Yes, we are still here.

I started typing a post, then lost it (always save your work) and I don't have the time that I'd like to have to really dedicate to this post, but here's the breakdown. Lots of things have been happening in my life and I'd like to keep you updated, but one of the most important things has been my goal to read more talks and books by the apostles of the church.

Still here. Not dead.

I got back from London. I took classes. It was rough. I was kind of burnt out. However, one major accomplishment in my life: I have finished processing and uploading all of my London pictures!

Feel free to view them at one of these two very very similar links:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/38080948@N07/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/38080948@N07/collections/72157624043684295/

I made this, you should watch it.

(by "I", I mean that my roommate Scott and my brother did most of the work, but I took all the pictures and came up with the idea...)

We leave for Ireland in about five hours. Bringing: my camera. Not Bringing: My laptop.
So hopefully I'll take massive amounts of pictures, but updates will be rather scarce for a bit.

See you on Sunday!

So these are slightly out of focus, but that's what I get for seeing picture opportunities when I don't have my tripod with me (yes I actually packed it over here...). These are taken just outside of the Globe theatre after we got out of A Midsummer Night's Dream (which I thought was pretty awful).

Since I didn't have my tripod with me I tried to rest my camera on the railing of the wall next to the Thames. I think that someday I'll have to take my tripod (and a buddy) and go night shooting. I love night photography a lot, but I'm finding that it's actually quite difficult.

As for the performance (it was Thursday night), I honestly did not enjoy myself. The biggest issue was that our seats were absolutely horrible. The Globe has two large pillars on stage, usually not a problem for the majority of the seats, except for ours. It didn't help that the production, instead of playing the show more in the round (to all sides) to accommodate the space, they chose to have the majority of the action take place right in between the two pillars. I didn't really see about 70-80% of the production.

But on top of that, I really didn't like it. I feel like the comedy was being forced and therefore not funny. I feel as though, like children, they found a joke that worked once and told it over and over and over, to everyone that walked into the room. Quite annoying.

They also tried setting the show in the 1920's with flappers and a cabaret type dancer. But they didn't really let it influence anything they did, which is the wrong way to go about it. More or less it just looked like they were in different costumes.

Who knows, maybe I was just bitter towards the show because I couldn't actually see it, but I didn't enjoy myself as much as I could have.

I love creative stuff like this.



Also I'm still alive. I have a bunch of stuff that I can post about, but rather than doing a huge post I think I'll break it up into a bunch of little posts so that you can read them at you leisure (rather than trying to work through a novel of a blog).

Sorry that I'm falling behind. It's been a little busy.

For those of you who don't know my sister, repent ye. She is pretty amazing and one of the best chef/cooks on the planet. She is a foodist. She believes in it and practices it. So I kind of promised her that I would keep a food log of sorts. Here it is. At least some of them. The more interesting ones at least. But don't be fooled, this isn't just for her. Any food fanatic can join in the reading fun!

Today: Lebanese place by the Orange Tree theatre. Sooo good. I had the large mix doner. It was lamb meat and chicken meat put in a pita with "salad" (onions and lettuce) with a garlic sauce on it. I have no clue how this is supposed to be different from a gyro other than the fact that I couldn't pick it up. However, that might have been because the thing was huge. Size of my head at least. It could have easily fed a family of four. The lamb was better than the chicken.

Yesterday: Indian food at Memories of India. This place was a bad choice. We were looking for an Indian place because we had heard that London has amazing Indian food (there is actually a large population of immigrants here). Looking at the prices on the window (everywhere has a menu posted outside) the prices didn't look bad at all. We figured out that the place was authentic when we realized it was near impossible to understand our waiter (not trying to be racist, just honest). The main problem with the restaurant is that they charged for everything. The price for the curry wasn't bad but then they charged for the rice as well. What kind of Indian place charges for rice? Anyhow I got the Lamb curry and we all shared some Sag Aloo and Nan bread. It was okay, but not impressive by any means. Oh well. Live and learn. I'm sure we'll have Indian again and we'll see if we can't get a better place.

Monday: Chinese at a small cafe type place (I forgot the name already, it was either Lan or Jen or something). I had the crispy pork and rice. It was pretty good and not that expensive. Jason and Allan both had duck and weren't too impressed. The best part about this place was the dumplings. We got an order of fried dumplings to split and I wish that I had just ordered that alone. They are made (cut and stuffed) when you order them, so they're about as fresh as they come. We may go back and just feast on dumplings. After that as we headed to the show for the evening we passed a little ice cream shop called Pandora. It was crazy. First off it wasn't ice cream it was gelatto (I can hear Nathan screaming in the background). Second, it had the craziest window display. I should have taken a picture. Apparently their specialty is Gelatto in a crepe with whatever crazy thing they want to put in it. There was a ham and cheese one. Anyhow, I was feeling a little ritzy and decided to get a cone with a scoop (pretty cheap too). There were some weird flavors (like green tea) but I decided that I would play it safe and get the cookie flavor. Turns out it was not at all what I was expecting. You see I was expecting something similar to chocolate chip cookie dough, what I got was fortune cookie flavored gelatto in a waffle cone. It was weird, but good.

So those are the food exploits that I can remember for now. I'll keep posting every so often. Because food is good.
Oh, and occasionally we try to cook in our flat. But usually it's not that exciting. This is a picture of a day when we tried making Tikka Masala from a jar with chicken and spaghetti, it was... food.

Sorry that I've fallen behind a little bit. I promise one of these days I'll try to catch up on everything that's been happening. I still really want to tell you about Women Beware Women, one of the most incredible shows that I have seen in my lifetime (and one of the actors was the guy who played Dudley Dursley from the Harry Potter movies in it, if that is exciting to you...).

But for now, other stories. Well this is actually more of just a picture post. Yesterday (Tuesday) we took a group trip to the London temple, so of course I brought my camera along. It was an absolutely beautiful day (a little cold but whatever). For those who haven't been to the London Temple, the temple is beautiful, but almost pales in comparison to the extensive grounds (is that blasphemy?). It feels almost like the temple is on the grounds of a forest. There are acres upon acres (I'm awful at measuring distance)(32 acres according to wikipedia) of little groves of trees that have benches hidden among them so that you can sit and contemplate life. It was absolutely gorgeous. Have I said that already?

So the problem is that I take lots of pictures and a lot of them look a lot alike. I'm horrible at decisions and revisions and so I love them all. That's where you (the magic readership) come in. I'm going to put little numbers above each of the pictures and you should comment and tell me which are your favorites (there is no minimum or maximum). Got it? Go!

So that's it. Well, that's 20 out of the hundreds I took. But my favorite part about all of these pictures is that they're all essentially straight out of the camera. I only made minor adjustments to brightness, contrast, and saturation in some areas. So yay!

Today was rather boring. I did laundry. Yaaaaay... Exciting right? Well about 3:30 we went to go find some stuff to do. We made a plan. We were going to go to the Imperial War Museum, get some fish and chips, and then go see The Habit of Art at the Royal National Theatre.

It kind of worked.

I really enjoyed the museum. We spent most of our time learning about submarines and MI6 (think James Bond). There were a bunch of exhibits that we just didn't have time to see. So we're going back at some point. One thing that I loved about the museum is that on the sign next to the tank, missile, airplane, etc. they would have a short description of when and where it was used and then it would have a picture from the war of the weapon. There were some amazing pictures. There were some images from WWI and WWII that were just stunning, especially so if you consider the type of equipment limitations that they had to deal with. It makes war photographers of today look like pansies.

After the museum closed we decided that we had just enough time to go get fish and chips. You have to understand that, for me, having my first English fish and chips seemed like a sort of right of passage, or initiation. We needed to do it right. After some research we found a place that was close to the theater and the museum, was cheap, and most importantly, got great reviews.

It is called "Master's Super Fish". Sold.

It was great. I got the cod and chips. Unfortunately we had little time and had to get the food take away, but it actually made it more fun because she wrapped it in the paper (one of those customs that seemed to add authenticity and legitimacy to my experience) and we ate on the walk over to the theatre.

When we got there we found out that the show we were going to see and had heard was amazing was at standing room only for the night. I was not a fan of standing for the whole show, I had already done that at the globe for Macbeth (which I still need to write about...). So we decided that we would see one of the other shows at the National. To be fair, most of the shows that are playing there currently sound great, so we were fine with switching shows since we were going to see the other ones anyways.

We ended up getting tickets to see Love the Sinner. The idea of the story was actually not too bad. But (in my opinion) it was pretty poorly executed.

The story is about a man who is struggling with his sexual identity and also examines religion's role in matters of homosexuality. The main character is a volunteer for a conference at which the international leaders of his church are gathering to discuss their bylaws, specifically the one dealing with homosexual bishops, unions, blessings, etc.

At this same conference, the main character has a homosexual affair. He then returns home and has to figure out who he is, what he stands for, how to deal with/hide from his wife who is struggling to get pregnant. Things get really twisted when the man who he had the affair with shows up from Africa to his house in England and essentially blackmails/begs him for help in gaining asylum in England.

I think that there were some interesting moments in the show. Watching the main character struggling with his decision and his double life was difficult in the good way (the kind that seems to teach us something and leads to a catharsis). It was interesting to watch him become hyper-religious to try and force an identity upon himself, and how he was so unwilling to accept any of his actions and yet his inability to forgive himself for anything. Just very interesting all around.

The issue was that I felt a lot of the acting was off, there were scenes missing, and the lines were just terrible. Jason made the argument that they were going for a natural feel to the conversation and that they were just talking around the issue and not naming it. I agree with him on that fact, but I felt like it was pushed to an extreme to where it was so "real" that it was actually surreal. I feel like if I had read the script next to an absurdist script there wouldn't have actually been that much of a difference. And yet it wasn't being played in an absurdist way, it was being played as realism which created this awful disconnect for me.

... Anyway...

The set was pretty amazing and the music and sound design were very well done. But overall I did not like it. Sorry. But it happens.

We still plan on seeing The Habit of Art and have heard that it is absolutely wonderful.

Tomorrow is church. That should give me a chance to get caught up on sleep and picture editing. Yay!


Sleep.

Today we went to Kew Gardens which is a gorgeous attraction. It's made up of 300 acres of gardens with a few special greenhouses and such. It is a photographer's dream. Landscape, architecture, floral, subjects everywhere. So, I'll let the pictures do the talking. We went and saw an amazing show tonight called Women Beware Women and I'm too sleepy to do it justice, but it is the best thing that I have seen in London, I may even venture to say in my entire life. I'll post on it later. Okay, now for pictures.

I know that I've promised lots of pictures. Always feel free to head over to my flickr account. I usually upload most of my pictures there as a form of storage. I've been pretty good about keeping it organized, but sometimes it's just a mess. FYI.

But here are some pictures to help you get a sense of what I do here (other than the theatre part since pictures aren't allowed during performances and most don't even let you take pictures inside at all).