*11/2/08, Sunday – Arrived at Hotel – St. Martin’s Lane. Hotel has robes and umbrellas, a TV, a DVD player and a mini bar. The view is pretty nice. It’s pretty chilly. It’s cloudy and rainy. I’m happy that I got internet working so I could email. I got adapters from the hotel so I could plug in and charge my electronics.
I was lucky enough to fly first class on British Airways. I had some trouble getting a seat but they ended up upgrading me since they guaranteed a seat and that was probably the only one available.. I was clumsy and spilled a glass of water. I dropped my glove and as I was looking for it I knocked the glass over and got half the seat wet and the lady next to me. I cleaned up and put a plastic bag over the wet part of the seat. The lady next to me wasn’t very happy and pulled the cover down to divide us (probably also because I was taking pictures). I ate a beef sandwich for dinner and I watched Wanted. I missed the very beginning but I saw it at Comicon anyway. I liked it. They had hot chocolate and warm cookies. I didn’t get it when the flight attendants were going around. I went towards the back and requested it. They were like ‘were you sleeping?’. I was able to recline the chair all the way down and there was a footrest so I was very comfortable. It was the most comfortable flight I’ve ever had.
Today is going to be pretty chill. Karmelina said we were meeting up at 12:45pm. It’s about 11:30am. We just took a taxi here. I haven’t done much yet. I’m pretty excited to go outside and see London. I’m also excited having my own room. It’s pretty comfortable.
*11/3/08, Monday – It’s 11:30pm. I just got home and we spent 12 hours in the office today. We were there from 8:30am to 8:30pm. We did go out for lunch we went somewhere nearby. It’s pretty cool that the train station was near MTV. It was a pretty close walk. It was drizzling a little bit. I guess its the usual atmosphere here in London. Its cloudy. Always light rain around you. Not enough for me to bring the umbrella out but enough for me to want to cover my head. Work today was tedious text stuff. We did a lot. Our cms was pretty slow and not very good. I did a lot of inputting information and waiting for a long time to load. During our load time I played Mafia Wars. I recruited a lot more people today so I reached 31 Mafia.
Today at work at first I was freaking out because I wanted things done as quickly as possible and there was no way to speed it up but later on I just dealt with it. All four of us were pretty much in that mood just like going along with it, trying to get out of work. Its really hard to schedule anything after work. There’s a couple of people like Michelle N’s BF who offered to hang out for dinner or drinks. Of course I wouldn’t drink. I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t really schedule dinner since I didn’t know when I’d get out of work. Tomorrows supposed to be chill day as long as nothing comes up. There’s also Jellycat from teamliquid who works at Oxford, near Camden where I work, and I wanna see if I can try and see him and hang out and maybe do an interview.
So the MTV office here in Camden, London (there’s another one at Oxford) had two floors. It’s wide open in the middle. There’s a small cafeteria and a lot of tables and chairs kind of like in a loungy area downstairs. Upstairs its very euro so there are no big partitions among the desks so you could see everyone. We ended up sitting at desks occupied by interns or temp people and we felt bad because they tried to go to their desks but we were there and they didn’t know at that time that they were kicked out of there but it all worked out. After work, we headed back to the hotel to drop off my laptop and freshen up and then me Karmelina and Chris went out to Chinatown. We ended up eating Chinese food. The first day we ate British food, this time we ate chinese food. It wasn’t bad. We ordered dumplings, chicken satay and egg fried rice. It was okay. The satay didn’t seem like the regular thai food that I know.
Apparently meals here are very long. You wait a lot and just digest. It seems to drag on more. The waiters aren’t there all the time. It seemed much slower paced than in the US which you’d think I’d be really into but I wanted my food already so I could go back to my hotel right away. I guess it was good bonding time with Karmelina and Chris though. That was all pretty much from 9am to 11pm.
*11/4/08, Tuesday – It’s 2:15am and I wanna go to sleep soon but I still wanna remember what happened so I’ll blog real quick. I’ll blame Karmelina for keeping me up this late. It’s not work since we actually got out early today at around 6:30pm. We didn’t have as much to do today. I made plans after work since we had a chance to go out around London since we were out early.
I actually met up with Jellycat from teamliquid and I found my way around the london subway system which they called the tube. Its actually not that bad. It’s pretty much self explanatory. We just pretty much had some dinner. He treated me out to this place, Nandos, which is popular among people in the UK. It’s a chicken place where you can choose how spicy your food is and you have a choice of how you wanted it fixed up. I had mine in a pita. You could choose a half bread, a quarter bread, or a burger. It was okay. I had lettuce in my pita and mild sauce (lemon something sauce). It was weird.. interesting. It was chicken so it was edible. Then I was talking to him, getting to know him. I did my interview with him. I had some questions prepared and put the camera on him. So I asked him some questions that I thought of and it went pretty well. It was like a conversation between me and him but I had an outline of categories that I wanted to cover. He’s not the biggest in the community but he is known for working on the tshirt designs. He was a good practice interview.
After that we just ate our dinner and talked some more. Its funny because there’s a lot of stuff we talked about after the interview that I thought would have been good for the interview. It was a good start to my practice of interviews. After dinner we didn’t do much. He walked me to the tube and then I had scheduled to meet up with some coworkers who worked at the London offices. One of them visited MTV NY before – Paymon. The other guy was Maurizio who was at the Camden office too. I talk to them a lot online. I wanted them to show me around London and let me know what things there are to do here.
I met up with them at 9pm and it took about 15-20 minutes to get back to the hotel area. It was an achievement for me to get back on my own. On the way back I encountered Maurizio and Angela who also works with us. He said Paymon was on his way so I saw him on the way to the hotel. I dropped off my laptop. Paymon called Karmelina to see where she was at. We couldn’t reach her at first so we ended up hanging out with Maurizio and Angela who went to go grab a bite to eat, dinner at some chinese restaurant. Angela is half brit, half chinese. Maurizio is half filipino half italian. Pretty cool mixes. After dinner, we found out that Karmelina was in Spaghetti House and the Brits were making fun of them because they said it was a tourist trap. It was fun hanging out with them outside of work. We walked around. We went to SoHo, a place of history related to something sexual but that was back in the day and now its about production, plays and such. We also went around there to go to a sports bar but apparently you needed to be on a guest list.
We found another one that had pool. We partnered up – me and Paymon vs Angela and Maurizio. It was pretty fun. I did pretty well. There was one game where I shot two balls in with one hit. I played well enough to help us win the game although Paymon did a bulk of the work. I was proud of myself. We won every game. Later on Karmelina joined us. They all partook in a lot of drinking, talking, playing pool. It was fun hanging out and getting to know them.
Karmelina was telling us how she used to play in a varsity pool team in college. Paymon challenged her so they played a game and Karmelina did some pretty impressive shots after Paymon started and put six balls in. Karmelina did all these trick shots like behind the back and such. They were both showing off but later they had a hard time (probably thanks to alcohol). In the end, Karmelina won since Paymon was trying to hit the black ball in but he got the white ball in. According to rules Karmelina won international rules but in the UK they continue playing. Karmelina agreed to keep playing so they continued to play and Paymon won according to UK rules. She had called a pocket in the middle and the ball went in the pocket in the corner.
Afterwards, we walked around thinking of stuff to do and Karmelina wanted to go back into the casinos. Apparently she does really well since she has been there every night and she’s been winning. The whole group went in with her this time and she played blackjack. She put five pounds on perfect pair which means you get paid out with two cards of the same number and you get paid out more if its the same suit. She didn’t get perfect pair until the very last few and she played on three seats and she got perfect pair on two. She’s pretty smart, she played the game well. With all her game wins, she was on a high.
At around 1am, we thought we were going home but Karmelina still wanted to go out and drink but we ended up just going to the hotel. We tried to get into some exclusive party. We found out it was members only even if it was part of the hotel. Pretty much the rest of the night, we went to a restaurant bar part of the hotel, stayed there. They ordered drinks and food and just talked. We were there until 2am and I was really sleepy but Karmelina was jokingly saying ‘no, you stay here.’ I wanted to stay as long as I could but I ended up going anyway. Finally she was like ‘okay fine fine go’.
Early this morning, Chris, Sarv and I were at Starbucks at 8:15am when we were supposed to meet and Karmelina was late. She just got up. Chris and Sarv were really antsy and wanted to get to work since they had tasks to do but Karmelina wanted us to wait for her. I asked Karmelina if it was okay for them to go on ahead to the office if she had a hard time waking up the next morning and she was okay with that. I had wanted to sleep earlier but I wanted to experience London as much as I could.
*11/5/08, Wednesday – Not much happened. I woke up through Karmelina’s call because I woke up late because of yesterday. Karmelina was understanding because she knew what happened and it was also partially her fault. Chris and Sarv were in a cheerful mood so I didn’t really piss anyone off that day. First thing I heared was that Obama’s president. It was great news. I was sad that I wasn’t able to partake in the voting but I was pretty confident that both CA and NY wouldn’t fail me. We went to work and we worked all day until 9:30pm. It was pretty much tedious work, same stuff I do everyday. We had lunch at this burger joint which was a diner. Pretty much American food with a little twist of London so it wasnt the taste I was expecting.
After work, we headed back to Leicester square where our hotel was located. We parted ways with Chris since he wanted to eat at Mcdonalds. Karmelina wanted a better restaurant so we went to an Indian Tapas place. I liked the food a lot. I liked the way we could just share the food family style and share bits and pieces of everything. I really liked the food. I accidentally got Karmelina’s spicy chicken but I watered it down with the sauce from another chicken we got. We got samosas, a variety of sauces for our naan, some fish, two kinds of chicken, etc. It was enough to fill us but not stuff us. Karmelina paid for it so it was cool that she expensed everything. No limit on expenses. After that I wanted to stop by mcdonalds since Sarv talked it up so much. They had Cadbury and Kitkat mcflurries. Unfortunately it was closed.
Tomorrow is my last day to go around and check out stuff so I wanted to wake up early and go to the big ben and the thames because Sarv highly recommends it and its only 15 minutes away. After, I’m going to Camden where the office is and meet up with Yves, Michelle’s bf. Hopefully I can pick his brain about where else to go around. Maybe I could also do some shopping at the Camden Market which is like a flea market around the area. It’s gonna be a full day of work. It’s a huge day, its EMAs. We’re gonna be there pretty late at night there should be some pizzas and beer at our desks so it should be pretty interesting and chaotic.
Friday will be so chaotic as well. My plan on Friday is pretty much get to work on time, leave by noon, head to the airport by 3pm, get to the plane towards Germany, and get picked up by Naruto from teamliquid, then go to WCG and stay with Ilvy. I’m not completely prepared since I’m not thinking of WCG as much because I’m all about EMAs right now. I’m just gonna take it easy and not stress so much. It is a vacation after all. I’m just going to milk it and enjoy it as much as I could.
*11/6/08, Thursday – Things went pretty much as planned. I got up early to see the Big Ben and the Thames river. It was nice seeing the sights. I got to take a ton of pictures. I fell in love with the foliage at the Victoria Tower Gardens. I got to meet up with Yves and ate a big eggs benedict brunch meal. I met a guy Chris at the Camden office and he recommended a walk to the Primrose Hill. He printed out a map and told me where to go. I headed out following the route he layed out for me and it was a nice relaxing tour. I got to see a bit of the residential area and I walked through the beautiful gardens as well. The fall colors looked amazing. I headed back to work and got there a little before 2pm. We stayed at work until 6:30am that day! The tube closed at around midnight and we were at work until they opened up again at 6am.
*11/7/08, Friday – I only had about an hour or two of sleep so I could get back to work by 9am. I didn’t get to do much work but I did get my last few pictures in. I had my luggage with me so I headed straight for the airport once 12pm came around. I had a blast in London. I’m glad I got to experience that trip. No matter how much work we had to put in, it was worth having gone through it all.
Gallery: http://calbearmnm.smugmug.com/gallery/6437191_Ks4uU
