London/Geneva

I went to London for work last week and got to see Kara in the process - she came up on her R&R from South Sudan! It was great and we ate lots of bad (as in good) English food, like cheeseburgers and steak and ale pie and pizza. We had coffee every morning at this really super little cafe around the corner from my hotel in Brentford.

We also met up with my college friend Josh, who's doing research for his PhD in the British Library. We went to the Tate Modern and went down the Holler slides:

and then saw the "Sliding Doors" exhibit:

On Saturday we went to another ex-power-station-made-into-art-space, the Wapping Project, which had huge fashion photographs in it. I was a little bored with the 'fashion photos and models in old brick industrial space' concept, and the cafe service was terrible. That said, the candles on the huge pumps and machinery still in the building made the early evening quite pleasant, as did the comedy of five english majors speculating on how the plant made electricity.

We set out for some dinner through Brick Lane (Indian restaurants galore) and Spitalfields, which has a Sunday market and a really good restaurant I'd been to the past summer, St. John. After some street BBQ we got a few beers at a bar, where I explained the sociology of Baltimore's heroin addicts to Josh's friend Ian. Honestly, most of it I just made up. Sorry Ian.

Sunday Kara and I had yet more coffee and went on a hunt for a scarf that took us up to Russell Square, where we perused books at Judd's, and where I accosted a man with a nice scarf, much to his shock and horror, to find out where he'd gotten it. Then back to Covent Garden, where I found said scarf right where he had told me, and then up to King's Cross to confirm Kara's hotel, down to Oxford Circus to grab food and an earful of live blues, and then home on the tube to pack my stuff up.

In Geneva I met with a bunch of people and all went quite well. I even have a friend to go skiing with next time I'm there and there's snow!