Patrick in Spain

Posts Tagged ‘Yahoo! Voice’

We landed in London in the afternoon yesterday and made our way to St. Christopher’s Inn in Hammersmith. We mostly just walked around to both the east and west. There was a nice park, and London seems pretty cool, overall. For dinner, we ate a Thai restaurant and watched a London soccer game. Vlad wanted to hang around for the Bulgaria vs. Ireland game, but that would’ve been a few hours, so we went on instead.

Also, yesterday, Vlad convinced us to head out to a region known as SoHo where there was apparently supposed to be good bars to hang out in. We were looking for a club named 24:London, which, as I’ve been told, uses Microsoft Surface like technology to create a very high-tech and engaging experience. Needless to say, the nerd in me was more interested in the surface than the drinks, but whatever, I was along for the ride. We ended up getting to the right metro stop, but then apparently those who were guiding us there, which will remain nameless *glare*, did not write down enough directions to actually get us to this club. So, we ask a few people, and they either don’t know or are either secretly hype men for other clubs and advertise those instead. There’s a lot of these hype men, as I’m calling them. They ask you if you’re interested in going to a bar or whatever, and point you in the direction of the one that pays them. They mostly wear black trenchcoats and black bowler hats, for some reason. We end up wandering around in a circle like three times before finally heading in a new direction, which was them deemed too gay, then not too gay, before we ended up heading that way. By this point, people in the group are getting annoyed with this walk and each other, so we just end up in some random cheap club. A few people had some drinks, checked out the mediocre dance floor, waited for Vlad to finish his drink (which becomes a common occurrence on the trip) and headed out.

Walking in what we think is the right direction for 24, we run into another hype man who tells us that Paul Oakenfold is playing at some bar (that I bet he worked for). I don’t know the name, but Ben and Jason do. He is, according to them, one of the more famous DJs that tours, and is supposed to be worth seeing. My comment to the whole scenario was that we’d just gotten a pop-up advertisement, and for some reason a groupmate clicked it. I think my assessment turned out to be the most true as you’ll soon see. A few people paid to go in when we got there, but Ben stopped and asked the bouncers who was playing. They didn’t mention Oakenfold’s name, so Ben inquired further. We realized that no, he wasn’t there, and wasn’t allegedly going to be there for a week. We were assured the current DJ was good, too, but people that paid go their money back and we all left instead. With that behind us, we followed the hypeman back to the bus stop. He told us that he didn’t know that Oakenfold wouldn’t be there for another week, but I didn’t buy it. We got on the bus and headed back.

This morning, we got up and went to Big Ben and the London Eye. Big Ben was really cool looking, and I took a few good photos of it. Vlad, Anya, Dennis, and Tim all went up on the London Eye (like a Ferris Wheel with small glass rooms instead of buckets and seats) for £16. The others of us, Jason, Ben, Conrad, and I, went and watched the street performers. I took a few videos of them, and compiled the first half into this YouTube video. Some of these guys are pretty good, and I’ll have pictures uploaded when I can. If you see any of the pictures and can identify the acts, feel free to comment here with that. I was also interested to find that there were a number of horror genre events in London. We saw a place called Fright Club and another called The London Dungeon, though we didn’t have the time or inclination to actually visit.

I had to talk to Wachovia for a third time (First time was before we left for Spain. Second time was in Spain.) today. I was a little frustrated and disappointed that my card had been locked again, even though they now knew for certain I was in Europe. I found over the phone that what happened was one of the things I purchased was through a company apparently based in Texas of all things, and thus Wachovia put a hold on my card when I made another purchase back in Europe. I got it all straightened out by calling them again. I used Yahoo! Voice, which is an awesome service, to make my call.

I’ll now spend a minute pushing Yahoo! Voice because it was really great. Essentially, you need speakers, a microphone, and a cable/dsl level connection and you can call anywhere in the world for a great rate. The service is Pay-As-You-Go, and prices range from 1¢ a minute to call the United States to 27¢ a minute to call Moroccan mobile phones. It doesn’t matter where you’re calling from. Also, United States 1-800 number calls are entirely free. You don’t even have to put money in your account to make those free calls. The program is a free download for at least Windows and Mac (didn’t check on linux). Anyway, my kudos to that service.

We rode the metro system around a lot since we arrived, and it’s a pretty nice system. The locals seem to mostly refer to the below ground train system as the Tube or the Underground. The passes we needed were £5.60, which is about $9.25, so a little pricey, but they lasted all day, and we made sure to get our money’s worth out of them. Like Barcelona, the London metro system beats Atlanta’s with its eyes closed. Atlanta definitely needs to take some cues from the successful metro systems in the US as well as abroad. I think London’s system is overall more comprehensive and reaches more parts of the city more easily than Barça’s, but more of Barcelona’s trains and technology are newer. The London tubes feel like they’ve been around forever, and Wikipedia agrees with me, dating the system to the 19th century.

I guess that’s a good segue into how old things are in London. Unlike Barcelona which has older parts, London just generally feels older all over. It’s got an interesting aesthetic about it that I’d probably like to explore more than I have time for. I have a feeling that many of the great and old cities of Europe share this kind of quality, and hopefully, I’ll make it to some of them as well.