Football

Football is a religion in Great Britain and quite a successful one. Watching a football game is a must for understanding British culture. My turn was today when I sat in front row at a Fulham FC game against Blackburn Rovers. Beautiful weather, a splendid football pitch 10 feet away from me, a sold out stadium and 23 men running all over the field for a white ball.
The result doesn't matter. It's the atmosphere , the chants, the pre-game beer and green grass sprinkled at the beginning of each half.

Thoughts on the Tube

Sometimes I just wonder how come a tube system can have such a good reach and sometimes such a poor reliability. Almost each day ,going to work on the capital's slowest tube line: Circle Line, I realise that all of a sudden there is a lack of trains or that a signal failure pauses the train
for 7 minutes somewhere near Sloane Square Station. On weekends things are different. Lines are closed for improvements. But I guess that London Olympics 2012 has it's say in that.

I stop now being negative and I have to reckon that the tube is even so the fastest way to go around the busy capital. From Greenwich in the South-East to Wembley in the North-West the journey is just 40 minutes and above you double deckers packed are lining together with black cabs on Oxford Street's many traffic lights. Sometimes it's also a good way to see the outside central London boroughs, because almost 50 % of it's tracks are above ground.

Will Bucharest have such a tube system in the coming 100 years?

Does it get better than this ?

St Paul's Cathedral - a bird-eye view

Magic football

I didn't expect to talk about football on this blog but yes football is in every English lad blood and tonight a magic night for English football unveiled it's magic. First of all the team that i support is Liverpool FC who have the hard job of not loosing 4-0 tomorrow against PSV Eindhoven to make it to the semi-finals of Champions League.

Tonight it was all about Manchester United and Chelsea FC. They both won in style, 7-1 and 1-2. By tomorrow England will have 3 of the last 4 teams that will play in the following weeks for the Champions League trophy. From Merseyside to Fulham Broadway and from Machester to Athens everybody will sang a kind of "You'll never walk alone".

Good work lads!

Animal captivity

Sometimes i wonder why do we build Zoo's? London has a big one, but a big Zoo means a lot of animals in captivity. Ok, they claim that some endangered species are reproducing in captivity here with their help, so they somehow save the planet. But are they ?
Look deeply in it's eyes. Don't you think he would like to be somewhere in Africa and not here behind close doors, for the excitement of people coming on a Sunday afternoon by the bus 274 from Oxford Street to see him and to laugh on him ?

TOP 10 places i like in London ,1st issue

1. St Paul's Cathedral
2. Kew Gardens
3. Greenwich Park
4. St James's Park
5. St Katherine's Docks
6. Hampton Court
7. Hampstead Heath
8. Trafalgar Square
9. Tower Bridge
10. Battersea Power Station

A (not so) secret spot

Two days ago I found one of my favorite places in London. It's a well known place if you are one of the rich people who visit London on their private yachts.

Hidden from the tourist trails, right next to the Tower of London and Tower Bridge lays St Katharine's Docks. Famous lock's that open at precise times , 20th century buildings and the famous Dicken's Inn make of this place one of my favs in the city.

Glastonbury sold-out

I decided not to buy a ticket to Glastonbury this year. But even if i wanted it so badly the website that sold the tickets last Sunday was down all the time since the start of sales at 10.00 AM. Funny enough at 13:15 they announced that Glastonbury 2007 is sold out. 150.000 tickets in 3 hours. That's a record i guess.

Instead i bought a Glastonbury DVD for 1/10Th of the ticket price and now I can try to see what i will be missing.

So many opportunities

London is a great city? Do i begin to repeat myself? Guess so.

Last week i completed my late-spring to early-summer concert tour with 2 new additions besides OMD , The Hours and Muse. I bought tickets to see Pet Shop Boys and Travis. I always think of this when I am buying a ticket: these bands will never come to Romania. And for some of them it's 100 true.

Imagine an OMD concert in Bucharest. 200 people in a too large venue, while here it sold out in 3 days.

Blackberry addictiveness

I am starting to catch on this. Day by day i just realize that i could not imagine how could I leave home without my portable computer in my pocket.

Everyone said to me that the moment i get one of these things : "Your life will be over". It's not :)

Fairtrade, global warming....

England is going crazy these times. Maybe living in a country so beautiful, with so many opportunities and getting used to all of this drives UK-minds crazy.

They complain about the privatization of their state-services (trains that now are more expensive, less reliable and packed with commuters, while before they were the opposite, electricity and gas bill that go up up up and so on). Would they say the same if a socialist regime was in place for about 20 years or so ? Guess not.

Besides all this the subjects of the day are:
- climate change and global warming: every paper is going mental with this thing. People are encouraged to use trains not planes, products should in the future contain on their labels the quantity of CO2 emitted in the atmosphere on each of the production phase and examples can continue. Can they stop for a second and think of China ? 1/6th of the world population i bet doesn't think about this, while 0.01% makes some much fuss.

- Fairtrade is a new concept that encourages retailers to buy their products directly from the source and not through intermediates. More than this the undeveloped countries are targeted more to help in their development. Wise enough, but who is doing this with more than 10% of their products. Or maybe I'm wrong. Check this out !

This is England :)

Hampton surprise

To be quite honest I didn't expected to much from Hampton Palace, even in the beginning first considering it's not worth a visit. Soon after arriving by train (30 minutes from Waterloo) I was amazed. On the banks of Thames lies a marvelous palace with beautiful interiors and splendid gardens. Actors dressed in 15th century outfits entertain you in the central court but also
inside the palace various rooms. You really feel that you are part of that period. The gardens impressed me the most and this was amplified but the sunny day that is becoming a normal thing nowadays in London: flowers with a vast array of colours, trees cut to perfection , famous English
lawns , a world wide renowned maze and animals wandering freely. Hampton Court Palace is a must for every London visitor that stays in town for more than 3 days.

For more sights click here.

London Pass

I bought today a London Pass for the 4 days that i will be a true tourist in London. It is really value for money if you plan to visit more than 15 attractions considering the average price of 10pounds per entrance, getting this pass for 70 pounds for 6 days it's a true deal.

The only thing that i need to do now is plan everything really really well. I want to see all the attractions but i know that this is not possible :) so I'll settle with the important ones : Windsor, Wimbledon, Kew Gardens, London Zoo, Tower of London, London Bridge, Shakespeare's Globe, Canal trip, Chelsea FC Stadium, River trip, St Paul's, Aquarium and maybe Hampton Court.

Prepare for some nice pictures posted on the blog in the following days and on the Picasa album.

Clapham Junction and trains

I love traveling on double-decker buses, but when you are in a hurry take my advice: don't take one. It's ten times slower than the tube (i realized that arriving late in the office today by half an hour just because i didn't want to wait 10 minutes for the next train in Lancaster Gate Tube Station). Anyway, London is beautiful from the front-window of a bus, but this afternoon i finally got myself on a London train from Clapham Junction to Waterloo. Traveling by train is somehow similar to the tube, but you get to see the tall buildings of London at high speed and not only on the London Lite pages.

Did you knew that "Clapham Junction" a train-station in the south Thames borough of Battersea is the busiest train station in Europe ? Well you do know. Yes it's hard to believe , but imagine a train station with 20 platforms where trains come and go every 3-5 minutes from each platform. Just like in a tube station , but above ground.

Today was the day when spring arrived in London.

Holland Park, Jubilee Walk, St Paul's Cathedral, Hampstead Heath and Millennium Bridge are smiling at the rays of sun. Cold weather is past.

A park or not only a park ...

Most cities have parks with lakes and bird and concrete footpaths and all that stuff...

I visited today a place that first I thought it's a park where all the tourists go to see a great skyline of London from it's highest natural point (Parliament Hill): Hamstead Heath. My surprise was big because I was soon wandering in a forest with muddy paths with trees that have grown without any human interference, with lakes for casual swimming in the hot summer days, with locals raising kites and with a view of London worth all the money.

This is Hamstead Heath a forest in the middle of a city.

Birmingham

It's hard for a city to be a great touristic place when the best building of the whole city is a shopping mall. But what a shopping mall, the best I've seen in my life.

Visiting Birmingham makes you think how much disaster World War 2 did to this lovely country. You feel like you are in Germany visiting a newly build 20th century city.


Birmingham it's a city that is developing fast from day to day, a commercial city full of shops and markets, a city with strong heritage in steel and heavy industry, a city with km of canals full of small leisure boats, a city that will never be able to sustain it's second position in UK in terms of most populated cities if a TOP beautiful cities in UK will be ever made.