The Bleigiessen

Today we had the chance to get up close and personal with one of Thomas Heatherwick's works--the Bleigiessen, a structure that spans all 8 stories of the atrium in the Wellcome Trust building (which is a biomedical research charity). Bleigiessen is actually a German custom on New Year's Eve where you melt small pieces of lead in a spoon and then pour it into a bucket of cold water. The hardened lead then creates a shape, whose figure is used to determine one's fortune for the next year. So, for example, if it looks like a bird, then you will have good luck coming. Apparently Heatherwick performed experiments with various materials in this same process, and after 400 tries he finally found the perfect shape that was created from pouring casting metal into spinning water to create this long spiral that this sculpture is shaped after. Heatherwick has a tendency to take everyday objects and blow them up into huge sculptures, and this is no different. The original bit of metal was actually only 20mm long, and he created a sculpture to span all 8 stories of this building. I think it's quite impressive. He used MRI scanning to examine the shape of the tiny metal cast and broke it down into layers so that he could compose this piece out of the 27,000 steel wires and 142,000 glass beads that now make up the sculpture. Our tour guide told us that each wire has from 1 to 39 beads (if I remember correctly) on it, and the inside of the sculpture is hollow, but it already weighs 15 tonnes as it is. I just think it's so amazing how Heatherwick even conceived the idea of such a sculpture and how he uses just wires and glass spheres to create this immense work of art. It's beautiful.

view from the ground floor up

one of the 142,000 glass beads

a dimple in the structure

look at all those wires and beads... awesome

The Great Outdoors

Wow, it's been an amazing weekend with pretty amazing weather, so I've no complaints. I spent a great majority of it outside, which I am happy about, and which also means I have a lot of pictures to share in this post!

Friday was a beautiful day, and the "adventure" I mentioned in my last post was that Lynn and I decided to go visit Regent's Park, one of the Queen's royal parks. We took the tube from Russell Square to Regent's Park and spent a while finding the entrance to the park, and finally, we were surrounded by grass, trees and all kinds of flowers! Regent's Park is pretty big, with the London Zoo in it, a boating lake, tennis courts, lots of gardens and fountains and at least 10 football fields, so as you can imagine, it was an awful lot of walking, but it was worth it.

a beautiful daffodil

jumping picture in front of a fountain

lynn with the poo-shaped bush :p

pretty flowers!

Lynn and I also decided to pay about 5 pounds each to row on the lake for half an hour--it was worth it! There was a good 10 minutes where the geese would not stop honking and they all gathered in the center of the island in the lake and started flapping their wings and honking like there was no tomorrow.. it was quite interesting.

on the boat

lynn wanted to take a picture with the duck

geese chilling under the willow tree

I thought this was especially cute - 3 ducks with their heads in the water and their tails in the air :)

Yesterday, Saturday, was not as beautiful in terms of weather but it was still a nice day to go out and enjoy the many different stands at the Portobello Market in Notting Hill. There are a huge range of things that are sold at this market, from antiques to vintage clothes, jewelry, old cameras, food, records, and more. Of course, I only spent money on food because I went with a bunch of guys, so I didn't want to make them stop at every other clothes or jewelry or bag stand. haha. There was a bruschetta stand that everyone said they heard great things about, and although the service was a tad slow, the end product was really good so I guess you could say it was worth it. I also had a toffee pudding cupcake from Hummingbird Bakery which was delicious, although kind of sweet, even for my notoriously sweet tooth. Derek and I split a cup of churros, and I also had a cup of fruit to finish everything off.

the beginning of the market

my cupcake in its box

me and my bruschetta

our churros covered in sugar and cinnamon with chocolate on the side to dip

I was definitely full by the end, and we decided to check out some of the places that were featured in the movie "Notting Hill" starring Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant. It was pretty cool, besides the fact that most of the 'landmarks' in the movie were not really there anymore. For example, the blue door that used to be Hugh Grant's character's flat was apparently removed and donated to charity and replaced by a plain black door. The book shop that he worked at is no longer in its original place (which is now a shoe store), but there is an actual Travel Bookshop that is based on the movie, but isn't the real shop.

the black door that replaced the original blue one

the impostor travel bookshop :p

After the market, we decided to head down to Putney Bridge to watch the boat race between Oxford and Cambridge on the Thames River. It started to get pretty chilly and we got there a bit early since the actual race started at 5pm, but we passed the time by taking pictures, walking around and exploring the carnival, and eating cotton candy. It was an interesting experience, and when the crew boats finally came into our view, everyone started cheering and it was pretty exciting, but once they passed, everyone started to migrate towards the tube stop and it was extremely crowded. I had a balloon and I was afraid people would pop it because it was so squished in the tube trains. I also had to pee really badly so the fact that home was so far from the tube stop and everyone pushing against each other was almost unbearable for me. I don't understand why I always have this issue of having to pee really badly at the worst times.. I should probably watch what and how much I drink more closely...

if you look closely, you'll see the two crew boats in the distance

the big screen at the carnival

a bridge on the Thames River

And that pretty much sums up my weekend. Today, I just went to Starbucks with Lynn and we sat out in the park and read for class for an hour or two. For once, I've kept my blog up to date! Ha. That's truly an accomplishment for me. 'Til next time :)

A Quick Update

Last Saturday, we went on a trip organized by NYUL to go visit Windsor Castle. Windsor Castle is one of the Queen's many castles and is actually the oldest and largest occupied castle in the world. The castle is beautiful inside and out, and even though we technically weren't allowed to take pictures inside, we all snuck some with our sneaky snapping skills. Some photos:

St. George's Hall, a large hall with shields painted all over the ceiling

outside the castle in the garden

group photo

Queen Mary's Dolls' House.. apparently even the toilets in this huge dollhouse work

This past Tuesday, Charine and I had to head to London's City Hall near the Tower Bridge to meet with our class to visit the Fashion Textile Museum and the Design Museum. Unfortunately, we left our dorm a tad bit late and ended up not meeting with our class for the first half of the visit. We finally met them at the Design Museum and there were some pretty cool pieces in their, though apparently one of the interactive works was not on exhibition that day, which is quite unfortunate.

Designs of the Year 2011

an interesting array of LED panels

that fold up in reaction to motion

charine rolling around on an interesting-looking chair

And finally, yesterday's weather was pretty nice as well, around high 50's, so Charine, Lynn and I decided to pay a visit to J+A Cafe, a quaint little restaurant that one of our suitemates raves about. I have to say, I was not crazy about the Irish soda bread they had (personally, I like the ones that my mom used to buy from the supermarket better), but the soup I ordered was pretty good and the cafe was cute, so no complaints.

cute, huh?

my latte

chicken soup with vegetables

buttered Irish soda bread

After our little lunch, Charine headed over to Oxford Circus for some shopping and Lynn and I decided to walk around a bit and enjoy the nice weather. We went to Bunhill Fields and there was a burial grounds, in which we saw William Blake's grave, among some other peoples' graves whose names sounded a bit familiar... kind of cool.

William Blake, the poet/painter

the cupcakes Lynn and I got from J+A

On the way back to the dorm, Lynn and I decided to get out at King's Cross Station to find the 9 3/4 platform from Harry Potter. Unfortunately, they had a lot of construction going on and all of the walls were lined with construction panels, so they must have created a temporary fake brick wall and attached the cart to this makeshift "platform." Oh well, I'm not that big of a Harry Potter fan anyway...

Overall, it was a great day and I'll have to create another post for my adventure today!

Shopping, Snogging and Snacking

Since I find it impossible to bring myself to go to bed before 1 or 2 in the morning, I'm going to write this post to further postpone bedtime, even though I love sleep and have class in the morning tomorrow. This is a pretty random post of the past weekend so I will keep it short.

I find myself eating pasta basically every other day in London, just because it's relatively cheap and easy to make. Waitrose and Tesco (the two closest supermarkets to my dorm) have these meatballs that Lynn and I discovered, which are pre-made and pretty darn good. So we decided to buy some spaghetti and make spaghetti and meatballs:

not bad, huh? plus some spinach on the side

On Friday, I had nothing better to do and Kathryn wanted to go shopping so I went along for the ride. After going to Zara, H&M and a few other stores, we made our final stop: SNOG! Snog is a frozen yogurt chain that's pretty similar to our Pinkberry or Red Mango. It has the same light, tart, tangy zing to it and they had original, green tea, spiced apple and chocolate flavors. They also had a variety of toppings, but they also had some new ones that the shops in the US don't have, such as red bean, pine seeds, and watermelon. I tried the original frozen yogurt with raspberries, mochi and red bean, and it was pretty good. Not to mention that the size was pretty big, so I think I had my frozen yogurt fix for a good while. Snogging also means kissing here in Britain, so they definitely play on that word in their advertising and slogans.

very cute shop, and we noticed that the yogurt machines and stuff are all in the back, which is different from the way it is in the US

the super cool lights on the ceiling that change colors--seriously mesmerizing

my guilt-free snog :)

We also passed through the Chinatown here, which is a little small but had tons of restaurants that looked pretty good. Kathryn and I also found a small Chinese bakery there and we went a little overboard with the Asian snacks, like pineapple buns and those coffee swirly rolls with cream along the swirls. We've been pretty deprived of Asian food lately, besides our take-out dinners from Hare & Tortoise, an Asian chain restaurant, so this stop at Chinatown was much needed.

arch in Chinatown

On Saturday, we headed back to the small market in Brunswick Centre for lunch. This time we came prepared to eat, and I tried the massive hotdogs as well as an egg tart, dumplings, and some home-made churros.

churros! they're served with chocolate sauce for dipping but we decided that they're best without the chocolate dip

massive sausage - Charine and I split because the sausage was so long

We decided to stop at Waitrose for some groceries after wandering through the stalls in the market and unfortunately, Charine's baguette decided to break in half and fall to the ground. The last picture is of Charine after Kathryn and I couldn't stop laughing for five minutes and the baguette finally fell. Such a tragic moment.

Anyway, that was my weekend for the most part. I didn't do much other than relax now that midterms are over. I just have a marketing presentation to do tomorrow and I'll be done for a while! Yay!

Birthday Weekend

I'm officially a week behind on updating this blog. I'm going to blame it on midterms again because I had two tests this past week, one of which was suddenly moved up a week so I was really unprepared for that. Anyway, prepare for an extremely long post:

Since it was Charine's birthday on the 10th and my birthday on the 11th, we planned a whole lot of festivities for the weekend. It started off with surprise cakes from the boys of room G04, who claimed they baked them but actually bought them from Tesco. They were good nonetheless!

group photo :)

On Thursday night, the night of Charine's birthday, we decided to try a contemporary dim sum teahouse restaurant called Yauatcha in Soho. It was a really nice place filled with adults sipping on wine and chatting. Good thing we dressed up for it, or else we would have stuck out like a sore thumb. At first we went just to try the desserts, since everything on the menu was pretty expensive, but after glancing at the dim sum dishes they had, we decided to order some salty food as well. Lynn and I shared the prawn cheung fun and the pan-fried turnip cake (our favoriate dim sum dish of all time!).

turnip cake

prawn cheung fun

we also ordered fruit martinis

After the dim sum came the much awaited desserts, which were super sweet but super delicious.

I forgot the one on the bottom left, but after that (counter-clockwise) is the caramel pannacotta, chocolate raspberry delice, and milk chocolate praline

... and a group picture! it was a great meal

On Friday night, we decided to book a table at a club called Cafe de Paris, which had a burlesque show that night along with some live music and whatnot. Although the music wasn't exactly what we would normally dance to, we made the most of it and at least we had a table, so the dance floor wasn't the only option. There was also a pretty cool show of this lady doing acrobatic moves on a ring hanging from the ceiling. We went with a bunch of people, and two friends visiting from New York came straight from the airport to the club to celebrate with Charine and me! Here are some pictures of this unforgettable night:

at the entrance

John holding the reserved sign

our waitress bringing the champagne with sparklers

group picture again with champagne :)

Of course, we ended the night at McDonald's. Not surprising at all...

The next day, Saturday, Kathryn and I decided to head to Brunswick Centre for some food at Hare & Tortoise. After ordering, we realized that there was a market in the centre on Saturdays with a bunch of food stands offering all kinds of cuisines from churros to paella. There was a stand for Japanese octopus balls which smelled really good so Kathryn and I decided to try them and they were really hot at first but really tasty.

8 octopus balls covered in dried seaweed and "Japanese sauce"

That night, we decided to go to dinner at a restaurant called Belgo, which specializes in Belgium food. Unfortunately, some peoples' plans changed so it only ended up being Charine, Kathryn, Jocelyn and me. I ordered the Florentine mussels and we just couldn't resist ordering a Belgian waffle for dessert. Good thing Charine and I shared, though! The mussels were delicious and the waffle definitely hit the spot.

Florentine mussels

Belgian waffle with chocolate sauce, vanilla ice cream, and whipped cream on the side

Derek also stopped by to drop off something for Charine and I for our birthdays, which was really sweet of him. Charine got chocolate and I got cupcakes from Bea's Bloomsbury, a tea and pastry shop nearby that I've been wanting to try for a while. Of course, we shared the cupcakes, which were really yummy and they looked cute too. Dan and Yan also dropped off these salt and pepper shakers that they bought for us from Paris.

cupcakes from Bea's Bloomsbury

the cute cupcakes packaging and the shakers

And that concludes my post on our birthday weekend, which was filled with good memories and good food, always a great combination! :P I'll have to do a separate post on what I did this weekend sometime this week. Now that all my midterms are over, I just have one marketing presentation to do this week and then I'll be done for a month!