We won!!!

Well, by “win,” I mean that we came in second place in Round 1 of last night’s pub quiz. And actually, another team answered the same number of questions correctly that we did, but they didn’t put an answer down for the tie-breaking question. But it resulted in the same thing—we got a £10 voucher for the bar for the team! And there’s no reason to believe that our guess for the distance from London to Baghdad would’ve been any further away than the other second-place contender’s guess.

Here’s the triumphant team. You can see the quizmaster himself waving in the back.


Eve pointed out it was first time we came in other than second-to-last. The quizmaster said he was proud of us.

Ok, so this is a cool thing about living in London

I went away for one night this weekend to go to a ball. A nice little touch about the ball was its location:


Not only did I get to go to the ball, but I got to walk around lovely Vienna for a day and a half.

January and February are the ball season in Austria. In those months, there are more than (depending on whom you ask) 80 balls in Vienna. This was the Juristen Ball, or the Lawyers’ Ball. The ball was held in the Hofburg Imperial Palace, where the Habsburgs lived and ruled over the Austrian empire. It’s also not a bad place for a party:


And I got see Astrid, a roommate from law school. Here she is with a couple of my colleagues.

Oh, Lord, it’s early

It’s four in the morning. I’m about to head out. I got up at a horrible hour. This had better be a good weekend.

Radio Four

My radio wakes me up to Radio Four, a mostly talk BBC radio station (if you’re in London, it’s FM 93.5), which has news on weekday mornings from 6:00 until 9:00. The other day I was up earlier. If you happen to be listening to Radio Four a little before 5:45, you’ll hear the daily prayer. The other day it was delivered by the Reverend Stephen Shipley. Then the farming report came on.

Breakfast

This is a traditional English breakfast.


This is what I usually eat for breakfast.


It’s a paradoxical life I lead.

Fruitless shopping

As the title to this post suggests, this was a weekend filled mostly with fruitless clothes-shopping. Things could be worse. In any event, I did meet someone new. Dusan is a friend of Bill (Joy’s fiancé). We had a very nice brunch, and then I went off to be defeated by the many stores of London.

FAFAT is on!

The First Annual Foosball Amateurs’ Tournament (or FAFAT) is going on at work now. There are eight teams, playing each other in two groups. Some teams are more enthusiastic than others, and since it’s up to the individual teams to schedule their own matches, some are getting played more quickly than others. My team, for example, played all three of its first-round matches right away—and we lost them all (much like with pub quizzes, I’m all enthusiasm, no talent).

The match pictured here involved another of the more enthusiastic teams (the ones on the right), although they’re doing far better than we did.

Sadly, my teammate has now left the London office and is heading back to the New York office, so there have been continuity problems. I got a new teammate, but we haven’t had a chance to play yet. In any event, there are some advantages to being in the London office.

Another Monday night pub quiz

We were back for more this Monday night—back for another pub quiz. And we did... pretty terribly. Do you know what artist’s work is on display at the Matthew Street Gallery in Liverpool? We didn’t (although we were really close).


We did, however, have the best team name and we had some answers that amused the crowd. You do what you can.

Sickness

Unfortunately for Martin, on the last day of his visit he got very ill and spent the whole day on the couch. Katherine still came over and managed to catch up—sort of. Here she is showing off both her beer and Martin's illness.


Hanging out with sick people is super-fun.

Touring around

An advantage to having people visit is it makes you go do the things that you mean to do anyhow, but don’t always get around to. For example, Martin and I and a few others went to the Tate Modern, where we saw innovative works of art:


As a nice bonus, the weather was beautiful. Although it was cloudy when we went into the museum,


it was sunny and lovely when we walked out.

He’s baaaack

The posts lately have been few, far between, and bland. But all that’s about to change. Why? Because Martin has returned—back in Europe on vacation while he’s going from one job to another. So it should be a fun weekend. Here he is proudly displaying his passport.

And as a very nice token of his appreciation, he brought me a gift. It’s hard to see from the picture, but this is actually a signed bottle of bourbon.

Another weekend goes by

It was a fun weekend, but there’s nothing especially enlightening to report. The main focus was going to pubs with friends. And I saw Walk the Line. All very pleasant, but none of it particularly London-y.

Time Out

I started subscribing to Time Out London soon after I arrived here. It’s a weekly magazine with movie listings, tv listings, things going on around town, and a few fluffy articles about local culture. This week’s issue came on Wednesday. Here’s a picture of the cover:

Awesome.

Cuba

Last night Jaynna and I went to a Cuban restaurant in my neighborhood (called Cuba Libre) that I’ve been meaning to try. It’s a colorful, cheery place that serves lots of colorful, cheery cocktails.

Neither of us had the drink named after Hemingway.

The food was fine, but Jaynna and I were both a little low-energy. But not a bad mid-week outing.

Go team!

I haven’t had a lot to report lately, and I have no good pictures from the past fews days. But just in case you were worried about this, I can now safely say that Americans are not the only fat people in the world. Ummm... yay!