I just got back from London today, and… what a city! Hugely diverse, an amazing mash-up of cultures, fun, and food packed in a funky city. I took the time to visit (of course) the Tate Modern (an totally amazing building by the way), and a cool exhibition of Banksy in there. It’s crazy to see how good his marketing scheme is, but rest assured he certainly is sipping Pina Coladas somewhere in the Bahamas. It’s not that I think he wouldn’t deserve it, because I love his stuff and I definitely think he’s an amazing artist (and certainly one of the most sharpened one in today’s art world), but when I see the prices of his stuff it makes me a little dizzy…
The Royal Society Building in London
Other than that, my impression of London it’s that it is a very “bricky” city. I mean everywhere you see bricks… I thought that the brick houses were just a cliché, but it’s totally true.
Bricks, bricks, and other bricks..
I loved walking around randomly in soho streets, crazy mix of restaurant and bars and clubs, and especially LOTS of TOTALLY amazing BILBs (Bookstores I’d Like to Buy) filled with freakish design and artsy books which usually hurts very bad my credit card.
Bars in Soho
Finally, I attended this amazing meeting on the last two days (see previous post), and took lots of notes that I’ll post here very soon, just once I’ll make them human-readable. The discussion was quite interesting by the diversity of the speakers and their thoughts on ubiquitous computing. There weren’t very “new” things but more perspectives from “non-ubicomp” people. I’ll put very soon the different talks online, and as some of the talks were much more interesting to me and related to my work, I’ll put them in independent posts with my thoughts on them, while the other will be just a bunch of notes I took and I don’t feel like spending hours just to make a post out of each (not that they don’t deserve, but it’s just that I have several other things in my mind for now).
So stay tuned!
