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finishing off the London trip entry
Monday: I showed up at the London Belgrave office... and it turned out absolutely nobody was there on Chrome DevRel. Oops! So not only did I not know who to work with but I didn't even know where to go. I decided to explore and found an awesome room that was full of Winnie-the-Pooh bears, comfy chairs, hammocks, bookcases with O'Reilly books, and was just a generally quiet nice lounge, and I worked from there the next two days. Most of the office was very quiet. I had lunch with my suitemates from the apartment actually -- they randomly recognized me in the cafeteria -- and the rest of the day was quiet. I had my normal "10am" meeting at 6pm on irc with everyone, which meant that by the time I got out it was too late to see a show that night, but instead I still walked to Leicester Square and bought tickets to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory the next day (the guy at the box office told me it was the only available ticket in the next several days). I got fish and chips for dinner at one of the tourist places in Piccadilly (I basically decided that the road between Leicester Square and Piccadilly basically is Broadway, and the entire area is Times Square. It's VERY similar. I walked home from there and attempted to do laundry, which was a bit of a disaster and I ended up getting little white lint balls all over my clothes. Of course there was no lint roller at the apartment, so I had to go hunt for one.
Tuesday: I started off at the Belgrave office again (did I mention that breakfast there consisted of like 3 kinds of bacon, 2 kinds of sausage, and then random things like hash browns, tomatoes, and beans?) and after lunch I went to the Central St. Giles office. I stopped off at a Tesco looking for a lint roller and failed, but after walking around CSG, which was almost entirely empty though I did meet a few nice people in one of the corners, I went to a Sainsbury's and DID find a lint roller. Hooray Sainsbury's! Oh, I stayed at CSG until 5-6pm though -- they had a nice library with a view of the London Eye and all kinds of crazy stuff, so I found an alcove with a comfy chair and did work there for a few hours.
I wrote more about Tuesday/Wednesday in another entry already. Basically I saw the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory musical, had dinner at Shake Shack, and decided to skip the fireworks because the Underground wasn't really running downtown.
Wednesday: Walked to the London Eye around noon. Decided not to go on it because it was too windy/cold. Walked to Covent Garden, had higher-class fish and chips at a pub, spent several hours at the London Transport Museum which was awesome, saw a t-shirt that I wanted but didn't get (this comes back into play on the weekend), bizarrely had McDonald's for dinner before the Dirty Dancing musical.
Thursday: So this day I actually had a buddy in the London office as my mentor Addy came in for Thu/Fri to hang out and work with me! Whee! So we spent a while talking and planning our screenshot marathon for Friday, and having lunch and stuff like that. Yay! In the evening I had to switch hotels from the Google apartment to a hotel near Victoria station, so I did that and walked over to the London Eye in the evening. It was a little rainy but not terrible so I rode the thing (also the great part was, no line!) I walked back to Victoria, wasn't sure what to do for dinner. I thought of going to Pret A Manger (WTF this shop is EVERYWHERE in London) but the one nearby was just closing as I was thinking of going in so I went to an Indian restaurant across from the theater Wicked was in. It was TERRIBLE. Seriously, I was the only patron in there for a while, the waiter was almost rude, the food was lousy, the naan was burnt... I've heard London has such good Indian food, how did I pick one of the worst ones ever?
Friday: We had planned to have a Screenshot-a-Thon (basically our devtools screenshots needed a refresh and it's hard to get it done so we planned to do that with a bunch of people) and invite in our GDE Umar (if you read DevTools docs you've seen stuff by me and Addy and Umar and Paul and Jared so it's not like my team is a secret), so that was what took up my entire day, seriously. I mean, in the morning we did some prep, then Umar got there, then we had lunch, then Addy and Umar had some stuff to talk about, and then we started our screenshot-a-thon (since Jared in Boston was snowed in he joined us early, and Paul came in when it was a reasonable hour in CA). It was actually a very surreal and somewhat boring experience in some ways — we’d divided up the pages to update, and thus we were all sitting there mostly silently doing screenshots. At least it was slightly less tedious by having everyone together, and it was nice that like, at 5pm or so Addy took us up to the London version of a TGIF and we had some food and chilled out, and then did more screenshots. Addy went home around 6:30pm, Umar left around 7:30 although we spent like an hour talking on his way out. (He's a nice guy and we don't get to talk often. He kinda reminds me of some of my old interns from Tagged.) I stayed in the office until 10pm and basically went back to the hotel and crashed.
Then I had a weekend of wandering around London before heading back home to SF. Originally I thought I’d go see a couple musicals over the weekend, but it turns out that there are all these weird rules in London about what can be open on Sunday! So a lot of the shows I was interested in didn’t have Sunday shows! Grr. Also it was rainy on Saturday and looked clear on Sunday, so I decided I’d see 2 shows on Saturday and go to Greenwich on Sunday.
Saturday started with me going to TKTS in Leicester Square, basically, and I got tickets to see the Mousetrap at 4pm and Once at 7:30pm. Then I went to Masala Zone for lunch (on the recommendation of Chris and others)… though it didn’t open until 12pm and I got there like 11:30, so I ended up wandering around an area called Carnaby for half an hour, and then had lunch. It was very very good! Then I walked to Oxford Circle station and took the train out to Baker Street station, where my idea was to go to the Sherlock Holmes museum… until I saw that the line to get in was OVER AN HOUR LONG. Sheesh. So instead I went into the gift store, which was amusing enough for a little while, bought a keychain, and checked in on Facebook that I was at 221B Baker Street, which I decided was good enough for me. I went back into Baker Street station and found the original restored 1863 platform, and took the train out to Westbourne Park station, which is in Notting Hill, and I walked to the Museum of Brands, which I had seen on the Notting Hill map and thought looked like the most “obscure random thing I bet my friends haven’t been to” thing there. It was pretty cool, they basically had packaging of things going back to the Victorian era, like soaps and flour and goods like that, plus of course fliers and stuff for the various royal coronations and marriages, and as time goes on they have wartime things and then the chocolate evolution and then just tons of stuff. It was pretty cool in general, except that you weren’t supposed to take photos, which is tough for me because I tend to take photos of the signs at least so I can read them later. I did sneak in some photos of old boardgames from 100 years ago and things like that though.
Then I walked to Notting Hill Gate and took the tube to Tottenham Court again and went to see The Mousetrap, which is an Agatha Christie murder mystery play. No, it is not a musical, but basically, I had read about it being in its historic 64th season of the original run — it has even moved to another theater, back in 1974 or so, and they still had a performance on Saturday and then again on Monday, same cast, same production, etc. So I saw the 25472nd consecutive performance of it. It was really good, I totally did not guess the ending (although I did guess some of the identities of people and why they got killed). They ask you specifically not to share the ending with people so I’m not really going to talk about the show here.
My next stop was at Once, which was actually also right near Tottenham Court but… I wanted to go to Covent Garden and pick up this “Keep Calm and Call Bumblebee” shirt I had seen the other day. EXCEPT I get there and the market is being shut down. I ask a guy where the funny t-shirt stand is, and he’s like “oh that guy? his stand is only here Tuesday through Thursday…” and I’m like “WHAT” and… yeah. So that was a little sad. I got a belgian waffle for “dinner” at a stand along the way back to the theater Once was in.
Once was pretty good, I’ll hopefully see it again when it comes to SF in a few months, from closer up (my only complaint is that it’s basically staged such that there’s very little movement, there’s only one set, and so there was a tall guy in front of me and it was hard to see parts of it). I walked back to Victoria again as was getting standard, and had Burger King for dinner of all things (don’t ask).
Sunday I went to Greenwich! However, I took the Tube and then the DLR there, and I transferred at Bank/Monument, and well, you know, I kind of wondered, what monument is at Monument? (I seriously didn’t know.) So I get out of the station to wander around a little and I immediately see this monolith-like thing which is, of course, the Monument built by Christopher Wren to commemorate the Great London Fire of 1666 which started right there in Pudding Lane. It’s 313 steps to the top and there’s an observation deck up there and you get a certificate for climbing it, but I decided I didn’t feel like taking the time (I asked the guys at the admission window how long it takes and they were like “How good shape are you in? It can be 5-10 minutes or more like 30 if you are slow”, and I said “Awesome, thanks but no thanks, cheers” and left). I did, however, take a brief wander around the area and found out I was right by London Bridge and so I walked across that and back too :)
The DLR was neat and then, Greenwich! I went through the Greenwich market but it wasn’t all that interesting. The Royal Observatory was pretty cool though, I paid admission to that and timed it so I got a photo standing on the meridian at about 11:55am and thus could post it to Facebook and such exactly at noon like “HELLO IT IS AS NOON AS IT GETS ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD” from, well, GMT. After that I went around the observatory and museum. There was an entertaining little skit from this guy who basically acts out parts of the old Royal Astronomers and people like Christopher Wren and various kings and whatnot and tells the story of how the observatory ended up there and how the meridian ended up there (answer: every Astronomer bought a bigger telescope and thus had to build a bigger house for it so the meridian kept moving to THEIR telescope) and stuff. Then I looked at clocks and things, and wanted to look at the camera obscura but it wasn’t open :( I did, however, stick around until 1pm to watch the ball drop which signifies it being 1pm — apparently they have done that there for hundreds of years now, so sailors could set their clocks before setting sail.
I had lunch in the Greenwich Tavern on the way out — a nice Sunday turkey “dinner” — and then I went to Camden Market to look through their shops to see if I could find any funny t-shirts, and hey, get this, I found the Covent Garden guy, who runs a shop there on the weekends, and he was like “I only have the transformers t-shirts back at Covent Garden”, and despite there being a bazillion “KEEP CALM AND” whatever t-shirts there weren’t any other transformers ones :( So after wandering around a TON of market stalls — there literally are blocks and blocks and blocks of market stalls on the weekend and you could totally get lost and find yourself in another town by the time you get out — I ended up getting a “KEEP CALM I’M AN ENGINEER” t-shirt and a Gryffindor Quidditch t-shirt. (shrug) I kinda liked a Yoda shirt of “CALM YOU SHALL KEEP AND CARRY ON YOU MUST, HMMM?” but not quite enough to think I’d ever wear it. Turned out that Camden Market station is only open to exit, not enter, on Sundays, so I walked down to Mornington Crescent, and then rode the Tube out to Wembley Park so I could ride the Metropolitan Line, which I had not explicitly ridden yet, despite having bought a map of it. Then I rode the Jubilee Line back in (which I also hadn’t ridden) to Bond Street. I tried to go to Uniqlo but it was closed. Ended up getting dinner at a place called Garfunkel’s (which is kinda like Applebee’s but British), where I had bangers and mash. I walked most of the way home then gave up at Green Park and took the tube for one station from there. Came home to the hotel and packed. Then also found out that I could have leeched free wifi the whole time there by getting a “lobby password” which also apparently worked in my room. Wish I had tried that earlier. Oh well.
Monday I basically mostly just woke up and flew back to SFO. The end?