And Genica chilling out, waiting for our train:

There are some advantages of waking up crazy early… no other tourists! Downside? Rain. Lots of early morning rain. Here’s the one picture I took before we exited the underground:

That is a very damp Big Ben. So, I put my camera away and we wondered around Big Ben, Westminster Palace, Westminster Abbey (which wasn’t even open to tourists yet), and finally made our way to Whitehall. We didn’t see the Prime Minister, or any famous people, but it did rain a lot… I suppose that’s a very British experience.

We headed towards Trafalgar Square (stopping along the way for a brief sit down and coffee in a Pret a Manger, which seems to be a very popular, not too bad, organic coffee/sandwich/soup place) The square has an interesting origin, but I’ll let you read about that on your own time. Of course it has the requisite tower with dude pointing -

And of course Lions!

It was really a lovely time to get there, very few people

and an unhindered view of things. It really is a pretty amazing sight.

Before I go any further, I’d just like to jump ahead for a second and show you the difference between 8:30 am (above) and 1 pm (below)

Anyhoo, we decided to head into the National Gallery, but it was still a bit early, so we wondered around a bit in the theater district near by and checked out some of the historic buildings and what not. Here’s a guy fleeing the life of a vested thespian:

Before too long the gallery opened though, and we headed in.

No cameras in the museum, sadly, so you won’t see any pictures of the innards here, but it was quite nice. An impressive assortment of named painters are housed here, and there was an interesting exhibit on the scientific investigation into classic artworks, their providence, and how they prove whether their very expensive things are genuine or just really good fakes. It even included a cameo appearance by Raman spectral imaging. It’s like I’m famous, just by the virtue of a technique I use being mentioned in a non-scientific setting. Just think, if I did DNA sequencing I’d be super famous.

After the Museum we needed sustenance to keep us going so we headed to a great vegetarian Indian restaurant in the theater district. We had excellent Samosas to share, I had Chana Masala which was quite good, and Genica had an “interesting” coconut curry thing. It wasn’t bad, but not all that satisfying unfortunately. We also had Chapati, which I’ve had once or twice before, which is a partially whole wheat, unleavened flatbread thing, kind of like a flour tortilla. It’s quite good and seems pretty easy to make. I might have to give that a go at some point. I like not having to wait for things to rise.

As I was sitting looking out of the restaurant I noticed some people milling about in front of the theater across the street, which happened to be showing this play with David Hyde Pierce, and sure enough, it was the man himself. I came all the way to London, I was hoping to at least see a British star dammit. I took this picture on the way out of the restaurant:

Please note that Mark Rylance and DHP (the two stars of the show) are filming this thing in front of posters proclaiming that both Mark Rylance and DHP are awesome:

I hope that’s supposed to be a joke…

After lunch we were exhausted, probably partially due to lack of sleep, so we decided to watch a movie. We saw The girl who played with fire. It was good to sit for a while.

After the movie we continued walking up to Piccadilly Circus. This appears to be where London stores all it’s tourists. Either that it’s like to couch cushions of London. You know… the couch cushions collect all your lost coins, Piccadilly collects all the lost tourists. We found them for you London!

This was not my favorite part of London. Pooped and tourist saturated we headed back towards the tube from whence we came, but noticed this footbridge over the Thames that we see all the time on BBC shows (such as Spooks, which you should watch.) It’s called the Golden Jubilee bridge and it’s much nicer looking than what you see here.

I’ll get another one later when we’re not on it. The view of the bridge itself from the bridge is not good, but the view of London from the bridge is amazing:

From there it was back to the flat where I made dinner from goods hard won from the local Whole Foods. Yes, that whole foods. Apparently there are 3 or so in England. One is two blocks from here. It’s quite nice. Here’s what I made:

After some recovery and benadryl induced sleep, we finally got up this morning and headed out for some museum going. Since we’re so close to many museums, we decided to start with the closest one, the Natural History Museum. There was only one problem with that, when we walked by at about 10 am, it must have just opened and there was an unbelievable line (or queue if you’re into that)… we decided to press on to the Victoria & Albert Museum, just down the road. There was no line there, so in we went.

This place is big. Really big. It has whole pieces of cathedrals built into the interior architecture:

We only got through one chunk of the museum, art covering about 1400-1600. About half of one wing in two hours. A lot of what we saw was bible based. One of my favorite things that kept popping up was this St. George and the Dragon thing:

There were also a lot of family memorial type pieces… some of them larger than others…

My favorite part of the one above was this shifty looking lion at the bottom:

Of course, it wouldn’t be an exhibit like this without the memorial edifices. This one was of some unknown Knight.

Perhaps it’s just me, but all I could think of was Indian Jones. I wanted to take a rubbing of his shield… except that he didn’t have one, and I suspect the museum frowns on that sort of thing.

There were many, many other paintings and carvings and stained glass windows, but I kind of stopped taking pictures of them… I mean, if you really want to see them you’re better off coming to London. I do have one more worth showing though:

I really like this one. It looks like Mary is up to something, and Jesus looks like a worn out middle aged man… kind of like Paul Giamatti. I’d definitely watch that movie.

After we got through with that section of the museum it was about lunch time so we decided to head off to find some food. We walked up Brompton Rd and, out of our depths, we ended up in a fairly high end Thai restaurant. It’s really quite hard to figure out where to eat when every place looks expensive, and they’re all pretty much empty. Perhaps we should have kept on going, but some times the food places dry up for a while, so I’ve found it’s often best to just plop down and eat when everyone is hungry, rather than wonder aimlessly in the hopes of an awesome lunch. At any rate, the food wasn’t that bad, but I did get the feeling that the waitress was irritated that we didn’t order drinks other than tap water, and that we didn’t order 4 courses… but hey, it was still forty dollars, so I’m not sure what she was looking for. I ordered a steak salad on Rocket (you may know it as arugula) but what I got was Steak on Iceberg. Hmm… disappointing if you ask me.

Rather than walking back to the museum, we decided to walk on, heading in the general direction of Buckingham Palace. We walked by Harrod’s, the gigantic mall/shopping/wealth porn place. It’s really huge, but the odd thing, is that unlike what I’m used to at home, it’s really just a series of small, low ceilinged rooms full of expensive stuff (and lots and lots of not so rich tourists). Once we got in there both Genica’s an my enclosed space + too many people sensors went off and we B-lined for the exit. I’m sure there was lots of great stuff to see in there (there was some kind of Egyptian Pyramid themed escalator area that was interesting), but, the call of open skies and fresh air was too much.

From there we just kind of walked from park to park and eventually ended up here:

On the far right is the first signs of the gate of the Palace, and the big statue seems to be some kind of memorial for Queen Victoria. This is a very popular place with the tourists, as you might imagine.

Turn around 180 degrees:

There seems to be a constant flow of people taking their pictures in front of the gates… for good reason, it’s really pretty impressive. Much better than the White House just for pure awe and grandiosity. Also, there are unicorns:

And lions:

After passing through the palace area, we walked down to the lovely St. James park where we took a rest and drank a very European luke warm coke.

Oh yeah, that was also a large coke. I would say, this pretty much sums up the cultural differences between my country and this one.

Here’s the view from the bench we sat on:

Rejuvenated, we continued through the park. I love these impromptu flower gardens that just kind of popped up through the grass:

We saw this odd bird. Hey bird:

And this honor guard-y looking guy rode by on a horse, holding a sword. Fortunately, he wasn’t in the beheading mood today.

At the far end of the park we came to Whitehall, or at least the outer edge of it. If we had kept going into the buildings, we would have been at the center of the British government. 10 Downing street is in there, as well as all the government offices, constabularies and what not… what is a constabulary? Whatever it is, I want to be one.

That round thing on the right is the London Eye by the way. I’m sure we’ll be getting to that at some point in the next days. At this point, we were pooped and decided to walk back to our place. At this point the rain began and away the camera went. It was a long, wet walk, and by the time we got back we were ready for a sit-down and dry-off before dinner.

We ended up at a place called Da Mario for dinner. I think it might have been slightly inspired by the video game, but I can’t be sure. The food was fine, we both had pizza, but it wasn’t amazing or anything. I think tomorrow we will begin sampling Indian places. There are many, and it could take quite some time. We’d better get started.

Anyhoo, as I was saying, London:

I’m looking for places to stay right now through VRBO, which I’ve had a lot of success with in the past. Staying in people’s houses/apartment can be odd, but it’s usually very nice, and cheaper than hotels… plus a kitchen and usually washers and dryers. Rawk.

In Paris, we’ll be staying near Rue Cler:

Which, by the way, is awesome. I’ve stayed near here before and between the food, and the sights, it’s pretty amazing. I think I have a few pictures from the last trip:

Okay, so not my best picture, but it was a long time ago. That’s Rue Cler in 2004. Crazy. Doesn’t do it justice. Just to make up for that, have a nice picture of the Eiffel Tower con “fire spinner” as they like to be called:

And here’s my Dad with some human skulls in the Paris Catacombs:

Anyway, I’m pretty stoked. I’ll post picture while we’re there, but in the mean time, I’ll post some more picture from my last trip by way of remembery.

Okay, I know I said without comment, but I just have to comment on this. The below picture was not edited in any way, that is the color of the street lamps. It’s really cool, they have normal street lamps, but attached on the underside is a set of LEDs which project down on the ground. The really cool thing is that they are variable color, so depending on the day or time, I’m not sure which, they change. One day they were orange, then green, then blue… I wish we had these here.

Okay, moving on to bigger and better things. The next day, while I was helping the lovely Bobby Jo and her Mom Mary Jane figure out Lightroom (photo editing software), they were assigned to shoot an artist and they kindly invited me to come along. We went to visit Nuria Valles, a local artist in Sant Cugat. Here she is in the alleyway in front of her workshop.

She does these amazing oil paintings of scenes in Europe. They’re incredibly bright and colorful. It was amazing to see her working in her shop.

The oils are like big crayons and they dry out over time, so each time she uses one she needs to trim away the dry bits.

The way she does her work is she makes a sketch at the place she wants to paint. She does this on paper she’s treated in a similar way as the canvas she’ll use. She just paints a whole bunch of paper with many different colors and picks out the one with the color and texture that she thinks best represents what she’s seeing. Then, when she gets back, she puts this down on canvas with the oils.

Like I said, she uses amazing colors in her work.

When she’s finished the work, she coats it in a clear glaze to protect it, then it’s done. That’s pretty much the whole story as I got it. We were really lucky that she spoke excellent english. It’s so much easier and interesting to work with people when you don’t have to pantomime to communicate.

Some of her work tools.

A lovely portrait of her in between poses for us. She was a great subject.

I spotted her shoes and had to take a picture of them… I don’t know why, they just totally struck me as artist shoes.

Anyway, she’s interested in getting her stuff into a gallery in the US. If you’re interested in her work, or know anyone who could help her, check out her web site and let me know.

Once the sun was up, we quickly realized that it was far too early for most people in the village to be awake… especially being Spain, where most people don’t eat dinner until 9 or 10 o’clock at night.

I suppose given the fishing nature of the village, one might expect there do be some fishermans going out to get some fishes, however, this was not the case.  I guess the boats were there for lesure activities.

There was one guy headed towards the boats, but it turned out he was just fixing his boat… no fishin’ here.

When people finally did start to emerge, like this fellow here, it had the unfortunate effect of photographer accumulation.  When I shot this picture, there were five of us huddled around, trying to get a picture of him.

In fact, that figure in the background is Bert, of Bert Fox fame.

With the dearth of people subjects I turned to some of the details of the environment.  This place had many characteristically Mediterranean designs and they made for some interesting images.  These seemed like summer or vacation condos, but I really liked the yellow awnings and the horizontal lines.

Check out the cool cactus.  Nice round pot.  Bert didn’t like that I cropped the bottom of the pot, “not a strong composition,” but I like it that way, so there!

I’m not sure what this was, it looks like the old clothes line post at my house in Albany, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t for clothes.  Whatever it is, I like it.

Here’s Bert.  I guess there were people around… people from the workshop.

See?  It’s Bobbi.  More people to shoot!  I like this picture of her.

Finally, the last local I got a picture of.  The local dog, picking up scraps of meat, I assume from the night before.

This is the man who shared his work with us and told us what was up… at least he told Dane what was up and my Dad and I got some of it second hand. I wish I could remember his name. Actually, I need to get his name and email address from Dane so I can send him these pictures. Anyway, he was a great guy and had no problem talking to us about what he was doing… no problem at all. He talked a lot.

I like this picture a lot. This is him stoking the forge for us. Nothing more to say about this, just a nice picture.

Here’s Dane getting the skinny. The guy would talk for twenty minutes, then Dane would say, “he’s going to put the hot metal into the water to cool it off.” Umm… I guess Spanish is a very inefficient language. I kid, I kid. Dane did a great job just keeping up with the guy. He was like a gatling gun of words.

Once he heated up the metal bar, he went at it with a hammer on that 2000 lb anvil, shaping it. He was amazingly skilled at getting this crazy hot piece of metal to do whatever he wanted.

This is the result. He tied the bar into a knot. I’m guessing it would take more than a day to learn how to do this… I could do it in photoshop. Does that count?

Sizzle.

This guy has awesome hands. I guess working with them for a living your whole life will do that.

Here’s the final product. We asked if we could buy one of these knots from them, and they gave us one each. How awesome is that? I don’t know what I’m going to do with it, but now I have a big metal knot. Pretty sweet.

Back to the photography! On this day we took a bus up to the wine country (like the Sonoma valley, but in Spain) and we split into three groups at three different wineries. At this moment I can’t remember the name of the one we were at, but as soon as one of my photofriends ™ emails me to remind me what it was, I’ll put it on here… also, I can’t remember the name of the lovely woman who showed us around the place, but more about her later.  [Update:  This is the Mas Tinell Winery in Vilafranca del Penedes in the Barcelona provence.  Thank you Rich for filling in the blanks]

There weren’t many people working the day we came, the weather was crappy so they sent everyone home early since picking grapes in the rain is no fun at all. Here is one of the die hard workers that were left, cleaning up the juice vats. Mmmm, vats of juice…

Most of what they make here is Cava, the Spanish equivalent of Champagne. If you’re familiar with Frexinet sparkling wine, then you’ve had Cava. It’s from this same region near Barcelona.

Look at that totally Hawt! photo action of Jay Kinghorn shooting our guide explaining sedimentation in wine bottles. I show this photo to demonstrate his awesome technique, and because my photo of same scene is no good. By the way, Jay is a great workflow teacher and a master Photoshop/Lightroom dude. Check out his web page if you need someone to help you figure out what to do with all your photos… also if you’re interested in learning how to better use your computer for photo work…

This is a rack of moscato, a sweet dessert wine. We had some after dinner, it’s tasty.

Although it might look like it from this picture, no radiation is used in the production of this wine. We were given a full tour of all their cellars. Lots and lots of wine, but not much light. Gots to be creative with the flash.

Why is this thermometer in Fahrenheit? I know it wasn’t 75 Celcius. Maybe it’s a humid-o-meter, I’m not sure, but I like this picture.

This was our guide for the tour, she also happens to be the wine maker. She’s a pro! She told us all about how the bottles are filled, about the corks, about cleaning the bottles… all that kind of stuff. She was unbelievably kind to us and spent over an hour walking us around and showing us her craft. Once I find out her name and where she works, I’ll make sure she gets these pictures.  [Update:  Our lovely winemaker's name was Blanca Ozcáriz, and I'm glad I can finally put a name to her face.]

Corks!

Grapes!

Mi Padre!

Now we’re moving on to the Mas Ferrer winery where we had a tapas party and drank a lot of Cava. We all piled back into the bus and made our way to this little hole in the proverbial wall.

Since the wine cellars at the winery from earlier in the day were less than photogenic, it was lucky that we got some time to take pictures in the Mas Ferrer cellars. They were beautiful and old. I hear a rumor circulating around that these were build as bomb shelters, and were converted to hold the wine. Whatever they were for, they’re pretty awesome now.

Oooh, a wine ghost!

That’s a lotta caps.

This is Albert. He owns this here place and was a great host to us. Cheers to you Albert!

The rest of the pictures here are of participants for the most part, so I’m going to leave it here for now, but some other time, when I’m not getting up at 4 am to catch a flight home, I’ll add names to these faces.  [Update:  I've moved all the pictures of my Photofriends to the gallery in the next post.  If you're interested, look there]