23
Mar
2009
yosemite trip
Due to the the australian government’s spectacular kindness in allowing me into their fine country for the past year coming to an end, I had a window of a few days to kill in California before Smart Geometry (more on that in the next few days).
While zooming out on the San Francisco map, I spotted Yosemite National Park 200 miles to the east, and knew in seconds what I’d be doing for those free days!
After a less than inspiring flight, and Lloyds thoughtfully putting a stop on my card in SF because I might be getting scammed, I eventually got on the train to Merced, where if I’d had less drama buying food I’d have caught the bus to Yosemite, but as it was, I ended up sleeping at the train station in a luggage cart!
Yosemite doesn’t mess about, there are incredible falls in the valley floor, and about a kilometer into the trail you come across Vernal Falls
the water falls so far that by the time it gets to the bottom it’s just a very fast mist that hits a rock and flys out horizontally!
5
Mar
2009
SF tonnage
Melbourne–> Sydney–> San Francisco–> Sydney–> Melbourne
** Carbon Footprint for the air portion of this itinerary is
2792 kg,
or 2.79 metric tons. **
19
Mar
2008
8
Feb
2008
The 2 week point
Ah, lovely long emails, a great way to spend an evening. I’ve just demolished intersection magazine, $17 of magazine and $8.50’s worth of takeaway noodles and I’m a happy boy. I can usually attribute my lack of happiness to not having had sufficiently nice food, which is something that I don’t intend to get too far into at the moment. Melbourne is a foodie heaven. Mmm. I had some biodynamic peaches the other day that were probably not as good as sex, but have been filed in the same category for enjoyment, but without any of the complication or too much of the mess!
I’ve been having a bit of a ‘career wobble’, but I think that an organic approach to things is much more my style, planning always leads to my downfall. I think my problem is that if I try and look too far head while I’m walking I get lost at a local level. A bit like seeing a mountain, and heading for it, but looking close to you all the time, but keeping the mountain in your head.
There is plenty to look at in Melbourne, there are loads of small indi design shops, and cafes, mouthwateringly orgasmic cafes, nice restaurants, and vintage Holden (ozzy dodge) cars. They also have a state sponsored street art program, so there is some terrific graffiti about.
My mind has been drifting off recently into strange fantasies. I’ve been thinking about these big American style cars, and the phrase ‘making out on the hood’ keeps running through my mind (you must remember that the bit of my mind that I have conscious access to has no control over the rest of the terrible depths of the inside of my skull) and sometimes it’s some sort of late teenage snog fest on the bonnet of a car, and sometimes it’s Wayne and Garth looking up at the bottom of a jumbo jet, but the idea of a car that’s big enough to sit on is cool in my book!
I’m going surfing this weekend, so I’ll get to meet some people, and to burn myself in interesting and amusing ways. Knowing my luck I’ll get a sharp line on my legs and arms that’ll take about 18 months to get off, a bit like when I wore cycling short when I rode to Brighton last summer. (that line has just faded)
Top of my list of things to take is going to be my hammock, regardless of whether I have a bed or not, the mosquito net that is built in will be put to full effect! I look like something from a horror movie, red blotches all over, but I suppose that is only to be expected if I insist on sleeping naked next to an open window.
Photos of the surfing, but hopefully not the insect inflicted mutilation will follow.
1
Feb
2008
yeah, I’m upside down!
Ok, to say that I’ve been sparse with details on what I’ve been up to would be an understatement, so I’m going to try and fix that.
I’ve been gone just over 2 weeks, and I’m trying hard to go native, so I have my thongs, my short-blacks and flat-whites, and I’m getting there with saying chips when I mean crisps.
So starting back in London, it seems that no matter how well prepared I think I am, I always have to stay up all night before I go somewhere finishing off last minute things. So when the cab came at 7 I’d caught 45 minutes of semi-sleep, and was feeling a bit trampish. The only shower was in the travelex business centre, so i grabbed a massive handful of complementary sweets and spent 20 minutes luxuriating in a quite dodgy shower. One of the better uses of £14 I can think of!
The flight was cool, I stole the blanket and it makes a very nice scarf. I watched 3 films and spent a long time staring at how much nothing there is just before Las Vegas.
In LA I stayed with Josh’s parents, who are very cool. They gave me a little self contained room, and the most amazing sweet grapefruits.
On the first day I was spotted as the weird guy looking for the sunny spot outside a cafe (while all the native LA people were looking for spots near the patio heaters) by a girl (Meaghan) who turns out did the same exchange as I’m doing, except she was at sciarc and was at rmit 3 years ago. Quite the coincidence!
LA is not a city that is really geared towards people who don’t drive. But I walked anyway, and probably covered about 10 or 15 miles a day taking in a lot of designer places and that sort of stuff. On the second day I decided to go to the beach, but forgot to get off the bus and ended up half way to Malibu near a ‘park’ (some wilderness with paths) so I went for a bit of a jaunt into the hills and then walked to Santa Monica beach (which is further than it looks on a map).
Where I started the beach bike path was empty, and as I got closer and closer to Venice it got busier and more packed with people posturing in their sparkly ‘correct’ sports kit. The funny thing is that most people really didn’t know what they were doing, 4k road bikes with beach cruiser setups, people on skates falling forwards at about the same speed as they were moving, challenging physics and just about staying up.
As I got to Santa Monica, I heard someone yell ‘Ben’, it took a while to register seeing as I was in a city where nobody knew my name, but it turned out to be Meaghan, (so we are stacking up the odds pretty high here). She was with the same guy that she’d been with at lunch the day before, so we all went for dinner at a place called the library ale house (fine beer and tasty nosh, all in a nice place by some sciarc dude).
I’m struggling with the ability to give off the ‘I’m single, come and chat me up’ vibe to women in quite the same way that I do to men, a dude in the Diesel shop spent a long time showing me jeans that I couldn’t afford, and I’m pretty sure he knew that.
Anyway, I met up with Stephanie Gary, the bike patrol’s American envoy (due to the special Gary clause), and she drove me around LA a bit (it makes more sense in a car) and then we went to the beach to see the nutters roller dancing, doing henna tattoos and smoking ‘medicinal’ marijuana. Then as we walked along the only street in LA that it felt normal to be walking on (Abbot Kinney, very nice) Meaghan stuck her head out of her car window and said hello, if you’d bet on this on an accumulator at your local tote you’d be turning a pound into at least a million.
I went to the Gehry office on the last day to speak to the GT people about geeky stuff and do some sort of 18th century introduction thing. Very interesting stuff, and it looks like a nice place to work on the main gehry shop floor.
American airports are crap.
So, finally in Melbourne, it’s lovely here.
The weather is great, sunny, but not too hot (for me, but I like it hot, so maybe I’m a bad judge)
I’ve been visiting cafes as a way of forcing myself to visit different neighbourhoods, and the baseline standard of coffee here is so good, the worst coffee I’ve had here is better than you’d get in most cafes in the UK, and the best is just superb the only place in the UK that comes close is flat white.
the best so far is st ali roasters, and i’m going for a public cupping session tomorrow at lunch time, woooo!
I’m working in a practice, and as far as practice work goes, it’s pretty good, but I’m on the verge of making a proper career decision that I’m not really interested in architecture as it is practiced in the real world. I love teaching, researching new working methods and thinking about big ideas, but I don’t think I have the patience to be a straight practitioner. This is going to take a bit more thought as to how it pans out in the long term, and whether it’s just me being adverse to real work.
Being the geek I am, I’ve got into the dorkbot scene here, and they all seem really nice, and very welcoming. Yesterday was an amazing presentation by Robert henke who does super cool live performance techno.
And… I’ve bought a bike, it’s yellow, and it’s a ‘proper’ track bike (but I put a brake on, cos I’m a wimp). I’m not in the shape I thought I was in. I did about 8-10 laps of the velodrome and nearly puked. The banking is so much steeper than I’d imagined it would be, I was struggling to keep the bike on the track in the bends. this challenge with CT is going to be an interesting race
Anyway, I need to post this, and I’ll link to it on FB.
More soon, promise, honest.
Kisses