And Bob's Your Uncle

No It doesn't mean my brother Bob is your uncle. And Bob's your uncle is Brit speak for, "and there you have it" or "and you're all set". For example, "to set a car alight, simply poor gasoline in the driver's seat, throw a lit match inside, and Bob's your uncle".



I've seen a lot of photo shoots/video shoots going on in my neighborhood. And they're always dressed funky.



drinks at the Griffin, which is across from the Book Club basically. Everyone drinks outside on the sidewalks in London pubs.



Hoxton Square is cool.



a Beef pie with mash(ed potatoes is what the brits mean).



a random assortment on the sidewalk



down the street from my house.



London has a "free" bike public bike system too. its a 1 pound access fee and then a 1 pound a day rental fee for 24 hrs. or 45 pounds for a year. I have hesitated to do this cuz London is not a bike friendly city cuz the roads are narrow, no bike lanes, and drivers are not yet aware of bikers like they are in tokyo.



Brick Lane review number 2. me and johnny wanted to try somewhere new so we let a guy tout us into "Cafe Bangla". I think he started at 11 pounds and johnny got him down to 8 pounds for whatever meal crap.



This place gets an A+ for awesome artwork on the walls. This isn't the only mural where you'll be wondering what the hell is going on.



chiken tikka starters. super sad size and not so good.



papadoms or however you spell it. are you supposed to dip into these are spoon out onto the papadoms? i don't know what the status quo is so i have been mashing my things in there and i'm probably not supposed to.



all i can remember is that the portions were super small and nothing special. So this place ultimately gets a thumbs down for skimping on everything and not tasting the best despite the fact that it has the best weird art on the walls.



what is going on here?



oh they just threw in a princess diana mural amongst the 13 year old boy's heavy metal dream land murals.



What is this thing called? a spatula, a pancake turner, a flipper? Lucy insisted it was called a flipper or "flippa" in her accent. The official product name is "Nylon Turner". I came downstairs in the morning to find that some clever gal was trying pull a fast one on me. Double gloucester is cheese that uses cream from the morning and evening milkings or something so its yellow and kind of like cheddar. it's not bad. Wenslydale is frequently mixed with fruit and ends up tasting like dessert cheese. also not bad if thats what you're looking for. but if you're looking for a cheese that slaps you in the nuts these are not it.



badminton at some sports center near angels house. I guess some sports that are not so cool in the US are at least tolerated here by people from all walks of life.



my first real cream tea at this cool place in stoke newington meaning just tea.



my first scones with clotted cream and jam. clotted cream is chilled and kind of like butter but creamier and chilled-ier so its awesome. scones are basically biscuits with more sugar in them. they don't even have biscuits in Britanian.



Angel's parents bought James a new Roland.



A melodica that you blow into. Yann Tierson who did the soundtrack for the movie Amelie uses this.



there are a lot of these stores in my area.





I hope to capture the complete "Poor Man's Harry Potter" cast on camera before I leave London. I missed my chance at the perfect Poor Man's harry potter at the airport last time cuz i was in a hurry. will i get my chance again? here is the poor man's Neville Longbottom.



Columbia flower market again with Lucy. This photo is horribly edited but i gave up on it so here it is anyway.



Lilies and Gladiolas from the flower market.



Lucy came home and said the riots were now 2 blocks from out house. I had a magazine deadline i was working on so i couldn't move from my desk to go take pictures or run away if necessary. all i could do was listen to the BBC and have a little adrenaline running through my blood the whole day. Lucy has been living in the area for 10 years so she has friends all over that were texting her updates like that their store is getting looted now and that they're not attacking people with cameras yet and looters yelling get out of here white people. She would yell these updates up to me in my room but all i could do say oh my and keep working. By the next day the carnage was over and a lot of the businesses in our neighborhood had been trashed. I tried to go Argos with Sioban but it looks like it got looted.





So tons of windows smashed all over London and England, fires set, (here on the news they say alight, as in 50 cars were set alight), trainers (sneakers) stolen, electronics and liquor stolen, and cars burned out. There was a riot in the 80's where they cut a police officers head off with a pen knife, in the same area where this riot started. I can't believe the police even let this whole thing come to this but everyone said the police in london don't beat people down like that. So they just let their city be set alight and ravaged by "youths" for a few nights.