merpel

I can’t believe it’s Thursday already! Time does fly when you’re having a good great time! So Tuesday was pretty quiet, I just hung around the hotel working on my thesis and in the evening Paul and I had dinner together somewhere near the hotel.

Yesterday morning I went out for a run. It was a pretty good run, it was nice and sunny, somehow I got lucky with the traffic lights and I didn’t get lost like I did in Athens :). Then I tried to fix mysql on my macbook (somehow I’d managed to mess it up so I couldn’t start it again. Now I can start it but I seem to have lost my databases….). At lunch I met Paul and his aunt (who happens to be visiting London too this week) at Somerset House. We were lucky to find a table in the sun as it was pretty busy but it would have been really a shame if we’d had to sit inside (it’s not like California where it’s almost always sunny). After lunch I decided to leave mysql be and work some more on my thesis, until it was time to go down to the Thames again, to meet Paul and go to the Apollo Victoria theatre for Wicked. It turned out that I got seats that were pretty close the the stage (row 4), not in the centre, but we could still see pretty much the whole stage and we had an absolute blast. The music was great, the dancing was great, and the cast was just absolutely amazing!

Afterwards we met up with one of Paul’s friends at a really cool place called Shunt. It’s a gallery/bar/club in the railway arches under London Bridge station. It’s pretty huge labyrinth, it’s candle lit and smells a bit weird, and around every corner you find something new and exciting. There were bands playing, there were corners with bars and tables and chairs, there were art installations, old pianos scattered around the place and even a games area with pool tables and pinball machines. It’s probably one of the coolest places I’ve ever been to.

Now I’m going to find something that contains cafeine to stay awake as it wasn’t exactly an early night :)

Blogging is really on a very low priority these days, although there has been enough happening that would have been worthwhile telling about. Most of it you may have gathered from my photos on flickr, though, at least I’ve been able to keep that up (apart from the gap the past few weeks, but that was because I wrecked my almost-indestructible camera in Athens, since yesterday I have a new one though so soon you can expect updates on flickr again).

So Athens was great actually. I was pleasantly surprised with the city as some people had told me it was a dirty city. It took a while to get comfortable with the city, obviously Greece has some political issues to deal with (riot police on virtually every street corner, police wearing bullet proof vest fulltime). But the city also has its charm (a vast number of archaeological sites, great public transport in the centre, great food, nice people). EACL itself was good too. Immensely fatiguing but the conference programme was interesting, there were a lot of inspiring talks, and great people to hang out with (some that I already knew from previous conferences, and also some people that I met there).

Then there were a few weeks of hard work, a visit from the Hunts to Leiden and Etten-Leur and now I’m in London :)