Tourist London Part 1

After yesterday's post, which showed a small part of London from the air, on my flight back to Heathrow, I thought today it would be fun to combine some shopping with a walk and to snap a few well know London scenes. So prepare for a short virtual tour using some pictures I took today. I'm posting them small, but they are all in my flickr stream in a larger size. Click on any of them to take a look.

This is my actual route and I'll show a few tourist areas and landmarks along the way. We'll start by Chelsea Bridge Wharf, and head over Chelsea Bridge getting a good view of Battersea Power Station, which is now planned for redevelopment, It used to provide power and hot water to a large part of South London and its famous for appearing on the cover of a Pink Floyd album.

Then, along the the northern bank of the River Thames, called the Embankment, passing a traditional red phone box along the way.

The Embankment is one of the roads which forms the edge of the revised Congestion charge, for driving in central London. It costs £8 ($15) to turn into any of the side roads around here and every one of them has an array of number plate recognition cameras, to stop people from cheating. Of course, parking is extra. In this area its around £2.40 ($4) per hour.

Next stop along the Embankment is the Tate Britain gallery, which currently has an excellent exhibition of work by Hogarth, the political cartoonist. The museums and galleries in London are mainly free, with a suggested donation depending on how wealthy you are.

Then towards Vauxhall Bridge, which is like many of London's bridges, well decorated and well lit at night. I like Chelsea and Albert bridge, with their fairy tale lights.

Of course, the bridge itself is a great place to get a photo opportunity of London buses, just five in a row waiting for the traffic lights here. The oyster card means a bus ride is £1 or £2 if you use real money. The advantage of the oyster card is that it only allows you to spend up to a maximum within a day and it works for buses and tube transport. And in the background, you can see some of the stylish apartments which are springing up all along the South Bank.

So, across this bridge, still on foot, and a glimpse of the Palace of Westminster - which is where parliament meets. On the South Bank, there's the London Eye, which seems to be one of the most photographed London tourist sights nowadays.

So here, from the Lambeth side of the river, is that well known clock tower, within which is the bell called Big Ben. Tony Blair and the gang hang out in the common looking building to the side, next to the other place where the Lords and Ladies visit when they are 'up' in town.

Then its climb the steps to the edge of Westminster Bridge, where the relative tranquility of the Lambeth Walk is shattered by the hubbub of thousands of tourists. I'll pause here, with a final gratuitous shot of a bendy bus and a black cab. My walk today continued, but the blog can take a rest until tomorrow. Time for a grande latte.


tags technorati : rashbre london city urban

london high

Sitting near the front on the way back from Frankfurt, we had a pretty good view of London, whilst the plane was banking to get into line for the final approach. There's a good view of the London Eye and Parliament, as well as the roof of Waterloo train station.

It was already late afternoon and a clear sky, although a few minutes earlier we'd had quite a lot of bumpy turbulence.

tags technorati : rashbre london city urban

SMS-ville

I arrived at the airport and my phone blasted me with a flurry of texts and voicemails, but not until I'd walked outside to the transit area.

Fortunately, one of the messages was from Roger, who'd decided to hire a car and planned to meet me at the airport but didn't know which flight/terminal or anything.

Texts and phone calls later, he arrived in his silver Sixt and we sat-navved our way to the hotel before a mid evening supper and a few drinks.

berry

I received a new blackberry today from the phone company. I hadn't ordered it, but I'm told it was sent as a replacement because my old one would not work properly because of the change to Amercan Daylight Saving Time.

I do have quite a few appointments with people in the USA and so I suppose there will be plenty of chances for things to go wrong when, for a few weeks, the USA Eastern Time will only be four hours different from the UK.

I'm not the only one confused by this, judging by the look on Britney's face when she was using her Blackberry on the way to the hairdressers a short time ago.

Lording it

I don't think I've mentioned it before, but like many Brits, I have a peerage. My full title is Baron Rashbre of London and I even have one of those Latin mottos : "illic est fun progressus". For those not familiar with the titled ranks, a baron is a fancy word for a Lord.

Of course, a lot of this has been in the papers recently, including allegations that some people have paid money to a political party in order to get a peerage. There has even been suggestion that there have been coded emails floating around in Downing Street talking about Ps and Ks (Peerages and Knighthoods). But surely if this was the case then chief of staff Jonathan Powell and director of government relations Ruth Turner would know about it, yet there seem to be strong denials.

Now that the police are involved, I'm sure we will all hear what has happened, once those unfortunate embargoes have been lifted, which stopped even the BBC from reporting on this for a while. I suppose now the Guardian newspaper has managed to get its story printed before the judge had a chance to ban it, then we will start to get more information.

And I suppose there will be changes at Downing Street soon enough, when Mr Blair decides to hand the keys over and presumably quite a few of his staff will line up for their redundancy cheques as a replacement set of advisors are brought in by his successor.


Perhaps it was prescient of Becky, 24 who commented from within Page 3 of the Sun a full year ago, on this very matter.

Or another way to find out what has been happening may be to enquire directly to existing Lords and Ladies who have blogs, websites and email addresses.

tags technorati : rashbre Lords london peerage parliament cash for peerages blair

sniggle

There's a series of adverts on the side of buses and taxis in London at the moment that say "Walk". In green writing. Of course, they are advertising a healthy spread for your bread, but its also a good form of culture jamming, or sniggling, as the street describes it.

And to make it more fun in London, there's an excellent piece of work been done by St Martin's College of Art, which shows the walking time between places on the tube. As a Londoner, I will use overground walking shortcuts, but its amazing how many people only know the tube routes, however convoluted.

cloned

They say imitation is a sincere form of flattery, and I've noticed for some time that there are cloned accesses to rashbre central on the internet. Here's one. And here's another.

I think there is a third, but I couldn't see it in the searches today. The thing is, when I was looking for a couple of old articles, there were searches where the cloned access was coming out higher than the original.

Gulp.

ps Use blogger? Wanna see your cloned access?
Type : http://www.inblog.net/myblogname (without the blogspot.com)

rashbre radio

Some of you know I like listening to music and I've had rashbre radio across on last.fm for about a year, but thought it was about time I integrated it into the blog. So here it is, along with a new tab above (called rashbre radio!).


To stay listening whilst scrolling or when moving away, press the little "Pop Up" button on the player, which will start a new mini window the radio station in it.

once in a red moon

Standing outside tonight, watching the moon, as it is eclipsed by the earth.

Pretty cosmic.



...and thanks dg, for mentioning it, so that I knew to look up!

Theres a few more pictures in my flickr stream.

snappy happy

I take quite a few of the pictures that I post for my blog, except maybe the 'earth from space' or 'mid week and no time to post' type entries. I've always had a collection of cameras of different types and thought it would be worth describing the hierarchy from the 'just about take a picture' to 'purposeful' .

The most basic camera I use is my phone. It has a tiny lens and can take slightly smudgy pictures when the phone doesn't start saying 'memory error' or some of the other excuses that Windows Mobile plays when it doesn't want to co-operate.

Then I have a little black pocket digital 'point and shoot'. This is a small, flattish camera which I usually keep in the bottom of whatever bag I am carrying. It takes normal walkman batteries and therefore I don't really have to worry about remembering to charge it. Frankly, I don't know how manufacturers get away with selling these though, because there is a loooong delay between pressing the shutter and the picture being taken.

Then there's the camera I use the most, which is a little Panasonic Lumix FZ-7. This looks like a tiny SLR, but actually has an electronic viewfinder. It has fast startup, takes the pictures when you press the button and has a nice big piece of Leica glass on the front so that it works well in low light. It also has a 12x optical zoom, which, if it were a 35 mm camera would be the equivalent of 36mm wide to 432mm Telephoto - so it also has image stabilisation to avoid camera shake. There is also a video mode which I've used at some music concerts. I bought a couple of extra rechargable batteries for this from Hong Kong and it goes out frequently when I go out.

Finally there's SLR, and I use Nikon. There's several around at the moment which are at between 6 and 10 mega pixels and for most people I'd just say get something you can afford unless you are into big pictures and fancy cropping.

The trick with these SLRs is to recognise the march of the mega-pixels which means there is always a diffusion model which is lower spec and cheaper but probably really about as good as the best models of a year ago. The current bargain seems to be the so-called 'refurbished' D70s which are around UKP350 at the moment, with a good 18-70 zoom lens. This is because of the replacement rave reviewed D80, which is about UKP700 with a reasonable kit lens.

There's also a superb smaller D40 for around UKP350, which is allegedly lower spec, but in my experience is a lovely camera to use and geared towards people starting out, although I know other photographers (like me) who swear by how good this is.

The snag with the Nikon (whichever one) is to remember to take it along. When I'm travelling and want to stay with carry-on luggage, unfortunately, the SLR becomes an item to jettison.

So thats how I get the hierarchy :
- phone
- black point and shoot
- Lumix
- Nikon.

And as a Mac user, I use Aperture to store my pictures (I did use iPhoto, which is fine for most needs) and actually I use the basic version of Photoshop (Photoshop Elements) for any post editing of the pictures.

blog party

Have you been to check this out? About 400 visitors and still counting!

Greetings if you've come here from the party, please leave a comment and/or a link!

If you havn't visited yet, then click here

fyne

A few of us had a bit of a do for Clare at Loch Fyne, which is quite a pleasant restaurant. A smidge of champagne was involved and some very enjoyable seafood. I decided to try the courses which were italicised and this led to a rather delicious Bradan Rost, which is kilnroasted smoked salmon with a whisky sauce.

So, as a weekend treat, here's my reverse engineered recipe. The Bradan Rost itself is a smoked salmon that has sort of cooked during the smoking process. Take some slices and heat them wrapped in foil in a warm oven for approx 15 mins. The result should look a quite deep brown colour.

In parallel, mix crème frâiché, creamed horseradish and whisky in a pan and heat through without boiling. A few pieces of sliced chanterelle can add a little texture. When warm, add freshly squeezed lemon juice and pepper to taste. Remove the Braden Rost from the oven and serve with the warm sauce and maybe some boiled potatoes, crusty bread and green leaved salad.

Sigh contentedly.