Puttering Around In London

The view outside my room window

I woke up today to the sound of the familiar rumbling of the trains running along the tracks outside. It was around 5:30am (London time). I Poked my head out the window to a slight drizzle of rain. The overall temperature was pretty warm. Warm compared to the -20 (before wind chill) in Toronto. Yes I think it was a nice balmy five degrees here.

My first thing on the to-do list today was to go to the Fashion tent to see what was going on with my photographer status. This season I filled out an online registration. As usual I didn't hear back from the British Fashion Council (BFC) other than getting an email of a barcode to get into the exhibition. It was with someone else's name on it.

Last year I would have started freaking out but this year I figured everything would just work out. I emailed the BFC with the error the day before I left. I would have emailed them sooner but didn't get their email any earlier to react.




On my way to the fashion tent I noticed this on a car outside my hotel.



Here's the offending car in front of my hotel.


London Fashion Weeks main tent is located here.

This year, or this season rather... fall winter 2007, the BFC had promised exhibitors a larger venue. From the outside the building looked the same size as last year. I got to the Natural History Museum at about 10am. The Fashion tent was located in the same place as last year on the museum's park grounds.

The grounds are surrounded by a large metal gate. This is possibly why the fashion tent is located here, to control the number of people coming into the event. There was only one entrance open letting contractors and other fashion type people in. The security guards told me they weren't letting in any press today and told me to show up tomorrow. For some reason I felt like I was getting screwed but these guys were just following orders. If the BFC didn't know what was going on how would these guys know.

I left and went to my favorite grocery store, Sainsbury's. I picked up a few sandwiches and looked for some roach motels. The store didn't have any roach hotels or pest control items of any kind. At least not that I noticed. But they did have good sandwiches. I felt a bit let down when I noticed there was no salad bar any more. I suppose I could always go to Whitrose (the competition) for the salad.


Sainsbury's under construction.


Traffic sign


On the way back to the hotel

For the most part, with the fashion stuff taken care of, I really didn't have much to do today. I ended up going back to the hotel to take a nap. Later I met up with Andrew to go to the Four Seasons, a chinese restaurant known for it's cooked duck.


The Four Seasons

The line up to get in was insane. They told us to come back in half an hour. We put down our name and ended up going to a local mall to kill some time. After about 20 minutes we showed up at the restaurant and waited. Andrew waited inside while I waited outside taking pictures of the street, stores, and various things in general.

I met a guy from Boston who was here in London for a "sustainable" convention. "sustainable". That's the new catch phrase these days. Like "multimedia", "the information superhighway", "Imagineers", or "associate" (a word given to the minions at a job to make them seem more than the cog that they are) this is another word that makes me want to puke. Anyways the guy had been waiting for about 45 minutes. He and a group of five others seemed to be getting tired of the waiting.


The local mall near the Four Seasons


Waiting outside the restaurant for a table

It was around the time that I started talking to him that Andrew popped out saying we should go eat somewhere else. We ended up down the street at another chinese restaurant and had the duck there. It wasn't as tasty as the Four Seasons but was still good.