the land of the British

I will remember to buy sleeping pills (because I forgot about it again) next time I take long flights! I flew from Sydney to Brunei on Wednesday noon. Once there, took another flight to Dubai and once there had a little time to stretch my legs before entering the same plane and endure the last 7h flight to London. At least I saw a couple of movies but don't remember any of them, that is how good they were, oh... except for Balls of Fury, a stupid comedy that still made me burst out some good laughs. The story revolves around the comeback of a ping pong prodigy in the underground world of this "exciting" game (really, there is a movie about that!!!).

To start my return, I initiated an update to my calendar with the new concerts in Munich and wow, was I surprised to see QOTSA, Portishead and Hot Chip! Sweeeeet! (the money to attend the venues is another thing). And to celebrate all this, I just added my little Google calendar to the side bar. I do have to find out how to change its color scheme, that baby blue clashes with the general blog color scheme! This is also a good opportunity to use Last.FM and use the "export to calendar" feature. While logged on to gmail, I found the Operator Please concert on Last.fm and choose to export to gmail (I cannot find the button anymore though:S) and gmail asks me if I want to import the event! This is really, really good, even if Google is the devil!

So yes, here I am in London for a second, better and longer time. The jetlag is still killing me, making me wake up at 7h30 each day. Although I landed wednesday, only yesterday did I have a productive tourist day. Along with Becka and Gabby, I strolled down Southbank, visited the From Russia exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts. I still have a couple of other galleries and exhibits to see, but that should not happen this weekend, crowds are not 100% avoidable here but week days still are better! This last exhibition for example was packed on friday noon, quite hard to see some of the artworks.

Sidenote: I always remember about Provigil when feeling like shit as I am right now. The reports on its usage are to say the least... interesting.

The concert scene in London is incredible. There are just too many of them and it's hard to attend a decent one if tickets were not bought early enough. This is where Munich is actually good. Any concert that is not that from a mainstream or known band is almost guaranteed to happen in a small and cheap venue. I still remember Kashmir and The Rapture, I was 1m away from the band and did not have to arrive early and struggle through the crowd.

In the lack of more inspiration, I'll just leave a picture of yesterday's walk in the cold, dry and sunny London with one of its most emblematic icons.


Today's program includes but is not restricted to Camden Town and a night out somewhere with cool bars. Camden Town is the alternative borough of London where its markets are a good source of fashion articles and god knows I need gloves and a scarf to stand the cold!

n.-

PS: Once (my brain is) fully operational, I'll do a write-up of my travel, as succinct (yesterday's new word) as possible. There were lots of highlights and no real #1 favorite event. The people I met made it all so good.