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