The Smalrus Web Site

For some reason (maybe it’s the fact that we’re actually in London), I didn’t really sleep in and woke up around 9am.  I grabbed some breakfast at the Pancake Cafe with Charles and then the two of us headed out to Covent Garden for the morning, since we decided we were going to find a pub for the FA Cup match during the afternoon.  Covent Garden is like an open air merchant market but is open every day.  They’ve got hat sellers, photographers, miniature sculptures, touristy tchochkes, and more.  Also located at Covent Garden is the Transport Museum, so I went looking for any gift ideas.

We got thirsty, so we stopped in Tesco to pick up some Cokes and found in one of the aisles juice can-sizes of red and white wines.  Additionally, there were small cans of pre-mixed gin and tonic.  Of course, I had to try it, so by 11:45am on a Saturday, I found myself drinking in downtown London.  So there was Charles and I, wandering around Leicester Square while I was mildly buzzed, searching for a pub for the FA final.

We ended up going back to the hotel to drop off some of our effects, but headed out around 1:45.  En route to getting some lunch at Ultimate Burger, Charles and I decided to put a little money on the game.  William Hill had some odds listed in their window with minimum bets of £10, so Charles and I split one bet with 10-1 odds on Chelsea winning 2-1.  After watching this season, it was difficult to not only predict a team, but predict a score as well.  And though I couldn’t root for Chelsea, I figured they win.  However, I also decided to hedge my bet by putting a pound in on Charles bet with 28-1 odds of Manchester United winning 3-2.

For the match, we headed to Covent Garden and ended up at The Nag’s Head for some drinks and a TV.  We sat at a table with some West Ham supporters, but there was a mix of fans for both teams (the majority in favour with Chelsea).  The game was won by Chelsea 1-0 in extra time – meaning I lost £6 because I couldn’t predict the correct score.  However, Man Utd could have won if a goal in ET was allowed as the replay showed.  But such is the officiating for football.

After the match, we went to the hotel and I was able to get a hold of Judi so I could catch up with her since I hadn’t spoken to her in a couple of days.  Charles and I headed back out to dinner in Chinatown and decided to go out for drinks.  We scouted out the All Star Lanes around the corner from us and although it looked like a great place for the whole class, it was almost too energetic for merely the two of us.  But Charles wimped out, we didn’t go to Night & Day, and instead spent a Saturday in London in our hotel room watching 30 Rock on Charles’s iTunes.

Since Mike was with his girlfriend last night, Charles, Tim, and I ended up going to Night & Day for a few ciders, but it ended up being a relatively early night out.

In the morning, class was relatively short since Professor Flowers wanted to go over his notes from our IBM visitation in the afternoon.  In a nutshell, their goal was to form “network corporations” that would allow for corporations that truly transcended national barriers in innovation.  Also, we went over a couple of presentations on LBOs, including the takeovers of Sallie Mae, Duracell, and Safeway.  Class ran until around 11 and then we were free for the afternoon.

Tim, Charles, and I went to the Pizza Express on High Holborn Street for lunch.  Basically, it was like an upscale Pizza Hut with upscale cuisine for nearly similar prices.  Tim was flying out to Austria to visit his girlfriend, so Charles and I took the tube to Knightsbridge station.  At Knightsbridge is the world famous Harrod’s of London.  Harrod’s is one of the most famous stores in the world and lots of famous people make their purchases there.  It’s not hard to see why.  First of all, there is anything one can imagine, from horse saddles to cricket bats, to laptop computers to fish, and perfumes to radio controlled cars.  But unlike a Macy’s, the seven floors of this place are ritz to the nth degree.

From Harrod’s we walked over to the V&A Museum, but we didn’t really care to stay, so we grabbed the bus to Hyde Park Corner and walked up to where Speakers’ Corner was supposed to be.  Speakers’ Corner was one of the first places that was designated in 1872 for free speech.  People are allowed to visit there and say whatever they’d like for however long they’d like, so long as they do not incite a breach of peace, nor use obscenities or blasphemy.  Suffice to say, the practice has been reduced to Sundays and we were a few days early.

We decided to mosey up to the Marble Arch, snap a few shots, and head on the bus to Camden Market.  A couple of people I know had suggested that Camden Market was the place to see, however we found it to not be a place of great relevance.  I’m not sure if its intent is/was to be a farmers’ market, but when we were there, it was merely filled with scads of vendors selling a few clever t-shirts and not much else.  Charles and I checked out most of the area but, finding nothing of importance, decided to move along to the Arsenal stadium.

We took a double decker bus from Camden Town to Finsbury Park, getting off a block away from the World of Arsenal store.  I picked up a scarf for myself, since apparently that’s one of the football fan requisites that I did not yet have.  We walked around the area, not exactly sure of where we were going, however we ultimately made it to Emirates Stadium.

Though the season was already over, it was neat to see the place where Arsenal plays because this has been my first year following a football team and on Saturday mornings when I’m awake to catch a match on Fox Soccer Channel, I’ve gotten more into the sport.  As such, visiting the stadium and its environs seemed to help bring some reality to what I was partaking in; in this city, it is obvious how connected people are to their individual teams.  I’m definitely understanding how much it is like the Montreal Canadiens are to the city of Montréal.

Around 6, we headed toward the bus stop and caught another double decker bus back to King’s Cross/St. Pancras tube station.  The bus ride was interesting, as it highlighted the working class parts of London that not many tourists usually choose to see.  If I had even more time in London, I would have definitely attempted to venture out there more often to get an intimate picture of what the local life is like.  Spending most of the time downtown definitely relegates one to more touristy experiences.

When we got back to the hotel, we just sat around the lobby and people started to filter in.  I ended up going to dinner with Amish, Mahesh, and Professor Flowers at this Japanese noodle bar, Wagamama.  Personally, I thought the food was good and reasonably priced.  The four of us briefly headed back to the hotel and Professor Flowers went back to practice his oboe while the three of us headed out to Waterloo tube station to get some nocturnal shots of the London Eye and Big Ben.

I might have had the most success with my photographs, using some of the level surfaces for image stabilization during the longer nighttime exposures.  After almost 90 minutes of attempting to get our shots, we headed back toward the hotel.  We told Mike that we might meet his girlfriend and him for some drinks at Night & Day, but by the time we got there, it was 11:50, the bar was packed, no one we knew was there, and everyone decided to call it a night.

After I left the Camera Cafe, I went back to the hotel and met up with Amish, Mahesh, and Professor Flowers and we went out to Brick Lane for some Indian food.  We took the tube to the Liverpool Street station this time, and took shorter than getting off at Aldgate.  We passed by the London headquarters of ABN Amro and the Spitalfields Market before getting to Brick Lane.  Professor Flowers and I deferred to the resident Indians to pick a good restaurant and we finally decided on one.  I went with Chicken Passanda, which ended up being really good.  However, the service was slow and never gave us the discount they promised us out on the street, so we didn’t get home until about 9ish.

When we got home, I picked up a few beers for the guys, but since no one was around, I went to the lounge and watched some TV.  On the BBC, there was a program called “The Human Footprint” which discussed all these facts about consumption and expulsion of human life.  Go figure, I came in on the part that discussed farts.  I figured the Brits might have a classier way of putting it (or not reporting on it at all), but nope.

If I remember correctly, the program struck a point in giving statistics that we fart about 25 times a day equaling about 3 litres of gas.  But the most ridiculous part was when they decided to discuss what the fireball of 18 thousand litres of gas would look like if it was put out in a field and lit afire.  Boom!  Then, they started dropping feces from the sky onto a toilet in the middle of the field.  It was interesting, yet very Monty Pythonesque.  Additionally, people will have 10 sexual partners, average sex twice a week (how they came to that number was interesting), and as such, will have 4,823 acts of congress over the course of a lifetime.  Hmmm….

I woke up relatively easily this morning and then went to Starbucks to grab some coffee.  It is my belief that the coffee here is stronger than it is in the States – even for Starbucks.  I find the caffeine hitting me a lot harder than usual.  We went to class at 9 as always and prepped for the visitation to IBM’s London office near the Waterloo station.  The lecture was interesting, but I don’t think any of us actually felt like it was lending itself to finance, but at least Professor Flowers’s anecdotes are interesting.

Since the visitation was at 1:30, we broke for lunch at about 11:00 and Tim and I decided to hit up the Pizza Hut lunch buffet.  It was £5.99 for unlimited salad, pasta, and pizza, which wasn’t a bad deal compared to some of the places in the city.  Also, the Pizza Hut here is more upscaled, so it’s not that bad to go out there.

We left for the IBM visitation and lost people and found them along the way, ultimately getting to the building just in time.  Our presenter was Keith Saxton, EMEA Financial Markets director, who lectured us for about an hour and then fielded some questions on everything from trading transaction speeds and bigger banks to IBM investment in India versus China.  Since the focus of IBM is no longer about personal computers as we’ve always envisioned, it was interesting to hear how IBM has shifted their focus to “business solutions” and just what exactly some of those solutions are.

The visitation ended around 3, so Tim and I ended up taking off, looking for some information on Eurostar (£59 for a roundtrip ticket to Paris?  Forget it.) and then deciding to head to the Millennium Bridge.  We started walking  along the Thames River and ended up crossing halfway over the Golden Jubilee Bridge before realising that it was the wrong bridge.  Instead we kept continuing along the Thames and ultimately found the Millennium Bridge.  Unfortunately, they didn’t have any of the hydraulic suspensions functioning, so we missed out on that, but we did make a stop in front of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre.

Tim needed to get some Cuban cigars, so we grabbed the London Bridge tube station and went to the little shop by the Bank station, then headed back to the hotel for a little bit before going out to dinner.  We ended up eating dinner at the Spaghetti House, where Charles and I ate earlier in the week.  It was a good conversation about everything from women, military and current events, our youths, and what not.

Meeting some different people on this trip with such diverse backgrounds has really been great for me.  I’m the second youngest person here, yet it’s not that difficult to fit in, understand, and contribute relevantly to conversation.  More so, these people have a lot of different experiences either in life or in work, that has been neat to compare stories and assimilate all the information that I’ve been taking.  I’m leaving this city in a week from today but I can’t say that I’ve done anything but learn about this city and the attitudes around which it revolves.

Tonight we’re going out to our local meeting place – Night & Day and then we’ll hit the sack for a couple of lectures tomorrow. Luckily, there’s no visitations tomorrow and Tim and Mike are out with their visiting girlfriends, so this weekend should be opportune to take in a few of the sites I haven’t gotten to during the week (ie, Camden Market, Hyde Park & Speaker’s Corner, maybe Emirates Stadium) and do some of the souvenir shopping I haven’t yet done.

Yesterday after leaving the internet cafe (well, actually, it’s more like a camera shop with WiFi and snacks), I went back to the hotel and just bummed around for a bit because Claire was supposed to meet us at the hotel at 7:30.  However, she was running late and didn’t make it to us until about 8:10.  Charles, Mike, Claire, and I went around to Soho and ended up at a Thai restaurant that was pretty good.  Mike said the curry he had there was one of the best meals he had on this trip thus far.

From there, Claire brought us up to one of the pubs she frequents, The Albany, on Great Portland Street.  It was pretty a pretty good and we had some good conversation until the three of them started talking about African development.  Unfortunately, that’s one of the areas of the globe that I have only a cursory knowledge of, so my contribution to the discussion was resultingly minimal.  However, it was good to see Claire again, since I hadn’t seen her in about two years when she came to New York to visit her parents and Seth.

We got home around 12am and went to bed.  I woke up around 8, grabbed a breakfast and a Starbucks for class and then headed to the room at Birkbeck.  Today’s discussion was surprisingly not about yesterday’s visit to Canary Wharf, but rather, some presentations about corporate governance here in Europe.  Seema and Tim presented a little on the scandals at Hollinger International and at Vodafone Mannesmann, while Amish had a little bit to discuss on the comparative structures of corporate governance.  In spite of the subject matter, we broke at 12:15 for the day.

After grabbing some Subway for lunch, I did my laundry around 2 on this place off Southhampton Row on Tavistock.  While waiting for my wash to complete, I wandered around and managed to find this little outdoor mall, The Brunswick, that had a bunch of small shops including a Waitrose, Starbucks, FCUK, sushi restaurant, and more.  When I got back to put my clothes in the dryer, I took advantage of the down time to write up and mail out some postcards.

I got in and came out here to the cafe, but will probably meet up with Amish, Mahesh, and Professor Flowers at 7 to go to some Indian food on Brick Land.  Tomorrow’s visitation is at IBM and I’m also working on trying to get us into the Financial Times, however the secretary hasn’t called me back.

The subject of today’s visitation was the Canary Wharf Group, PLC. However in class, we went over the visitation to Barclays from yesterday and talked about the various banks and their niche markets. So far, class has been running like the seminar it’s supposed to be and we’ve been getting in some decent discussion during our mornings.

We broke from class around 11:30 and then reconvened at the hotel at 1. I took that time to call my mom and wish her a happy birthday, since it was about 6:30am EDT and I figured she wasn’t yet at work. We took the DLR out to Canary Wharf and got to go to the 30th floor, where the Canary Wharf Group has their headquarters. It was most interesting that Canary Wharf got the right to develop what was essentially abandoned land and turn it into a real estate prospect wherein the growth rate of prospective leaseholders is enormous. The entire wharf has been developed and maintained by the group, in particular the relationship with the London Department of Transport, which has allowed Canary Wharf the transportation means to incentivise companies to move their offices there. Major tenants include HSBC, Citigroup, Barclays, KPMG, Oglivy & Mather, and more.

Howard Sheppard, Planning Advisor, gave us a rather lengthy description of the Canary Wharf development occuring in the past decade, and we even got to seen the various models of London and of the buildings that have been sprouting up. The amount of capital investment in Canary Wharf has to be massive, so the building themselves are truly where the financial centre of London is located.

From Canary Wharf, we took the DLR and tube back to the hotel around 3:30 and I was able to get back here to the WiFi cafe, only to find out that Myspace was having a glitch with the 24 airings and I couldn’t catch last night’s 24. It’s alright though. Around 7:30, we’re meeting up with one of my old McGill roommates, Claire, and going to dinner and/or a pub. Not only will it be cool to get a chance to see her before she takes off for the Cannes Film Festival as part of her job (since I haven’t seen her in a couple of years), but also to know someone living here in London who can show us a couple of the cool places around.

We have no visitations tomorrow (though it’s my job to attempt to get us into Financial Times offices before the seminar is over), so the afternoon might be some presentations. Most likely, it will also be a good day (and trip midpoint) to pick up some postcards and start sending them out.