The Adventures of Lorie and Brian Groth

I am in Seattle this week working and not really doing much else – not even going to Microsoft’s main offices in Redmond. I am in a week of all-day meetings in downtown Seattle, so I am truly a visitor, which seems a bit weird. I am staying at the Marriott on the waterfront, so I get to see the WA State ferries float by, which is one of the nice and unique things about Seattle compared to other cities.

I did get out and play for an hour today and visited Easy Street Records and picked up a few new CDs. It’s a great store to discover new music and with the exchange rate in my favour (GBP vs USD), it means that CDs are cheaper in the US than in the UK.

Here is Milo’s card to his girlfriend Daisy. You can make your own here. You need to have photos on a Windows Live Spaces site or on Flickr, and hopefully everyone has started using Spaces to share their photos with friends and family like I have been doing and as I suggested in an earlier blog entry.

We spent the weekend enjoying Champagne with friends in Reims, France. We visited the old Roman chalk caves of the Ruinart champagne house and the tasting area of the Pommery champagne house. The Ruinart caves are impressive and are the only ones listed as a historical site, but we all preferred the champagne at Pommery even after trying a couple of the very high-end ones at Ruinart – I wouldn’t turn one down if offered to me though.

My last 2 entries were about cemeteries – sorry about sounding a bit down, but they are sort of fascinating. Anyway, here are a two new things in our lives:

1. We just discovered that the "now playing" mode in Zune displays a bunch of album covers that we own, which looks pretty cool.

2. I just finished reading Merle’s Door, which is a great book about a great dog, but also educational about how dogs learn and deal with life.

Merle’s Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog by Ted Kerasote Read more about this book…

Also, here is a great list of plugins for Windows Live Writer that I usually use when posting to my blog. With some of these cool plugins, I can now link to our entire photo album of our September trip to Champagne with Anne:

The bus I usually ride to work goes down Sydney Street (SW3) where there is "The Parish Church of St Luke Chelsea" with a small park right next door, but no cemetery like most other churches in the area. However, there is a fence around the church with headstones leaning against the fence; 2 and 3 deep. I suspect that the headstones were moved from the "park" next door to make room for the park. I wonder where the bodies are?

Seven of us joined about 350,000 of our closest friends in London down near the London Eye. A good time was had by all, until of course we tried to get home. The tube stations in the area were closed so we had to walk quite a ways before getting to a tube stop that was open. We didn’t get home until 3am. 

We went to the London Transport Museum on Sunday and saw the history of the impressive bus and rail system that we rely on every day in here in London. This is one of the better museums I’ve been to. I didn’t realize it, but the Routemaster bus was designed and put into production in 1959 and the FX4 black cab in 1958. Since then, they have of course become icons of London. It was interesting to see how suburbs grew up because of the public transportation and eventually engulfed and simply became part of the city.

Our friend Steve is in town so we met up with a bunch of his friends last night and went to the Hackney Empire Theatre to see a pantomime, which is a stage show where the actors encourage the audience to yell things at certain times or when certain things happen on stage. The kids in the audience loved it, and it appears that the parents that were there probably loved it when they were kids too. The show we saw Dick Whittington and his Cat.

We left at intermission.

It was interesting to see, but probably more so if you are a kid. More interesting to me were the neighbourhoods we saw before and after the show. We walked along the river in Wapping and ate lunch at the Prospect of Whitby, which is a pub that has been around since the 1500s. After the show we walked around Hackney and Bethnal Green and had dinner around there somewhere at a tasty gastropub.  

Cold and rainy days are often good for a bike ride and in London on Christmas day the busses don’t run, which makes for an even better bike ride.

This is a little video story of what I saw on my ride – I basically discovered small neighbourhoods that I had never seen before and came upon Westminster Abby via the Dean’s Yard, which was a fun little surprise.

We have noticed a few things that are different about Christmas in London compared to the US. None are bad, just different, which makes it fun for us. These are:

1. Christmas Crackers: As our friend Alan explains, the Christmas Cracker is a fun way to get a little gift. I have only seen this at dinners around Christmas time, but I’m not sure if it is just a meal-time thing.

2. Dinner at a pub:  A month or more ago, you could reserve a table at a pub for Christmas lunch or dinner. You have to reserve early because they do fill up. I think this is partially because many houses in the city are too small to host a big dinner party. So you could have your Christmas dinner at the Crab & Winkle, the Zigfrid von Underbelly, or any other number of strangely named pub names. I doubt I can get lefsa like Mom makes at any of these places though. She makes great tynnlefse.

3. Lights: Most homes in the city don’t have their own Christmas lights, but many of the shops downtown have big light displays.

4. Trees: Of the people who buy Christmas trees in the city, they buy them wrapped up in some netting and often I see people carrying them down the sidewalk. There probably aren’t many U-cut places near London! I saw this in Paris too though, so it might happen in cities in the US too, except Seattle.

5. Ice skating: There are a variety of small ice skating rinks setup around the city, including one in what should be the moat at the Tower of London. We did our ice skating at Kew Gardens. OK, lots of US cities have this too, but there seem to be quite a few; possibly because London is so big.