I love Edinburgh

There, I said it. Leeds sucks. Edinburgh rocks.

Last weekend I went up to Edinburgh to visit my old roommate Chris from San Francisco.
My friend Jeremy came up from London - his company sent him to UK for work for a few months as well, so we decided to check out Edinburgh together. He came up to Leeds on friday night, we hung around the infamous Corn Exchange, and took the train the next morning.

aside: Trains rock. I understand US is big and we like our cars, but it'd be sooooo nice to have train service. Fast. Reliable. Read while someone else drives. Convenient. I could go on.
And you get to meet nice English girls on the train that tell you stories about "houses" in their public school "just like Harry Potter, really" and comment on their pastry: "Lovely, isn't it"?

Anyway, Edinburgh is awesome. As Chris put it, it has "interesting topology" - it's multilevel, there are a lot of sub-basement apartments, bridges and streest are intersecting. Very much a multi-level city.

Reminds me a lot of San Francisco. All the houses are Edwardian, bay windows, water, hills.
All around good times.

Oh, and of course, i had "haggis" - the traditional Scottish meal of "chopped sheep intesting wrapped in sheep stomach". Delicious and a lot less disgusting than it sounds.

I took lots of pictures, and so did Jeremy.

Drink the Plank

I wouldn't call Leeds a student town, but it definitely is a bar town.
So naturally, being "russian" and all, i found mysefl a nice neighbourhood vodka bar - Revolution.
It's actually a chain, which makes it less cool, but I doubt it'd be visiting other locations.

They even serve vodka nad pickles! almost "russian-style".

And now to break some stereotypes: i'd say brits drink more than russian. Without naming any names, let's say I have a friend that participated in the following:
This would be a 30-shot plank of vodka, with 5 different flavors. I'll do the math for you - that'd be 8.5 shots per person when you have 4 people.
Yep. Tasty. Naturally, with flavors like "vanilla" and "strawberry", that was "too sissy", so we had a few more to chase it. Like "chili" flavor. If you ever have indigestion or problem with vomiting on demand - that's the vodka to drink. Goes well with napkins, since the taste in your mouth is so rank you end up eating a few just to try to get rid of it. That sure was entertaining to us and the others at the bar...

I have to give it to them - everybody showed up at work bright and early the next day, w/out incident. I guess one can train for anything...

Would you like some business?

Walking the 100 yards from the office to the hotel at night is always fun. One night 2 reasonably dressed women (it really is cold outside) approached me and asked whether i "wanted some business".
Huh? what business? i'm just getting out of work, you want me to work again? no way dude, i'm getting my drink!
So i was polite and just ignored them. Turn to my friend P. with a silent "what's wrong with these crazy british people?" look on my face, at which point he just starts laughing. Conversation ensues:
P: these are hookers
Me: no way dude
P: want to bet?
Me: ah, no thanks, i don't want to go to jail, i'm on a tourist visa

Turns out that my office is right in the middle of the "red light district". Or more like it's on the one block that's all there is to the red light district of Leeds.
Naturally, i didn't know that.
However, i was later told that the record was some guy getting propositions 8 times (!) on the 2-block walk it takes to get from the hotel to the office.

Corn Exchange

So i'm now in Leeds, located in West Yorkshire. It's about 2.5 hours from London, in the middle of the country. I'd say it's exactly what you'd expect in a "small provincial English town" (someone's definitely going to flame for this).

Leeds has a storied history of a manufacturing town, a great University of Leeds, fabulous shopping and so on. It's known as "gateway to the Dales" - a big national park. Sounds great, doesn't it? I may be biased, but coming from both San Francisco and most recently New York it appears a little small and boring. It's the same as the kiss of death when you are describing a guy to a potential date: "he has a nice personality". Just like St. Louis Mo, which is "gateway to the west", Leeds is a great place to live if you are already married, or are a college student set on spending more time drinking than studying.

So, first impressions of Leeds - very cute. Old buildings. Cars driving on "wrong side" of the road. Giant double-decker buses hugging the curb (I bought emergency insurance. One of these things is bound to run me over some day).

Since I don't have a car, I walk around for transportation. The city centre is fairly small, it's about a 10x6 block. You can get walk the entire "downtown" in about half an hour.

Which, of course, brings us to the "Corn Exchange".
It's a giant building (shopping mall) on one side of town where most of the bars and clubs are.
Anywhere you go, you end up at the Corn Exchange. For the first few days, my coworkers and I walked around in circles, trying to find a particular bar, and would always end up at the Corn Exchange.
The hilarity would be that no matter where we went, it would always be near the Corn Exchange. Anything. All directions began with "go to the Corn Exchange and turn X...".
Naturally, all the streets are crooked, so it worked out well - i live about 2 blocks from it, work another block from it, and all the bars really are next to it.

So yeah, Corn Exchange. I'll never forget you....

Jet-Setting lifestyle

I needed to get to Leeds on Monday Jan 9th.
The weekend before, i had to be in St. Louis for my grandfather's 85th birthday party. Naturally, there are no direct flights from St. Louis to Leeds, so imagine my lovely itinerary:
friday night: JFK-->STL
sunday morning: STL-->Newark.
Take the train from Newark to Penn Station, come home for 2 hours, have some tea, get a new set of bags and take the train to JFK.
Which brings us to next section:
JFK-->London Heathrow, at which point it's 7am Monday morning in UK but still only 1am in NY.

Here's the upside of the jet-setting life: an acquintance I met while traveling in Russia 2 years ago was flying out of Heathrow to St. Petersburg at the same time.

We met up, had some tea, and parted ways - she took a flight to St. Petersburg and I went to Leeds.

I love elaborate plans. Arranging this was fun.

Going to Leeds for work

Well, after a short and exciting stint in NY where my job didn't pan out, i got a short-term project in Leeds, UK.
This becomes an second annual British Commonwealth country work-visit. Perhaps I should make this a habit. Maybe next year I can go to Australia or British Virgin Islands.

Anyway, i'll do my best to post the entertaining stories that always seem to happen to me during such trips.