and Liv