Back to the Geovation hub to work today, even though I (correctly) expected it to be deader than yesterday. I stopped off at the coffee place from yesterday ( Goswell Road Coffee ) and hung around in there for a bit.
They may be winning the “weird decorating” prize.
The hub was, as predicted, dead. Other folks have commented that it’s cliquey & techy, and I’d have to agree. I know they do networking events, and I’m guessing that’s the only time that people from different groups interact. Still, got some work done, which was the point, and left in the early afternoon, which was the consequence of some late-ass finishes earlier in the week.
Commuting through London when the footpaths & underground aren’t rammed? Pretty nice.
Moving through London when you get to a tourist bit? Not great. Kind of annoying, because people move really slowly and spread out to fill the space.
Still, I had a nice time, learned some things about actually working in this city, and now hold a firm opinion on a specific underground route, which feels like a win to me.
The plan for Saturday was to get an early start & go to the British Museum before it got crowded. This didn’t happen.
What did happen is that I got there later than planned, got through some of the Mesopotamian & adjacent bits, and left earlier than planned because it was too crowded to move through & the airflow … wasn’t? Should have expected that for a Saturday.
Still, I saw some stuff, and marveled at the tiny tiny cuneiform writing, and learned about sealing up contracts in clay envelopes with a summary and rolled-on pictures on them as an anti tampering technique, so that was pretty cool.
Canary Wharf continues it’s impressive streak of confusing me, so well done there; Didn’t know there were ‘underground’ bits below the various plazas and parks. Also didn’t know there were parks.
Greenwich on the weekend is a madhouse. People in all directions, and pity anyone trying to drive anywhere. I spotted someone who’d probably gone the wrong way, thought they’d found a route out that didn’t require reversing, and were then blocked by a taxi doing something weird. From that point, they were probably better off parking the car and recovering it after sundown, because the odds of them manoeuvring back out in that crowd were not good; Could be done, but you’d need a spotter and a lot of yelling at pedestrians.
I kind of want this to be a detective agency, or at least a pair of amateur but surprisingly effective investigators. Maybe they’re involved in the production or sale of their respective substance, or maybe they’re just importers who keep finding bodies/evidence of crime.
( OK, this does maybe link nicely to one of my Gen Con games – CHEW )
I could also see it as a wacky superhero cartoon, with a sentient bottle of champagne & wheel of cheese fighting superpowered food crime. Whatever that is. Kind of the opposite of Milk & Cheese: Dairy Products Gone Bad, for those who remember that.
It turns out that I’ve evolved a check-out routine without realising it.
- Everything that can be packed the night before gets packed. Clothes for the next day get set aside.
- On the day, everything is either on my person or on the bed, so that the rest of the space can be checked. As soon as something can be packed, it gets packed.
Google maps gave me all sorts of interesting options for getting between Greenwich & Paddington, including walking from Lancaster Gate because the stop is a lot closer than it looks on the standard map, but in the end I went with a three-line hop; DLR to Bank, Central to Oxford Circus, Bakerloo to Paddington.
Made it with an hour or so to kill, so I found a relatively sane bit of the station to hang out in, and checked the departure boards online. Got a window seat during the early phase when the platform was announced, which was lucky, as the train filled up with folks heading for Penzance whose train was for some reason starting in Reading, not Paddington. (People were standing in the vestibules in some carriages)