Everyone told me that the one-month mark would be when I would get over the first significant bump of homesickness and really start to feel like I’m living here. Perhaps I’m a late bloomer, but I’m just now passing the 6-week mark (more or less the halfway point in my stay here) and I’m starting to get that feeling. The emails from home have trailed off to the point where neither Kelly nor I have heard anything from home in close to a week, and increasingly it feels like our life is here rather than in North Carolina. It seems like a funny thing to write when I know I’ll be back there in a little over a month and back into my old routines, but myself in North Carolina increasingly feels like it doesn’t exist. Anyway, enough waxing poetic, back to the trip.

Here are a few more entries in the “weird products” collection… roast ox potato chips:

Or if you’re feeling like something a little bit lighter how about prawn cocktail?

The weather here continues to be insanely gorgeous. It’s hard to believe that there was snow on the ground my first weekend here, because temperatures have been in the 80s and the sky has been cloudless. We took advantage of the weather on Thursday by going out for a picnic at Hampstead Heath. The rhododendrons were in bloom, making the whole space light up with color.

We had a picnic on the lawn in front of Kenwood House, which felt like an old-school British meadow. The only thing that was missing was a herd of sheep being ushered through.

After our sandwiches we hung out on the grass for a while and enjoyed the weather:

After soaking up some sun we headed into the estate’s huge house. Here’s its impressive facade:

All of the rooms were restored to how they might have looked in the 18th century when the house was built, including a lot of original furniture (including some very cool clocks). However, I think that the main attraction for visitors is the artwork on the walls, as they have a very fine collection here. There is one incredible Rembrandt self-portrait from late in his life, some nice Van Dycks and dozens of works by Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough. My favorite room, though, was the library. I love how 18th-century libraries were organized by the size of the books rather than their content… it makes everything look so orderly.

After exploring the house we went back outside and read on the benches for a while:

Next we went on a long walk around Hampstead Heath. Kelly has been running here for the past week or so, so she’s gotten to know the place well. Here’s the highest point in the park, where you can look back and see incredible views of London. You can pick out almost all of the city’s major landmarks scattered across the skyline.

After checking out that spot for a while, Kelly took me to her favorite spot in the park, this open area where all of the trees have grown up really high and formed a canopy, sort of like the redwood forest in California but not as dense or as high.

We stopped here and read in the shade for a while, which was wonderful.

After that we headed home for a quick dinner and then went out to the Old Blue Last, where Jay Reatard was playing. We also have plans to see him next week (he’s doing a 2-week tour of London for some reason), but since this show was only 5 pounds and we didn’t have much else to do we came out to this one as well. The opening band was called Ezra Bang and the Hot Machine and they were very different than the stuff I normally see live… they weren’t punk, that’s for sure. The music was kind of funky dance stuff and they were fronted by a rapper who wore a t-shirt that read “ELVIS WAS QUEER” and spent a good deal of his time humping various surfaces in the general area of the stage. They were actually really fun, and since most of the crowd clearly was here to see them the room had a ton of energy with people dancing, screaming and going nuts.

Jay Reatard was up next, and if you’ve seen him live in the past year or so you probably know about what we saw. He played at least 15 songs, all at hyper speed with no breaks in between, making his set last 20 minutes tops. Last time I saw him there was a second guitarist in his backing band, which gave them a bigger sound, but with just the one guitar I think his little melodic lead parts stuck out more. Since his live show sacrifices a lot of vocal melody in favor of ratcheting up the tempo several notches I appreciated being able to hear the guitar better.

With that hair Jay is starting to look like he’s being attacked by a tribble!

Feedback jam:

Most of Friday was spent trying to get work done on the dissertation, but Kelly and I did make it out to one of the famous lunchtime concerts at St. Martin in the Fields, a beautiful (and newly-renovated) church right in Trafalgar Square. The concert, which was a program of Beethoven and Liszt performed by a 21-year-old Australian who had won some big prize in classical piano, was wonderful, and it was a joy to sit in the church and have so long to soak in the surroundings. Here’s a pic of the outside of St. Martin’s:

After the concert we sat and ate lunch with the crowds in Trafalgar Square before heading to the British Library for more work.

Since the neighbors in our building can often be noisy on weekend evenings, we were determined to get out of the house on Friday night. After checking the listings in Time Out we decided on seeing Times New Viking, a band I’d only heard briefly but have read a lot about over the past few months. The show was at a photo gallery / bar in Camden called the Proud Gallery, which has been converted from a massive stables. The room with the main bar still has all of the original stable areas, so it’s like having 20 private rooms all branching off from the main area. It was a very cool place to hang out and have a drink before the bands started.

Speaking of the bands, the first one was called Pin Me Down and I wasn’t too into them. Somehow they managed to feel both too polished and not altogether there at the same time, and it didn’t help that they’re a few years late on the dance punk trend. The second band were called Yeasayer and my semi-weekly glances at Pitchfork inform me that they’re hyped right now. I couldn’t decide whether I kind of liked them or absolutely hated them… I suppose this hinged on whether I thought they sounded like Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds or Phish. I never actually made up my mind because they only played for about 15 minutes. Apparently they took up too much time during soundcheck and the promoters weren’t willing to let them eat into the between-band DJ set.

Which reminds me, that’s one key difference between UK shows and US shows. If the show is at a legit venue like a bar or club, there will certainly be a DJ playing records between bands, and more than likely there will be several. Even though I don’t think there’s much difference between these DJs and a well-stocked ipod set to shuffle, someone out there seems to think they’re at least as important as the bands judging by the fact that they cut short Yeasayer.

Finally, Times New Viking played and they were a breath of fresh rawness after the very layered, ambitious sounds of the first two bands.

The band were a three-piece with drums, keyboards and fuzzed-out guitar played through a bigmuff pedal. For those 3 people out there who have the same frame of reference as me, I kept thinking to myself that they sounded like Chaos UK playing Breeders covers. Even though TNV clearly are a very poppy indie rock band, I think the crasher crusty comparison goes a long way. Not only was the guitar sound as raw and as blown-out as anything on a Confuse or Gai record, but also the drummer spent 90% of every song beating the crap out of his crash symbol as though it were a ride, just like those bands tend to do. The result was a beautiful, beautiful mess and I’m really glad I saw it. This is exactly the type of show I used to go to all the time when I was younger and had fewer commitments and responsibilities, and I had such a great time at this show that I think I’ll try to make time for a more diverse show-attendance schedule once I get back home.

From there it was back home and to bed. Here’s a funny story about that… I went to sleep an hour or so before Kelly because she wanted to stay up and read. We only have two crappy, flattened pillows here, and by the time Kelly came to bed I had commandeered both in my sleep. When she tried to take one of them from me I sat up and whined “BUT I NEEEEEEED THIS PILLOW.” Despite this rather pathetic plea, Kelly took the pillow from me. When I got cranky she threw me an empty pillowcase and I took it gladly and seemed satisfied. I have no recollection of any of this.

Saturday we did another of our podcast walks, this time exploring Chelsea. The first stop on the tour was the Royal Hospital, an incredible 17th-century building designed by the great architect Sir Christopher Wren. This building still houses war veterans, who are known as Chelsea Pensioners.

There is some kind of large, star-studded event taking place here later this month, so there were workers busy polishing everything, re-staining the benches, and generally making the place look ship-shape. This gilded statue of Charles II as a Roman emperor looks like it had recently been spruced up as well:

Lots of famous literary figures have lived in Chelsea. We stumbled upon this building, which is the former home of Oscar Wilde, despite the fact that it wasn’t even on our audio tour:

People are fond of their ivy in Chelsea:

And their wisteria. It’s funny that people are so excited about wisteria here, because in North Carolina I believe it’s classified as a parasite and grows randomly all over the woods and telephone poles around our house.

Here’s a statue of Victorian Historian Thomas Carlyle looking quite the bad-ass. His home (which is owned by the National Trust and contains a museum) is just down the street behind:

Here’s another literary residence, the former home of Tobias Smollett, one of my favorite 18th-century novelists:

Just down from Smollett’s house was the site of Chelsea Old Church (destroyed during WWII and replaced with a new Chelsea Old Church), famous both as the place where Henry VIII and Jane Seymour were married and as the burial place (after his execution) of Sir Thomas More, who is depicted in the statue out front:

After walking around Chelsea for nearly three hours it was time to head home. Kelly turned on the camera to look at our photos on the way home and this popped up on the screen (since the lens was pointed at the ground). I thought it was a cool image so I told her to click the shutter.

Kelly thought that our dish soap deserved an entry in the weird products series:

Today we decided to enjoy the lovely weather once again and head out to Hyde Park to read and relax. I think that the rest of London had the same idea, as the place was a total mob scene:

I think the line to rent these row-boats was about 3 hours long, but I must admit it looked pretty fun:

In addition to spending several hours sitting in the shade and reading, we also looked around the Serpentine Gallery, a small public gallery in Kensington Garden. The gallery was having an exhibition by the Austrian painter Maria Lassnig, and Kelly and I both enjoyed it.

On the way out, we passed by one of Kelly’s favorite sights, the memorial to Prince Albert:

As we sat on the edge of Kensington Garden waiting for the bus, I was struck by how incredible the scene was in front of us. The round building is the Royal Albert Hall:

From there it was home to eat grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup, watch Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom on TV and write this blog post.

Things continue to be quiet around here with lots of staring at computer monitors, this despite the fact that the weather has been near-perfect for the past few days. The sky has been sunny, the temperatures in the mid-70s and everyone has been out enjoying the weather. Walking around here in East Finchley you can almost imagine that you’re somewhere like Virginia Beach or the Outer Banks in North Carolina, since so many people are cruising around with their tops down (their cars, not their shirts) and their music blasting. While I’ve been feeling a lot of pressure to work, we’ve been sticking to our goal of one sightseeing / cultural outing per day. Tuesday we went to the White Cube gallery in Hoxton Square for an art exhibition called You Dig the Tunnel, I’ll Hide the Soil, which is a collection of contemporary artists responding to the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Kelly has been working on a dissertation chapter on Poe for nearly a year now, so she was excited to see what these artists (who, I imagine, are not coming from a background in literary studies) would do with the author’s work.

The works in the Hoxton Square gallery were about what I expected, i.e. a mix of works that more or less illustrated settings, scenes or characters from Poe’s work and works whose connection to Poe was more or less impossible to discern without recourse to supplementary materials. My personal favorite was this painting, which I think falls into the latter category:

Even though I was a little underwhelmed by this part of the exhibition, we decided to walk 2 blocks to the second part of the show, which continued in the basement of Shoreditch Town Hall. While the White Cube was more or less your typical, sterile art gallery environment, the Shoreditch Town Hall was an unfinished basement that lent itself well to artists who wanted to do ambitious and creepy installation pieces. The entire space was dimly lit with uneven floors and few, if any, finished walls. In installations like this one, which was inspired by Fall of the House of Usher, it was difficult to tell where the gallery ended and the art began:

The pieces in this space seemed a lot more inventive, as the artists seemed to revel in the opportunity to incorporate the space. Even when a piece wasn’t particularly engaged with the environment, the curators used severe spotlighting and unconventional placement in some really great ways.

In another room there was a video piece that ostensibly showed why this room contained a gold beetle in a padded metal case, but unsurprisingly I did not understand this video at all.

This afternoon’s outing was a picnic in Regent’s Park. Again consulting our Cheap Eats guide, we went to a restaurant called Squat and Gobble which has a lunchtime menu that is heavy on soup and sandwiches as well as baked potatoes (which the English, charmingly, call “jacket potatoes”).

I went with a pretty standard chicken-and-pesto sandwich that was quite good, but Kelly was feeling adventurous so she got this jacket potato with prawn mayonnaise (which I’m guessing we would call shrimp salad in the states?) and salmon:

It looks like a mess but I assure you it was delicious, and a very good value (for London) at five pounds. As I mentioned, we ate in Regent’s Park, which was like an entirely different place from the last time I ate lunch here back when the weather was still chilly. Almost all of the available shady spots were crowded with people lounging around, chatting and reading, and there were also lots of people playing sports in the open areas, including this school group:

Kelly and I struggled for a long time to figure out what game they were playing. It was sort of like baseball in that you hit the ball with a bat and run from base to base, but there were some important differences, the most significant of which was that the players used a bat that was only about 18″ long, which they swung at the ball with one arm and carried with them as they rounded the bases. If anyone can identify this game for us we would be highly appreciative.

After watching the game for a while, we walked over to the British Library where Kelly got her reader pass and I (after being here for more than a month already) made my first attempt at actually using the library. Using their catalog this morning I managed to find a book that I hadn’t happened upon before in any of the online databases I’ve used, so I was excited to find that after working with the same 3 or 4 books for the past few months. The desks in the reading room also provided a spacious and comfortable spot to work. The protocol is a little intimidating at first, but once I figured it out I was quite enamored with the place and I can’t wait to go back there to work.

After the tourism blitz and subsequent recovery period I feel like we’ve finally started to settle into a routine. Generally, Kelly and I have been trying to do one activity per day (the goal was 3 or more during the blitz) and devote the rest of the day to work, errands, or whatever else needs to get done. I’m happy to report that I’ve finally gotten a bit more work done on my dissertation, though the fact that this is a long holiday weekend here in the UK threw a small wrench into the gears. I thought that we hadn’t done much in the past few days until I compiled all of the pictures for this post… it turns out I have quite a bit to write about, so I should get back on my schedule of a post every day or two because this will probably be unbearably long.

Friday afternoon we headed out to Borough Market in South London, partly to browse around the market and partly to gather supplies for a picnic later that evening. I gather that this market is known for its pork products, and there are all sorts of sausages there with various bits of various animals combined with various fruits, various vegetables and a varied assortment of herbs and spices to even things out. With so many options, we ended up letting economy guide our decision-making process. Here’s the entrance to the market:

I always thought that North Carolina farmers’ markets had an impressive array of tomatoes, but this stand held its own. We haven’t exactly been experiencing tomato weather lately, so most of these were imported from Spain:

The same stand also had the largest lemons I’ve ever seen in my life:

While Kelly seemed to be attracted to the olives, my personal favorite stand was this one, which contained various fruits and dozens upon dozens of varieties of juice made from them. They had a few different blends available for sample, and Kelly and I both tried the apple and beatroot juice. It sounds gross to those of us who grew up with pickled beets but it was delicious… it tasted like very sweet apple juice (or even non-fermented apple cider) until you swallowed, when a distinctly pleasing aroma of fresh beetroot wafted into your mouth. I also bought a glass of raspberry apple juice which was one of the sweetest and most delicious things I’ve ever put in my mouth.

After collecting all of our necessaries we headed home for a bit of work, then went out for a walking tour of Notting Hill. One of our first stops was this church, which is called St. James:

Kelly really liked the wording of this sign, which explains the history of the church and why it doesn’t have a spire. Kelly pointed out that, in the absence of the spire, the architect chose to repeat the motif of the four thin pillars at the top of the tower throughout the building, which is definitely a nice touch.

Here’s another funny sign. It took us a long time to figure out that a “T” had been removed by a clever vandal:

Eventually we found a nice little park in which to have our picnic. We’d picked up some soft cheese from the supermarket, which was supplemented with our items from the market: tomato ciabatta bread, marinated olives stuffed with sundried tomato (instead of the usual pimento) and fresh strawberries. Here’s an extremely flattering pic of me going at the bread and cheese:

We’d also picked up some chocolate truffles, but due to my near-complete ignorance of the metric system we spent WAY more than we’d planned. Four small pieces of chocolate cost 5 pounds, or about $10US. Kelly and I have a long history of mis-ordering and over-paying for food on our travels, though usually we can blame this on a language barrier. There was the time in Denmark when we meant to order two slices of pizza but instead received two entire large pizzas (a problem when you’re staying in a youth hostel with nowhere to store the leftovers). There was also the time in Kyoto when we ordered enough okonomiyaki to feed an entire youth soccer club. However, the most ridiculous of these incidents was easily the time when, in Florence, I accidentally blew an entire day’s food budget on a single gelato that was as large as my head. It was so massive that I couldn’t eat it fast enough and it quickly melted in the hot Italian sun, coating me to my elbows in a sticky mess as we wandered around a city that is apparently philosophically opposed to the idea of a public restroom. The truffles rank pretty low on the foreign food screw-up scale, but regardless I hope you’ll pardon me if I over-document our enjoyment of these treats… I have to get my money’s worth.

After dinner we continued the Notting Hill walk, which took us down Portobello Road. I’d been here earlier record-hunting, but things were very different in the evening after the street market (as well as most of the proper shops) shut down. I did find two record shops that I hadn’t noticed before, though, so I’m sure we’ll find ourselves back on this street sometime. On this trip Kelly also spotted this bizarre sculpture, which I’d managed to ignore completely the first time around:

While the walk didn’t take us past too many terribly interesting things, it did point out this totally awesome skatepark which sits right under the Westway. Why aren’t more skateparks located underneath overpasses? It seems like a perfect spot given that skateparks last a lot longer when they’re shielded from the rain and the highway noise makes this space useless for just about anything else. This park made me seriously regret that I did not bring my skateboard to London, because it seemed made for me. This picture is of the street course, which was the least interesting part (for me, anyway). They had not one, but TWO mini ramps (one about four feet tall and one about six), a vert ramp and–something I’ve always wanted to skate but never have–a mini bowl that was just about four feet deep. I sat and drooled for a long time until I realized I was just torturing myself.

Saturday around noon we went out to Jenni’s, where she cooked us a delicious lunch of chicken and vegetables. I cannot overstate the deliciousness of home-cooked food when you’ve been living off of microwave meals and the cheapest possible restaurants for over a month. After lunch we took a Thameside walk around Hammersmith, which was lovely. Looking down the river with its winding path and numerous islands always reminds me of a Turner painting, especially in these more suburban areas. In addition to the walk, we also stopped by the former home of one of my favorite artists, William Hogarth:

The house, despite being in some disrepair, also served a small museum. Hogarth was at least as famous as a printmaker as a painter, so it’s not difficult for a museum like this to build a very good collection of his works for relatively little money since each one exists in hundreds of copies (thousands for the more famous ones) rather than as a single work which can only be owned by one person or institution. We had a great time looking at Hogarth’s hilarious satirical prints and learning all about his life and Chiswick, the area of town where this house sits. For some reason Kelly and Jenni both thought that Hogarth bore some resemblance to me in the self-portrait behind me:

In back of the house is a mulberry tree that has existed there since Hogarth bought the property in the 18th century. The tree was nearly destroyed by a bomb during World War II, but gardeners from nearby Kew Gardens cleverly managed to re-grow it from a cutting. There were numerous munitions factories along this section of the Thames so it saw heavy bombing.

Hogarth is buried in a nearby churchyard, so we also checked that out. Here’s his tomb:

After ending our walk with a much-needed refresher at a local pub, Kelly and I headed home and made our very first foray into cooking in our flat, frying up the sausages we bought at the market the day before. Here’s me plating the goods:

The dish was bangers and mash (no gravy, unfortunately) and it was excellent even if the onions were a little burnt in places.

After dinner Kelly settled in to watch some horrible made-for-TV disaster movie while I headed out to east London for a show that was supposed to include Annihilation Time. Unfortunately, though, they didn’t make it over the border this afternoon so they had to cancel last-minute. The first band to play was Alabaster Sun, a two-piece who I was informed feature a former guitar-player from Born Against. The guitarist and drummer were both very talented, and I’m sure that if they manage to form all of those riffs and beats into coherent and compelling songs they’ll be a great band. For now, unfortunately, they are a bit of a bore. Up next were Shitty Limits, the band whom I came to see. They started off with a cover of “Party Line” off the first Government Issue EP and the place exploded, not stopping until the band finished their set about twenty minutes later. The Shitty Limits play a scratchy, jerky and hectic brand of hardcore that brings to mind comparisons with the first Formaldehyde Junkies EP and early Wire. I was astounded at how energetic and memorable their set was… they’re easily the best live band I’ve seen in months, if not years, and while it might be sacrilege to admit it, I’d say they played a far better set than Systematic Death played the other night. Here are some pics:

No stiff upper lips here, these Brits were moshing!

After the Limits’ set their bass player, Ellis (who is an all-around stand-up dude) introduced me to a long-time internet pal, Ed from the Stupids and K-Line (who were, for my money, one of the most underrated UK bands of the last decade… if you ever find their full-length CD on Boss Tuneage Records do yourself a favor and pick it up). It turned out that almost all of K-Line was in attendance and they’ve all been avid readers of Deep Fry Bonanza / Dead Metaphor since I wrote a glowing review of their album 5 years ago. In addition to having great taste in web sites, they are all great people and I had so much fun chatting with them that I completely neglected to watch any of the other bands. Oh well. It was more than worth it, I think, to hear CRAZY stories about being in the studio with Joe Strummer, discuss the brilliance of Horse Bites, Dog Cries and learn that I currently reside in the same neighborhood as Feargal Sharkey from the Undertones. Let the Feargal Watch begin, I say!

Today, Monday, was a national holiday in the UK so Kelly and I didn’t feel too much responsibility to get work done. Kelly had done some research about cheap restaurants in London, and one of the more interesting-sounding places was this tiny Sri Lankan cafe in some god-forsaken section of northwest London. Neither of us had ever had Sri Lankan food before, but Time Out’s claim that you could have a filling meal for less than three pounds per head was more than enough to spur us. Here’s what we got for 7 pounds, though I realize now that at least 2 more dishes of food came out after I snapped this pic:

The food was delicious, our personal favorite being the eggplant dish on the right. However, due to a slight language barrier, instead of asking that the food not be very spicy, our food was as spicy as they could possibly make it. We soldiered ahead, but after two bites I was covered in sweat. My scalp always sweats when I eat spicy food, but this got so bad that the waiters became visibly disturbed and started bringing me extra glasses of water and supplementing our meal with free side dishes they thought would cool my palette.

After lunch the plan was to take a walking tour of Marylebone, even though by this point Kelly and I were so full that we both felt like we were waddling down the street. We persisted, though, and had a nice walk, though as with the Notting Hill walk we didn’t see anything of particular historical interest.

Here’s an interesting photo Kelly took. I guess all of the old townhouses around London must lean on one another for support, because here one had been demolished and there were massive iron beams holding up the houses on either side:

I’m not sure what Kelly was photographing here… my guess is that she liked the interesting ironwork:

And here’s a very cool lamppost outside the Royal Society of Medicine:

Here’s me in a busy but scenic alleyway called St. Christopher’s Place, listening to the tour on the ipod and drinking an iced latte:

Here’s a very cool, very modern statue of Mary and Jesus… I wish you could see it better because this was truly striking:

After taking a pleasantly long and meandering route, the tour ended by taking us up Marylebone High Street, past this church where the poets Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning were married:

From there it was home to a much-needed nap and writing this post while Kelly watches the second part of her ridiculous disaster movie.

After doing so much walking during the tourism blitz, my knees and ankles were battered and ready for a rest. Thus, Wednesday was devoted to doing absolutely NOTHING. The weather cooperated by being utterly miserable, so we stayed in the flat all day reading, watching TV and taking indulgent naps. We had a tasty dinner from the fish and chips shop downstairs and really didn’t do much of anything else with ourselves. This was very nice and when I woke up on Thursday morning I felt like a new man.

Thursday afternoon was supposed to be devoted to dissertation work, but it ended up going toward blogging, playing guitar and reading. Since the weather got rather nice in the late afternoon Kelly and I decided to complete our aborted Highgate walking tour from last week. On the way out we passed this sign that I’ve been meaning to document ever since I moved to East Finchley:

Does anyone know the origin of the expression “____ rules OK?” In addition to being very cute (and strangely Japanese-looking), this sign always makes the song “Standards Rule OK” by the Jam get stuck in my head.

We picked up the Highgate walk just at the edge of Hampstead Heath. I actually hadn’t been in this park at all, but this section was very rough with tall grass and little manicuring at all. It felt like a wild meadow, not at all like we were 4 miles from one of the biggest cities in the world. The fact that the Heath sits up on Highgate Hill also afforded some lovely views… you can just make out the city off in the distance in this shot:

From there we walked along a little street called Makepeace Avenue which was full of cute little mock-Tudor houses and had truly astounding views of the city. Apparently when this area was first opened up as a housing development in the late 19th century it bombed horribly as it was considered too far from London. I’m sure these properties are very coveted today, though. The views were breathtaking… in this photograph you can clearly see the London Eye just to the left of center and St. Paul’s Cathedral is just obscured by the tree on the left:

Here’s a view down one of the side streets: