St John's Wood

There's a neighborhood in London that's lucky enough to have not one, but two(!) defining characteristics. This little hood is called St John's Wood and it manages to not only be the local Beatles fanbase, but it also has the distinction of being London's 'American' neighborhood. It's hard to tell in the photo, but the Beatles are crossing Abbey Road to get from the Abbey Road Studios to the American School in London, located about a block and a half away.

As far as I can tell, you can blame the American neighborhood aspect on the decision of the school to be located in the area. We've been doing a small piece of work for the school so I have had the very hard to come by privilege of visiting the school. Essentially, it's a K-12 school that teaches by an American curriculum. It's attended mainly by American kids who's parents have been relocated to work in London (and whose employers are willing to buck up the private school fees!). Being the only school of this type in London, Americans with school-age children seemingly flock here.

So today, after observing the morning arrivals at the school, I dragged my patient coworker that block and a half down the street so we could walk back and forth across Abbey Road. You wouldn't guess it by the 35 year old Beatles photo, but Abbey Road is quite the busy road and my attempted photos of my coworker were spoiled when a bus stopped in between us. Sad times. However, traffic died down a bit and I was able to get a few photos in. So yes, that photo is indeed of me on The Crossing, this morning.

As an extra bit of excitement, it appeared as if the walls outside Abbey Road studios had been heavily graffitied. The orange cones you see in the background have been put up by the graffiti squad, who were painting over the 'art'. There was also a noticeable stream of musicians heading to the studio from the station. However, instead of being cool rocker types, they were for the most part carrying 'classical' stringed instruments. Sad!

Cycling to work

Over the past week and a half, I've commuted to work and back on my bike! I know, I didn't really see it coming either. But before I dive into that inspiring topic, I must first discuss bike lingo. For some reason, the terminologies for bicycle related activities is very different in the UK to the US. As I work in 'sustainable travel', I discuss and write in the UK terminology basically every day, and having not discussed these things very frequently in the US, I tend to use the UK terminology even when I'm not at work. As I will no doubt write the rest of this entry using UK terminology (go ahead, judge me, that's fine!), I think I should first give a run down on these differences.

US: 'Bike ride'
UK: 'Cycle ride'

US: 'Bike riding'
UK: 'Cycling'

US: 'I rode my bike to work'
UK: 'I cycled to work'

I think that just about sums things up, so bear with me! I shall try to refrain from using any additional anglicisms.

So, after Mark and I had a few weekend 'cycle rides', we decided that we would try 'cycling to work'. Our first attempts were thwarted by torrential rains on the Friday before last, but the forecast for last week was remarkably warm and sunny and we decided to give it a whirl. So last Monday we dressed up like complete idiots (but no lyrca people!) and hit the road.

While I did eventually make it to work, I must admit I did get a bit lost. Our plan was to stick to the main roads to our workplaces, many of which were 'cycle routes'. For me this meant leaving the house, 'cycling' up a side street, through a park and some residential streets (essentially a traffic-free short-cut to Fulham Road), then up Fulham Road into Chelsea. As a good 'cyclist', I try my best to obey traffic laws, including stopping at red lights and not proceeding through them until the light turns green (although you get started on the 'red & amber' phase). When I was stopped at one of these red lights on Fulham Road, I was joined by 7 (!) other 'cyclists' before the light turned green again. This seemed like an impressive number to me.

On day 1 I missed my turn off of Fulham Road, which would have led me through a residential bit of South Kensington then up through Hyde Park alongside Kensington Palace and then an undetermined route from there to my work. So having missed this turn, I took one just after and ended up sort of winding through South Ken (not a bad area to be lost, in general) and ended up going up Queens Gate, then through, um the Queens Gate into Hyde Park, then alongside the road through the park and I managed to find my work through the other end. While this was entirely accidental my first day (I resorted to following other 'cyclists' who seemed to know where they were going), I have gone up and down Queens Gate every day since (on purpose). Might I add, that this route takes me past the Natural History Museum, the Albert Memorial, Royal Albert Hall, and I noticed yesterday on my way home that I could see a bit of the Princess Diana Memorial in the park. Again, not a bad bid of scenery for a commute.

So how do I feel about this route? Fulham Road tends to be a bit busy with traffic and I have to pass several buses. However, it's a 'cycle route' and there are always lots of other 'cyclists' around so you feel like there is an awareness of 'cyclists'. Queens Gate is a massive, massive road, but instead of being busy, it's just really wide. Basically there's sort of one lane of traffic in the space for two lanes, so cars don't come anywhere near you and there's plenty of room to pass other 'cyclists' without danger. That being said, my bike is not meant for speed, so I am generally the one being passed by those guys on road bikes wearing lycra, but I do pass the occasional old lady! The route through Hyde Park is quite nice as there are 'cycle lanes' along the sidewalk of the main route, so you are essentially lumped in with pedestrians instead of cars. There are 'cycle lanes' along both sides of the road so you don't have to deal with a lot of people coming at you either. The sketchiest bit of my commute is on my way in when I have to go along the very busy road along the north side of Hyde Park for a couple blocks, crossing two lanes of traffic so I can turn up to work. However, I have found that it's quite easy if I just go a bit slow and let every pass me, waiting for a gap in traffic to duck over.

So there are supposed to be many benefits of 'cycling' to work that we spew off in the world of travel planning. Now I shall debunk them.

Time savings: if I just walked to my desk from my bike it might be quicker to cycle, but having to get changed sort of makes it a push. If I was in a rush in the morning I could probably get in a bit quicker, but I don't want to get sweaty so it's not worth it. However, I made excellent time 'cycling' home yesterday when I wasn't so worried about such things! Oh, and my trip in to work is slightly uphill, so the trip home is slightly down. This makes the trip in a little more tricky!

Energy: we like to claim that people show up at work awake and ready to face the day when they 'cycle' in. However, I just seem to be a bit sleepier than usual! Perhaps this only applies if you would otherwise drive to work?

Hair: not really something you talk about in travel planning, but a concern for female cyclists, especially. I put my hair in a French braid if I'm going to be wearing the helmet as I don't get helmet hair. When I get in to work my hair is a bit weird from having been braided straight after drying, but I generally have been putting it into a pony. It's not ideal, but I'm not that worried about impressing my colleagues by having fabulous hair (as, let's be honest, it's never fabulous).

So that's a brief wrap-up of my cycling to work ways. I took the tube in today. I'm pooped!

Liverpool - Chelsea

It's unfortunately that time of year again where all the random 'football' competitions are nearing the end and, um, emotions run high. One of these competitions is the Champions League, which is um, either finishing up the quarter-finals or about to head into the quarter-finals. You can't expect me to keep close tabs on these things as in general I don't really care. What I do know is that the Champions League is a competition that runs across Europe and is not restricted to certain leagues as a result. Oh, and it's a tournament style competition. If you want more details on the premise, you'll have to ask Mark. Teams play each other twice, once at each home field, and the scores are added together to determine the winner. In the case of a tie, away goals count more than home goals.

As part of this competition, Liverpool and Chelsea have been matched up in one of these near-the-end rounds. This meant that last week Chelsea played at Liverpool, and last night (lucky me!), Liverpool played at Chelsea. I have decided that both of these teams have weird and over-zealous fans who in general need to take a chill-pill, get over themselves, and find another hobby. As the game was blessedly on a work-day, I had to 'deal' with the gathering fans in order to get home. Luckily starting my journey at the second station on the line assured that I got a seat for the entire journey. The very large group of 8 or so Liverpool fans who got on the same station sadly had to stand. However, you get better lung capacity when you are standing.

On Chelsea home game days, the trains get very very crowded between Earls Court and Fulham Broadway, which is luckily only two stops, but it's a difficult two stops for people who have to stand. Yesterday these two stops were made even worse when that group of Liverpool fans decided it was best to start singing and jumping up and down. Sadly, there was no wall for me to bang my head against. After the fans got off at Fulham Broadway, a middle-aged woman sat down with tears in her eyes, traumatized from being stuck in the middle of the singing-bouncing fans.

As a side note, Chelsea won. Well, the game ended in a tie, but Chelsea won the game in Liverpool last week so they had the higher cumulative score and will therefore advance to the next round. They will be playing their first game against Barcelona in two weeks, and a week after this I'm eagerly anticipating sharing my commute with a large group of singing Barcelona fans. Yay!

Richmond Park

It's been a four day weekend here in the UK. While otherwise generally stingy with the whole public holiday thing, we are somewhat holiday rich this time of year! For Easter, we get off both Good Friday and Easter Monday, and then a Monday bank holiday both the first and last weekends in May. It's not a bad deal. However, it is a bad deal between New Years and Easter, between the last May bank holiday and the August bank holiday, and then between the August bank holiday and Christmas, during which we get nothing. Oh wait, I guess we still have those 5 weeks of annual leave we can use...

Anyways, the weather this past long weekend was a bit lacking. It was essentially raining all day Friday and Saturday before being just grey on Sunday, then we finally got a bit of sun yesterday afternoon. To compensate, we spent Friday painting our bathroom (it's seafoamy now), Saturday running errands and going to the mall, then finally on Sunday we snuck out for a little bike ride and yesterday we went for a long bike ride. Sunday we did a loop along the river through Putney and Hammersmith, and yesterday we went down to Richmond Park via Putney and Barnes.

First, some background. Richmond Park, according to my AA pub, walk and cycle guide (thanks for that, Chris!) (Hi Chris!), I've learned that Richmond Park was originally set aside as a park by Charles I, who took his court there to go hunting/escape the plague (talk about killing two birds with one stone!). Numerous hunting excursions/plague outbreaks have ensured that the park has remained since the 1600s, and today it is apparently the largest urban walled park in Europe. I think the word 'walled' is of key importance there, but at the same time I assure you it is indeed very, very big. The outlined bike ride essentially around the perimeter of the park was 7 miles long. Most of the park is sort of open grassland with several 'glens' of trees and some carefully placed massive hills. The hills allow for some very nice views, as well as some opportunities to hop off ones bike to push it up the hill. In general, the park is quite pretty and features a very nice car-free rail for cycling. Although that being said, we somehow managed to get lost and ended up at a dead end, pushed our bikes up a very big hill only to find we couldn't take our bikes through the gate at the top, and then had to walk around until we found the trail we were supposed to be on.

Secondly, the National Cycle Network. The powers that be have set aside several 'cycle routes' connecting a lot of random places. Yesterday, despite a small detour on the way there when we got lost, we followed cycle route 4 from essentially our house to the park. The routes are sometimes along main roads, such as Kings Road and Putney Bridge, and sometimes along segregated paths, such as a bit along the Thames in Putney and through the wetlands in Barnes. They are remarkably well-signed, if you keep an eye out for them, and they include directional signposts with destinations and the distance in miles. So yesterday we knew we were finally almost there when we saw 'Richmond Park 1/4 mile' on one of these signs. In addition to the national cycle network, London has a number of cycle routes and produces special maps for riding through certain areas showing both exact routes but also things such as 'quieter roads recommended by cyclists'. The maps are available for free from Transport for London and I'm sure very useful if you actually look at them, can then remember all the names of the streets you're supposed to turn down and then find those streets while you are out and about. All easier said than done, of course.

G20

London was lucky enough to host the G20 summit last week. I know, we completely lucked out on that one! Thanks, Gordon Brown, for volunteering!

I won't bother going through what actually was achieved at the summit, mainly as I have no idea, but will instead discuss what impact it has on my day to day life. The summit itself was held at the Excel Centre, in very far east London. The protesters who manifested themselves overnight decided to concentrate their efforts around the US embassy, the Bank of England and the rest of the City and Canary Wharf. Lucky for me, I spend just about all of my time in west London, far from all these sites. So basically, the G20 summit has no impact on myself whatsoever. A bit sad, I know, but true.

However, there was much talk of the G20 and the impact it would have on the folks who worked in the banking sector. Apparently the banks were telling their employees that they should 'dress down' last week when the protesters were about, as if for some reason the fact that they are walking into the RBS building at 9am doesn't imply that they are a banker so much as the fact that they might be walking down the street wearing a suit. In the end, I did not hear any reports about pulverized bankers. Thanks goodness they were able to go incognito!

As seems to be the rule with things like this these days, the peaceful types with things to say were over-shadowed by people who used the whole thing as an excuse to steal computers out of high street banks. In front of lots of police and cameras. When will these people ever learn!