Michael Carøe Andersen

Category: Living in London

Irish Monday

A night of folk music and Guinness – not the worst way to start of a week 🙂

Monday night we headed to The London Irish Centre in Camden. A festival called The Return to Camden Town celebrating Irish culture is currently going on in Camden and Jamie Smith (who we saw last year as well) was playing with his new band Smith: Byrnes: Oâ€™Sullivan and this was the release concert of their first CD.

There were two bands playing that night, the first one with was a guy playing different a instrument for almost every song with his band. This was a bit more traditional I guess and then there were Jamie and his friends playing a bit more upbeat with a drummer and guitar. I really enjoyed the music, it reminded me of my days back in high school when the folk festival was in town there.

I shot a video of the first song they played; Exotic Snowball. The sound in the video is not good so if you want to hear what it really sounds like go to their myspace profile and hear the song there.

October 28, 2009
Culture – high and low

My first weekend out of London went to Margate to take part in RailsCamp UK; a 4 day unconference, with about 50 guys, geeking with Ruby and Rails, no internet connection, barcamp-style sessions and copious amounts of Guitar Hero and other types of video games.

First of all it was great to get out of the big city and to the sea. I grew up close to the sea and that is one thing that is nowhere close when you live in Prague. The RailsCamp took place in an old hostel close to the beach so we went for a couple of walks to get blown out with fresh sea air after sitting couped up in a smelly room for too long. Margate where it took place is somewhat of a has-been resort town. In the past centuries it was the place to go for Londoners when they wanted a beach. But these days where a flight to Spain is cheaper than the bus to Margate the place is in somewhat of a decline. This made it an interesting place to go and take pictures of the shut down amusement park Dreamland.

After four days of geeking I returned to London and joined Ann and a group of her Maltese friends for a visit to the Les Miserables musical. One of Ann’s friend’s cousin was in the play so we got some of the best seats in the house 🙂 The musical has been running in London for 24 years now and I can surely see why. It’s a great production with a lot of nice scenes and songs.

Photo by Julie Broadfoot

We met the cousin after the show for a while and it was interesting to hear him talk about it. He also has a cool blog where he writes about his experience like when blind people come to get a Touch-Tour of the set.

The “low” point in culture this past week was actually really amazing. On Ian Visits, another London blog, I had read about the chance to see the Kingsway Tramway Subway tunnel which was decommissioned in 1952 and generally not open to the public. Now an artist had been allowed to use it for a huge art installation called Chord and we went to see it. The installation is two big machines with a number of roles of string turning and moving away from each other to create a bigger rope. The tunnel itself was not as interesting to me as I thought but I really liked admiring the huge machines slowly turning.

Photo by Ian Visits. Also see the rest of his set.

Saturday we went to the British National Gallery where Ann attended a class in Styles in Painting and I did the guided tour. The guide only showed us 5 pieces in an hour but really gave us a good introduction to the museum and their collection and I would definitely have to come back and see more some other time, they have a very impressive collection.

Today we went to the new multi-venue King’s Place where The Guardian was hosting a literary festival. We went to a talk by Dan Cruickshank about the seedy economy of 18th century, Gregorian London which he had written a book about. An interesting topic but the author was a bit all over the place.

Phew, that was it for now. I’m still amazed at how much London have to offer and even for low-budgeters like us there is more than plenty to do 🙂

October 25, 2009
Tina Dickow at Shepherd's Bush

Last night Ann and I went to see Tina Dickow (or Tina Dico as she goes by outside Denmark). I’ve been a fan of her for a couple of years and in February when I saw she would be playing in London shortly after I moved here I was quick to buy tickets for it. So we got great seats at Shepard’s Bush Empire just a few rows from the stage.

The warm up act was Norwegian Thomas Dybdahl who has had some airtime on radio in Denmark and has made a couple of great songs. It was just him and his guitar on stage for the most part and I thought he played very well.

Dico’s concert followed and it was great. She has been living in London for the past 8 years and are leaving now so as she was explaining it playing at Shepherd’s Bush was both her biggest dream and a way to say goodbye to London. She played songs from all her albums with two guys backing her.

I’ve seen her perform a number of times before but this time the latest being at Roskilde Festival last year and in a bookshop in Ann Arbor three years ago.

I think it was my first sit-down concert for this kind of music and I was both good and bad. Good because we had an excellent view and room but bad in the sense that part of the intensity of being at a concert is lost when you sit down. However I thought the concert was really intimate and enjoyed Tina’s personality matching the songs. But the best part was to see the concert with Ann, it was really great to experience it with her and to show her some of the music I love.

I’m writing this as I’m looking out over The North Sea. This morning I jumped on a bus and headed out of London for the first time since I moved here. This weekend I’m geeking out with 52 other Rails developers in a hostel in Margate where we are having a “conference” called RailsCamp.

October 16, 2009
My parents visit London – and us

I’ve been in London for a bit over 3 weeks now and I really enjoy it. These past days the weather has been so-so but otherwise it’s been remarkable good weather.

Two weekends ago we went on a walking tour organized by Walk London where we joined a route close to our place. The route we were walking was the 10th segment of a walking path called the Capital Ring which goes through the green belt all around London. It was a really nice walk and nice to see that there is lots of green patches around us.
At Welsh Harp we met up with the chairman from Welsh Harp Conservation Group who told us about the area that sees a lot of migrating birds. The conservation group had two hides from where they can sit and look at the birds. Below is a picture of how it looks inside the hide and here is the view you can see looking out from the hide.

This past weekend my parents came to visit us. And as I am still very new to London I got the chance to explore a lot of new places myself. Friday we took a tour in open doubledecker buses around London to see the famous landmarks in central London.

In the evening we went to my first West End performance to see a musical called Jersey Boys about a band from the 60s. I really enjoyed the music and the production with the way the stage kept changing into so many different sets throughout the show. This is definitely something to do in London and I hope to see more shows while I’m here.

Saturday we went to Notting Hill for the Portobello market to look the stalls, stuff they were selling and the atmosphere. Later we went to the Science Museum.

Sunday we went to Little Venice which doesn’t really look like Venice but is a very nice place none the less. From here we took a canal boat to Camden Lock where we ran into another market with great food stalls and loads of people.

It was nice with a visit from home and now that I have come closer to Denmark it will be easier to travel back and forth to visit friends and family and get people to visit me 🙂

October 9, 2009
Extravagant weekend in London

Last weekend was my first living in London and if it is any sort of indication of what life in London will be like, I’m excited 🙂

We started off the weekend Friday evening meeting at the Tower of London after work for The Tower Festival. Ann had managed to get us tickets for two days at the festival and Friday it was The British Philharmonic Orchestra playing Classic Extravaganza. Before the concert we met up with a couple of local CouchSurfers at a pub and went to the venue with them afterwards. The concert was good and it was quite amazing sitting outside in central London listening to classical music. Here are two short video clips of the concert.

Saturday we went to The Barbican Centre which is a huge modern complex in the middle of London. It is a maze to figure out and although some call it The Ugliest Building in London I kind of like the place especially the inside has a very clean design in a 70s way with wood and concrete.

We went to hear a special concert to commemorate the 250th anniversary of HÃ¤ndel’s death called Handel Remixed. For that celebration they had asked a couple of composers to reinterpret some of HÃ¤ndel’s works. The composers were at the concert as well taking applause after their piece had been played. I wasn’t really expecting much before the concert but was blown away once it started. Compared to the day before the sound was so crisp and clean. The music was also very captivating and I really enjoyed it even though I don’t know much about HÃ¤ndel or classical music.

Sunday we went back to The Tower of London for a day of World Music at The Tower Festival where five bands were playing. It started in the afternoon and they had encouraged people to bring a picnic, so that was what we did.

The bands we saw were Siyaya from Zimbabwe, Abdullah Chhadeh from Syria, Justin Adams and Juldeh Camara from UK/Gambia and Tony Allen from Nigeria. They were all good in their own ways but the one I enjoyed the most was Adams on electric guitar and Camara on a one stringed ritti playing “Afro-Blues”. It doesn’t get more worldly than that 🙂 Here is a short video of them playing.

What a weekend! Three separate events and we had more things planned that we didn’t make it out the door to. I’m looking forward to keep exploring London 🙂 Ann has written a lot more about the event’s of the weekend. Here are here stories for Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Being in a big city like London there is such a multitude of things to do that our biggest problems are finding out what’s going on and choose what we want to do.
We have started an open calendar for the events we would like to do in order to keep track of things. If you are in London feel free to subscribe to it and let us know if you wan to join us for something.

September 24, 2009
Good bye Prague, hello London!

So my final days in Prague came to and end faster than I had expected but I’ll save that for a later blog post.

Photo by pnoid00

Tuesday afternoon I arrived in London in the pouring rain and it was raining a lot. Ann has been saying that London weather is not as bad as people make it out be to but this day she was a bit off. I’m not complaining tho. Ann had cooked me a nice English meal of Shepard’s Pie and showed me around our new home. Mmm, our new home. It’s been almost exactly two years since we went on our first date in Prague and now we are finally living in the same country 🙂

The next day the weather was a lot nicer so while Ann went to university I could get out and explore the neighborhood. The picture above is of the house we live in. We are in the house on the left with the red door on the first floor where we share a two bedroom flat with an Aussie/Brit couple.

Our neighborhood is covered with streets of terraced houses – all looking the same but also very different. It’s an interesting place to walk around and see how these maybe 80 year old houses have evolved differently depending of different styles and owners. Some are very nice and others are falling apart.

London is a very multiethnic city which also shows in our neighborhood with all sorts of exotic shops and restaurants. Compared to Prague which is very homogeneous (if you don’t count in the tourists) it’s a quite different atmosphere with all these cultures mixed amongst each other. On my trip I remember seeing Polish, Jamaican, Brazilian, Pakistani, Indian and South African and I’m sure I forgot a few. Also I’ve seen one synagogue, two mosques and a couple of churches and this place:

There is plenty to explore still and I’m looking forward to tasting the different foods and seeing what else there is to explore in this area.

Before I made it home I came across this piece in a school yard, “Share My World” – what a nice welcome 🙂

September 17, 2009