England - London

   England!  London and the area around it houses 8 million people!   We took a 50 minute train ride on the TUBE, as Ronald Jenkees would say-  "Hey tubes!".  The Tube is an underground railway that is super efficient and allows you to get all around London very easily. It was funny getting used to all the little changes of wording like "Mind the gap", which means watch your step, and "Would you like chips with that", which means do you want french fries (and chips were sticks), etc etc. James met us at the station, and we had a 10-minute walk to his place.  After dropping our bags off at James' place we headed to Picailly Square - like Times Square for London but not AS crazy lit up.

 We walked around checking out statues and ridiculously large building that curved forever:

    In moving towards the long stretching building with British Flags, we happened to pass by a club that had a girl with a hoola hoop on fire twisting around her hip.  So of course we had to enter.  Inside were crazy chandeliers and felt like a cross between an elegant mansion with a bit of Moroccan spice.  Upstairs had a bit of African flavor and a ton of little benches and stools.  Dancers were dancing around and the music was super loud, which ended up pushing us out and onto other things.  Like for instance buying Coldplay tickets for Saturday night!  Or, for instance, Sushi with James.  We met up and he took us to his favorite Sushi restaurant.  The food was good, and the selection unique and entertaining with the way they brought out so many dishes, it seemed like one dish every 2 minutes for 20 minutes.  But, alas we had to get home because we had to leave at 7am for a Jujitsu tournament in the morning.  Sleep it was.

    By the way being around James was like old times right away again and we could walk around talking for hours at a time and not even notice where the time went.  It was fun to see him being able to get to know Candace more and such as well.  Back to Jujitsu though -

  At this event there were close to 100 vendors for martial arts, arm wrestling tournaments, body building competitions on stages, fencing, boxing, gymnastics, swords, tae kwon do, and more…  Cool as heck to walk around and see the Cluster of stuff happening.  Though 80+% of our time was spent watching Jujitsu and anticipating (almost 3 hours) James' first fight.  He ended up winning the 1st two fights and then, the closest fight of the day with the dude who ended up taking the Gold Medal.   James lost 5 points to 4, and he had "Advantage" at the end.  On top of that, James had the champion in a lock and the winner said in another 5 or 10 seconds he would have tapped out.  Oh well, Silver medal will have to do ;)



    Afterwords we got BUBBLES TEA, which was like nothing I've had before.  The tea was great, but Inside the tea were two types of bubbles.  One bubble was like a gummy chewy one while the other was like a pop-type bubble that exploded, all the while your straw is large enough to draw these "bubbles" through it.  Super yummy and good and I'm slightly jealous we don't have them in the states yet that I'm aware of.



    Then we checked out Chinatown area and headed back home.  Time for Coldplay!  It was funny as I kept playing random Coldplay songs off my phone for Candace so she could remember what they played and the whole time as I played each song she was like - oh, they do that?  Oh - that one too? etc etc.  I was pretty excited to see them, and not just that but to see them in their hometown of London that they grew up and started in added to the excitement.  The concert was awesome!  Every song had amazing effects.  Every song was spot on.  On top of that, the comments inbetween songs, the exact verbiage, was powerful - whether it was at the beginning being genuinely grateful for peoples time, to recognizing the audience, addressing the rain and other issues of the night, and generally just making the audience feel special, it was brilliant crowd management and more than that.
 

    Then we metup with James and Randi at home around about midnight and headed out to a club that their friend and other DJ's were spinning some music at (drum & bass, electronic, etc).  Super interesting seeing the laser show at the venue and all the crazy people there, most of which were on something or another.

     After James had 3 redbulls and we felt like leaving, we headed back for some late night youtubing of honeybadger and Ronald Jenkees around 5am

    Sunday everything was closed because of the holiday - the Queen's Jubilee.   Celebrating Elizabeth's the II Reign of over 60 years as monarch of England, of which only one other Monarch has done (which was 63 years).  Plus with it being Super rainy all day, "miserable" as James put it, we kinda just chilled out a bit - Randi took Candace to go Antiquing down a really cool strip she knew about.  Candace saw some cool Jewelry and souvenirs, while James and I went to eat and then saw MIB 3.  The movie was just OK, so we headed back to hang out and to watch a more epic movie.  I know most of you SHOULD be able to guess what that is, my new favorite 80-minute movie, part of which I used to wrapup RDC this year, The Art of Flight, for like my 10th time =)  Epic as always.  Just like the next day:

    MONDAY we made a touristy day!  Out we went on the town taking the Tube to London Bridge.  After walking across the bridge, which didn't fall down!, we bought a Tour Bus ticket which afforded us the ability to tour all of London's sites on a bus and included a River Cruise.   Before we hopped on the bus, we started a walk from London Bridge to Hill Bridge, which we actually were gazing at when we were ON the London Bridge and happens to be WAY cooler looking than London Bridge (which was flat and boring But DOES have history =)
London Bridge:

 Hill Bridge:

    From Hill Bridge we took the Rivercruise down the Thames River.  The cruise was nice and the commentary great & humorous, even talking about his engagement on the top of the London Eye (A huge wheel right off the river Thames that is the tallest viewing spot in London, looks like a carnival wheel.
Tallest building in London:

London Eye:

      There is a ton of history along the River Thames, the most interesting to me was the fact that the whole south side was rather destroyed because during WWII bombers at night came in and followed the river bombing alongside it.  Even if the city lights were completely off, the moonlight still shimmered unfortunately along the Thames..  The north side has since been built up and historically restored.  We saw an Egyptian spire which is the oldest piece of architecture in London, unfortunately the Sphynx's are facing the wrong direction and admiring the spire rather than protecting it =). 

We also got an interesting view of the Parliament building, a ridiculously large, old, and beautiful building along the river.  I had to go nearly across to the other side of a bridge later to actually get a shot in its entirety.

   After the River Tour we engaged the bus adventure tour and hopped onto the multi-level bus.  The top part of the bus was uncovered so thats where we headed for the best view.  We had to bundle up because it was a bit chilly, but as the bus moseyed along we learned a bit about and at the same time captured pictures of St. Pauls, Trafalgar Square, Hyde Park, Hangmans Tree, The Royal Courts of Justice, Shakespeare's Globe, The Tower of London, Statues of Achilles, Genghis Kahn, Famous generals & admirals, and a sad lion…

    The admiral in the following picture earned his rightful place in the center of London through his legend.  He is centrally located on the spot that all distances are measured between stations, maps, and cities throughout Europe.  A battle between the English and the combined navies of the French and Spanish took place where the English Armada was outnumbered almost 3 to 1, but managed to sink over 30 enemy ships and turn the tide of the battle to victory as the Spanish and French retreated.  The admiral died in the battle, but his orchestration and plan worked so well that the English lost only one ship during the battle and turned back a force far massive than their own.  An epic victory, and possibly one of the greatest naval battles and overcoming of adversity in recorded history.

    For dinner we met up with James and ate at The Assembly House near the Tube stop.  Food was great.  When we got back we played a movie - Drive, which we downloaded overnight and was spurned by the fact that Jeremy Katan hooked me up with a song "Kavinsky - 01 Nightcall (feat. Lovefoxx)" that I played randomly the night before.  James had asked me "oh yeah, how did you like the movie?".  I said "what movie?".  Drive.   Cool movie.  Bit gory towards the end, but otherwise super original, good music, and interesting story with an open-ended ending leaving the viewer to their imagination.

    TUESDAY - Today was a day where James and Randi started out with us and decided to show us some stuff.

  We hit up the Tower of London and saw the inside - HUGE.  PS The area where you see the tents used to be a moat filled with water about 7 feet deep.  The "Tower"/Castle I'd call it, is shaped overall like a big square, so what you see of this picture is not even half of one side of the square.  Those are people on the bridge on the right hand side for perspective.

   Used as a backup castle to take a King or Queen running away from enemy attack and house them for a time or siege (though ended up not being effective sometimes for several reasons), the castle was quite large and held a massive armory as well in the center.

    Also here at The London Tower, The Crown Jewels were on the premise (a quite large display, but no pictures allowed).  The diamonds in these crowns just blew our mind, James included.  We couldn't even estimate the cost of a 530.60 Karat diamond… insane.  James and I plotted ways to infiltrate the place, but the best we could come up with would be to blow a hole in the castle wall - No way getting through the safe which was over a foot thick. Haha.   The rest of the premises were cool, and it was definitely fun to put yourself in the place of an English solder defending the castle from the ramparts and walls:

    From The Tower, we headed to St Pauls Cathedral.  It was massive and the bells were ringing loud when we got there.  The Peoples church it was said to be was very well kept on the inside and was very different architecturally from the Cathedral in Dublin.  You can see James and I midway up the steps:

    After our little tour of the city, the idea was to go see Hamlet at The Globe, a Shakespearean theater that is modeled exactly after the theaters Shakespeare's plays were performed in back in the day.  No electronic audio amplification, seating the exact same, etc.  Unfortunately we booked tickets for the wrong day, and they were already booked until August.  So instead we headed back to James' house and Randi and him cooked us dinner.  Afterwords James and I went into the olden times with an SNES emulator and busted out one of the coolest games ever - Rock N Roll racing.  We proceeded to play, and yell, taunt and be very loud all the while the girls making fun of us the entire time.  Needless to say nobody could sleep with our antics going on, so we ceased and yet another day ended in London, England.  But not before playing a round of Eucher!  Guys vs Girls and an epic battle it was with guys down 8 to 2 and then coming back for the victory 11 to 8.  Afterwords, James Candace and I retreated to the other room while Randi went to dreamland.  We played an awesome game of 3-person Eucher. =)

    Wednesday Candace and I did a bit of research on Paris and got things setup to leave the next day.  We then headed out to the British Library where we were able to see some notebooks of William Shakespeare, the Magna Carta, some handwritten songs from The Beetles, some parchment from a super-ancient bible, and original handwritten workings of some of Da Vinci's architecture plans.  It was interesting learning about the Magna Carta (about 1000 years old) and the fact that it was it 1st time to define The Law as an entity that is separate AND able to make the King subject to Law (in the Magna Carta it was mostly dealing with Lords and deeds and estates and not the "unfree peasants", but the point is that it made it so that the King had penalty if he did certain things, the whole important concept of this document.  This, of course, eventually led to much more limiting of the Kings power in the future as this idea progressed of Law applying to all, even the King)

    After we got back home, I left for a Jujitsu class with James.  The particular training place James goes is fairly special, considering the teacher of the classes is Jude (don't remember last name), who was the 1st black belt in the United Kingdom for Jujitsu and trained under the Gracies, grew up in the sport with the son (who's father taught them both) who has dominated Jujitsu worldwide for 8 years and has been unbeatable.  Jude is also a Thai fighter and is a black belt in 2 or 3 other martial arts.  When I stepped into the class, Freddie, one of the guys I sparred with who was about 3 years in, pointed out all the ridiculous fighters around me that were practicing; From BJJ, internationally ranked kick-boxers, wrestlers that were gold Medalists, championship boxers, etc etc, all learning Jujitsu.  I must say I haven't been so exhausted from a workout in almost 5 years since my Bike trip..  It takes more endurance than Soccer, Hockey, Rock climbing, anything I have done.  I could barely move my hands into a fist by the time I was halfway through the hour sparring portion that came after the hour warmup and training.  I also got to spar with Jude, which was my favorite person to go against.  Cool experience and now James is looking to see if he can find anyone reputable in PHX that I might be able to train with. 

    In the morning we left for Paris, France!  I'm now in a Spanish Tapas restaurant near the apartment we are renting for $110 a night through AirB&B.  Gotta love Air B&B.  Gotta love travel.  Gotta love being in a restaurant right now where you can only point at things on a menu and can't ask a single
question, but still get good food.  Gotta love life.  Cheers, talk soon,

Jason & Candace