The Adventures of Milo, Lorie, and Brian Groth

Sunday night we saw the last night of comedy at the Pimm’s Summerfest in Holland Park. The venue was pretty interesting, since it was outside under a large tent, but half surrounded by an old Victorian building. Click on the Holland Park link to see it in the map. For those who don’t know, Pimm’s is the summer drink of choice at pubs all around London, and goes over quite well in Minnesota when we bring it there. The 4 comedians we saw were great (should have been 5, but 1 didn’t make it) and we plan to go again next year if they do it again.

Milo’s playground in Fulham is Bishops Park. I took a bunch of photos of it in an effort to create my first Photosynth, which is Microsoft’s latest cool thing. More specifically, Photosynth is a new way to create panoramic photos, but online and in a way that lets you navigate around the set of photos instead of seeing just one big image.

Click on the picture to see mine.

A bunch of co-workers and I spent Thursday evening at the studios for Virgin Radio (recently sold, soon to be renamed) for a night of team building and rock trivia. I did OK despite the fact that I had never heard of some of the English bands that didn’t make it over to the US in the last 30 years. Being the only American helped a little, but not too much. It was a fun night and included a rather strange race at one point…

I’ll post photos once I get them, but there were about 30 of us and they needed 5 volunteers to wear large, full body-sized, foam costumes and race each other around Golden Square in SOHO. I of course jumped at the chance! The choices were a lemon, a red pepper, a banana, a carrot, and a hot dog. I chose the hot dog, but the guy in the red pepper won the race. It was difficult to run in a big costume with no peripheral vision, with the mesh thing over my face rubbing my nose raw, and of course we had all had a bit of wine with no food yet. 

Just another odd experience of living in London.

Yes, the Colosseum in Rome is amazing, St. Peter’s has more marble than anything I’ve ever seen, and all of the various ruins are quite interesting. However, we really felt like we got a feel for Italy after a large Italian meal, with a large Italian family (sort of since they’re mostly a mix of Europeans now living in Italy), in a small hill town near Orte (a different small hill town), and drinking a very good house wine. Although, to be more precise, after this big meal with locals, 5 of us squeezed into a worn out Fiat Panda with the local 22-year old driving with blaring Italian music on the radio going between 70 and 100 kph – often on small roads, with cell phone in hand. It all seemed quite normal for him and the rest of his family, and a bit surreal.

We just got back from a few days in Rome and a few days in Orte with friends Geoff and Silvia. Geoff’s cousin owns a place in Orte that we rented and it is her family that we had dinner with and their Fiat Panda that we borrowed while there – after the above driving lesson. This means that we got the experience of squeezing a car through very narrow roads in various hill towns, driving like crazy Italian drivers (sorry my Italian friends, but I think you know what I mean), and tasting gelato in different locations. It also means that I got to test the waters (at least my foot) of another sea: the Tyrrhenian Sea. It was a great time and we can’t wait to get to other areas of Italy, preferably in the smaller towns and countryside.

I have uploaded a bunch of photos.

We live near Munster Road in Fulham and saw this tonight. Yes, apparently rainbows do end in London, but we never saw a pot of gold.

If you look real close, you can see a plane under the street light – it had just flown through the rainbow.

Yesterday started with a meeting near our place in Fulham at the Chelsea Football Club. There were people from the club, some from Microsoft, and a couple of other technology partners. The most interesting thing about the meeting is that everyone involved except two Americans (one was me) was that they were all avid Chelsea fans. I think it is somewhat of an unspoken rule that you don’t do business with them if you are not an avid fan, or if you aren’t, you send someone in your place that is.

I didn’t get to tour the stadium, but I’d like to. That costs £15 though. However, they have their own television studio, since they have their own cable channel. They are quite proud of this, so I got to see their studio. It isn’t as impressive as the Big Ten Network studios we saw the other week in Chicago, but this is just a football (soccer) club, not a television network.

I’ve given my dad a CD from Eric and made a copy for Anne (sorry Eric) and Alyson just sent me a URL to a good video that you should see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8toUUnAJfgI

You can see and hear more from Eric at http://www.youtube.com/user/ebranner

More about Eric at http://ericbranner.com/

I decided to check out the British International Motor Show today, which unfortunately was way over in East London. With weekend tube closures and summer tourist crowds, it took me almost 2 hours each direction to get there and back. From bus to tubes (Picadilly line to Jubilee line) to light rail (the DLR). I only spent 2 hours at the car show, so my travel time was twice that of my entertainment. Oh well, at least my new Zune is full of good music.

My favourites were electric cars from the NICE Car Company. MSN has a list of their view of the 10 greatest cars at the show. One of the trends I certainly noticed was that most car companies are creating small cars like my 1992 Honda Civic and are focusing on low CO2 emissions. Even Ford and Chevy were at the show with their environmentally friendly cars.

One of the nice things about living in London is access to a variety of champagne, probably because of the close proximity to the Champagne region.

With Anne on Friday, we sampled a new champagne (new to us) and one we had picked up a few months ago when we were in the Champagne region. Pictured here are 3 of our favourites, left to right:

1. Pommery: We had the Blanc de Blanc, also called "Summertime"
2. Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin: pictured is the Brut, but we didn’t have any this time – it is our regular standby, which a pretty good one to have as a regular.
3. Louis Cesar Beaufort: We had the Cuvee Hannalice, which is the new one that Anne introduced us to.

If you get the chance to have one of these, I recommend you give it a try.

• The other night, we were with our friends Odele and Brent in Chicago when we got an interesting opportunity: see the set and operations of the Big Ten Network, which is where Odele works. I don’t watch any sports, but those of you in the US might recognize the set used by the news/sports-casters pictured here. I have a few other photos here, but didn’t want to take any that might give away details of their operations, broadcast, and editing machines. I am happy to report that almost all of the computers I saw were running Windows. We were there after-hours so the place was pretty empty, which gave us the opportunity to check out how they can monitor and control multiple games being displayed all at once, including multiple cameras, instant replays, and so on. 

After just two days, we have gone sailing, kayaking, wake boarding, knee boarding, skurfing (pre-cursor to the wake board), swimming, diving, golfing (yes, even me), driven golf carts (the good part about golfing), and ridden a paddle boat. We still need to get some bike riding in, especially since this is where my recumbent bicycle has ended up. A bit too much food though! The Pimm’s we brought from England has been popular, although possible with us more than our local relatives.

As you can see from the photos, the weather has been great, which has made the sailing a bit of a challenge, but everything else good. Only a few mosquito bites so far, which is certainly a rare bonus.

Today Lorie and I (not Milo) took part in the London Bikeathon from Chealsea to Richmond Park, and back. This was the first time I had seen Richmond Park, and seeing it via bike on a nice sunny day was the perfect way to experience it. There were a few routes to choose from, and we were on the Scenic Ride, which meant we each got a wonderful light pink t-shirt. 

One big difference I noticed between this ride and ones I have been on in Washington State was at the rest stops. In the US, we get bananas, oranges, energy bars, water, and maybe a sport drink. On this ride in London, we got bananas and water, which was fine, but you had the option to purchase burgers and beer too.   

The ride was a casual 4 hours, which was about 3 1/2 hours of biking – all at a pretty slow pace, which is how Lorie prefers it.  

I posted few other photos here.

No, I am still not a classical music fan. However, one of the great things about London is the vast amount of interesting events happening at any one time. Last night, Anne invited us to what turned out to be a fascinating talk by John Suchet about Beethoven. What made it fascinating is that Suchet is so passionate and excited about Beethoven as a person and what events in his life inspired him to write his music. He almost turned me into a classical music fan and he never played a single tune.

Another thing that made it interesting was where this talk was being held, which was at Daunt Books on Marylebone High Street. This has to be the most interesting travel book store I have ever experienced, but thanks to Megan’s fascination/addiction to the place , I already knew about it. Here is the description of the talk, which sounds dull, but certainly wasn’t.

Following his wonderful fictional trilogy about Beethoven, "The Last Master", broadcaster John Suchet has now turned his attention to "The Treasures of Beethoven". He tells the stories behind the music, and highlights some of the most important events in Beethoven’s life by investigating the many items of memorabilia to be found in museums and collections around the world.

I flew into Madrid, Spain this evening to attend meetings on Wednesday. We landed at about 23:00 (11pm), so I didn’t get any time to play tourist. Since I will be in meetings all day before heading back to the airport, I won’t have any time to seem much of the city or sample the local food, drinks, adventure, or entertainment. So, I took a little walk tonight around my hotel and snapped this photo of my hotel and the square in front of it that was full of people finishing their dinner and drinks (at midnight). It seems to be a pretty popular area. The hotel is the “Melia Madrid, Reina Victoria” – or “Reina Victoria, By Melia” – or “ME by Melia”. It is too trendy for its own good since the name keeps changing depending on what I look at.