The Olympics and the Whitechapel Bell Foundry

Hiya!  Me and some friends went to watch the Olympic opening ceremony at UCL.  They have a big screen set up there broadcasting from 10 am to 10 pm because they are one of the official partners or something like that.  They even get banners on the front of the portico!

During the opening ceremony, there was a flyover of the Stratford stadium by the Red Arrows (the Blue Angels of the UK).  We saw them on the tv, and then about thirty seconds later we heard the roar of their engines and I managed to snap the above photo before they went by.  Pretty neat!

The next morning, I went to Whitechapel to see the famous bell foundry!  I was nervous about taking the tube in case the Olympic / tourist crowd was nuts, so I spent about 50 minutes riding the Overground all the way through north London before dropping down into Whitechapel.  I was surprised, it wasn't particularly crowded, even on the part of the line that connected with the Olympic Park, so that was a pleasant discovery.  The Olympic Committee and Travel for London have been working for several months on a scare campaign and therefore nearly all schools and businesses are requiring their employees to work from home wherever possible.  Aldgate was like a ghost town when I was walking around!

Below is the bell foundry as seen from the side.  It shares a main road with the East London Mosque / Centre, and every time I have been there I have heard a muezzin singing a call to prayers, which is very cool.  There are also a lot of interesting clothing stores and Halal Fried Chicken shops along the street.  I like it during the day, but it is the only place in London that I've not been thrilled about by night, although the Royal London Hospital is only a few blocks away, so that's convenient.

Here's the bell foundry from the front!  There used to be two doors, but this smaller one is now used as the main entrance.  The foundry is London's oldest manufacturing company.  Trivia of the day.

Here are some unincorporated bells out for display.  By unincorporated, I mean that they do not belong to a set, but they would work well for a church that only needed one bell for their tower.

This is a Burmese bell that was sent to the foundry as scrap to melt down, but they set it aside and kept it.  Close call!

The foundry had two locations before they found their current digs.  They started up by Aldgate and moved around there twice before shifting a few blocks to Whitechapel, where they set up in an old inn, the Artichoke.  This photo is from the inn's courtyard, and the lead water tank remains where they found it, perhaps a little more colourful!

Although the tour was not supposed to be guided, the employees were all very friendly and so I got to pester quite a few to ask them what they were doing.  The man below is coating the inside of a cast with loam.  Once he has built up enough, he will spin a frame / pattern (sorry, I don't remember all the technical words) around to make sure the loam is traced perfectly, at which point the whole cast will be upended and placed over an interior mold that has undergone the same process.  The outer and inner casts, once fitted, will have a space in between where the molten mix of metal can be poured.  {/\} <- dunno if that visualisation helps you or not, haha.

Below, the pattern for Big Ben on the far left, and two of its accompanying bells.  Then, the next largest on the right is the pattern for the bell at the Olympic Stadium, and I have forgotten what the bell on the far right is, sorry!

Before I interrupted him, there was a man cleaning graphite off of the bell on the stand there, but he was more than happy to tell me about the other bells out on the floor.  In the back, you can see a number of bells that are part of a 14 piece set being made for a church.  The bell on the left in the front is a bell from the 1400s when the foundry first began operating, just in for some polishing and maintenance.  He showed me a number of clappers and how the design has changed through history.

Here are a few very old clappers and bells that are several hundred years old as well.

The next employee I came across was the handbell specialist.  He was very excited to hear that I went to an AGEHR (American Guild of English Handbell Ringers) event when I was a kid, but I didn't know any of the names he asked me about.  His job is to crack open the handbell casts, sort bells into sets, tune, polish, and fit handles and clappers on them, and then ship them off.

Here are some bells, post-tuning, in various stages of polish and leatherwork.

These bells he is just starting on, and they are fresh off the presses, so to speak.  He is working on finding bells that "sound" alike to put in the set above there.

There was an employee tuning a very large bell at the next station.  He and the handbell tuner had a bit of a rivalry, and the large bell guy jokingly tested one of the freshly tuned handbells and proclaimed it was several cents off of the mark.  He showed me how to read the machine on the left, but I'm afraid I didn't really understand it.  Basically, all of those red quarter circles have a little glowing line bouncing back and forth.  There's one reading for each note in traditional Western music, and every bell speaks with several tones at once.  Supposedly, when a bell is approaching specific frequencies, those dials will bounce more than the others, but I didn't really see it.  Every time I focused my eyes on one dial, it appeared to bounce more, optical illusion style.  My ears were telling me which ones I should be watching, but if I looked at their neighbours suddenly those would be more jumpy than the "correct" ones, so I gave up.  He said the bell on the apparatus in this photo weighs about 1.5 tons.  The scale isn't apparent here, but it came up to about my shoulders.  There bells are tuned by scraping off layers of metal from the inside, and you can see the device they use to do this sitting in the middle of the bell.

However, before they got fancy technology, bells had to be tuned by hand.  This bell is old enough that you can see where someone chipped away at the edge there to tune it.

They have an electric carillon / bell tree in the courtyard.  They played "Oranges and Lemons" for me as a demonstration, run from a computer.  I was really curious to see the notation / program they were using, but they were a bit puzzled and said they basically have a little chip that they insert in and then it plays.  Dang, I was excited for a second that I would be able to use my computer music training in real life, haha.

That's the end of my Whitechapel Foundry adventure!  Many thanks to Ruth for sending me to the foundry.  Give my best to the bell choir at 1st P!

Only one week until I get to go to the Olympics football semifinal!!!  I'm excited!

Cambridge!

Hello!  It's time for another update.  The last couple weeks have been fun.  It rained an awful lot but recently it has been really sunny, so it's hard to concentrate on sitting at a computer for so long!

For the 4th of July me and some folks went to a blues bar to watch a hot dog eating competition.  Despite the number of competitors, the competition was really quite pathetic!  They had thirty minutes, but the winning contestant only at 10.5 hotdogs!  What kind of American Spirit is that?!  Roy and I ate three each just watching them (we got hot dogs whenever the kitchen made too many so they passed them out quite frequently...they too overestimated the amount that the eaters could handle).  We accidentally beat several of the contestants while leisurely enjoying our free dinner.

I helped Sanjiv put together a gaming computer, which was fun.  He ordered all the components himself and they arrived box by box over the course of about a week.  Here you can see a massive cooling system for his graphics card.  You will NOT see a hard drive, because he got a fancy solid state one.  It is very small, as small as a cell phone, and so it is tucked away out of sight in this photo.

I bought these at the grocery store for £1.50 and three weeks later they are still blooming!  Nice!

On the way to Cambridge to interview a live coder.  I'll leave out his name because I don't want this post to come up in search results.  Looks a bit like Nebraska!

He let me play around with the environment he is developing. You can write a program to react to the fancy little device in the front.  In this case, he wrote it so that every time you press a button, the next chord or note of the piece (specific to each hand of the piano part) will ring out.  So in order to play the song you need to simply tap in the rhythm.  One hand at a time was fine, but try putting two hands together, I dare you!  It took me about three tries before I was able to play something somewhat recognisable, and I still wasn't trying to incorporate volume or phrasing!

The rest of the day I walked around Cambridge looking around on my own.  It is pretty small.  The colour of the stones and things reminded me of Bath.  The only part I didn't like was that they charged upwards of £6 to go into each "college's" grounds, so for the most part I just took photos of the outsides.  I had hoped that my backpack and studenty look would get me in, but alas!

A lot of the churches were free!  I went in quite a few just because of that, haha.

Bells!

I took a photo of this because it reminded me of the Ballad, haha.

I did pay to get into one college just so that I could see the Bridge of Sighs.  Looks like Hogwarts!

There's the Bridge of Sighs!

Around the back of the college were these super looking buildings.  The leaflet I got said that they were award winning and inspired a great deal of architecture, but I think they just look ugly.  Particularly when back to back with a castle-looking structure, below!

I sat next to the same lady on the bus coming to a from Cambridge.  She lives in West London but farther out than I do, and was still upset about the Olympics.  She hasn't been able to get tickets and has been inconvenienced by the tube work, etc, etc.  This is not an uncommon sentiment, haha.  I am surprised by how Big Brotherish the UK has gotten about the Olympics, actually.  McDonald's bought rights to the concept of "chips," so now UK shops within 10 km or something of Olympic events are not allowed to sell chips.  Unless they are a paying sponsor of the Olympics, organisations, individuals, pubs, etc, are not allowed to post the words "London, 2012, Olympics, sport, games, etc" on the outside of their building.  So if a pub wanted to advertise "Come watch the games," or "Tennis Finals Tuesday 8pm" they would be in trouble.  People have been making fun of the regulations quite a bit, and I've seen quite a few shops that put up signs saying "Watch the 2210 Olimpyc Gmes Here!" with a version of the Olympic rings underneath, perhaps as squares or smiley faces, etc.

Here is a photo of a giant banner across the way from St. Paul's celebrating the Queen's Jubilee.  It really is massive, it's hard to gain an idea of the scale.  There are huge Olympic rings hanging on the Tower Bridge too.

I have been trying to take photos of the neighbourhood for the yearbook that I'm putting together.  Here is a nice one of the church just around the corner.  Serene lent me her cool camera, so the shots look very crisp!

Last weekend we went to the Tate Modern Lates event for a silent disco.  The silent disco that I went to at the Science Museum was really awesome, but the Tate's was kind of lame.  We did get to pain a giant skull, though.  Sanjiv, Lakshmi and I painted the one on the far right in between the blue and gold, like 8 from the bottom.  Super exciting.  The polka dot one is Pep's and Maia's.  This is the second time I have been encouraged to paint skulls in London.  Weird.

Sanjiv got a couple of us tickets to see Batman yesterday and told us "Sunday, 8:40."  I agreed because I figured even though it was expensive, I wouldn't often get to see a movie in an imax.  Then I found out that Sanjiv had gotten us tickets for 8:40 am!  WTF!  So we all woke up early and went down the street to the imax, haha.  It was really huge.  When we walked in we found a big dining / reception hall that was serving breakfast quietly to nicely dressed folks.  Weird.  The imax itself was pretty grand too.  Lots of staircases and walkways with railings.  The lights stayed up for about twenty minutes after the show was supposed to start.  In the UK, I was aware that going to the "cinema" was a bit different -- assigned seats, outrageously priced, etc, but I was NOT aware that for £12 they would make you sit through 30 minutes of commercials for cell phones and cars.  I was getting pretty antsy by the time the trailers for movies finally started.  Batman was a good movie, I would recommend it, although it seemed pretty slow at parts.  Maybe it was because of how long I had to sit before it actually started!  I'm glad the only shows I went to were in Spain, where they were cheap!  Plus now I can see the Avengers again, and it will feel like the first time!  haha

Kofi had never been in a movie theatre before, so I think he was particularly surprised by the experience.  He said they have cinemas in Ghana but they are mostly benches sitting in front of a projection on a wall showing low budget movies from Nigeria.  Rarely can a theatre afford to bring in a big name movie or something, even if it is a nice cinema, so he had never gone.  He had never been to a symphony performance before either, so it was fun when we took him to see the London Symphony a few weeks ago.  Next up, we just have to convince him that girls are as smart as guys and can do math and science!  Although initially surprised, he has accepted the idea that girls can play football with guys (especially considering the unskilled efforts of the several of the less athletic guys in the house, haha), and the counter to his argument that "if women were as smart as men there would be more of them in the sciences" then "if black men are as smart as white / asian men there should be more of them in the sciences" seems to have given him pause.  I'm giving him a little time to mull that one over before Lakshmi and I start round two of Feminism Training.  It's interesting though, he considers himself to be a feminist, although I haven't figured out how, exactly. 

Kofi is a really good cook and has been showing me and Mariana how to make traditional Ghanian dishes.  One of them proved to be exceptionally good, but I was in a hurry so I crammed a bunch down and was out the door before I suddenly realised that I was crying a little from the heat.  Then I started sweating profusely, even though it was a cool night.  It took me a while to figure it out.  I had realised that what I was eating was pretty spicy, my lips and mouth were burning, but the reason I was suddenly feeling so ill was definitely because of the food!  It was so good, but I'll need to be careful if I eat it again.  I sweated and trembled and breathed fire for a good two hours while I was babysitting, and I was pretty worried I was going to have to lose my dinner too (which could have awoken the sleeping dragon child I was supposed to be watching).  I can honestly say I've never gotten the shakes from eating spicy food before, and I wouldn't recommend the experience.  I considered digging through their fridge for yogurt or cream or anything to help my sad plight, but since she hadn't told me to help myself I sat and suffered instead.

Pep left for Spain for a few weeks and he lent me his piano!  That means I can now torture my neighbour with three different instruments on a daily basis!  How very exciting.  I'm practicing Chopin but it sounds silly without a pedal.  I am gonna go now!  I am going to try studying in the backyard, although I don't know how successful I will be.  I feel like I need to take advantage of this awesome weather, though!

Keeping Busy

Hi!  I've been trying to find activities for myself to do that let me keep my sanity simply because otherwise sitting in my room all day researching is getting me down.

I got more paralympic tickets, this time for the medal matches of several judo weight divisions.  Should be pretty fun!  I'm going with a guy in my dorm who does a lot of judo and Brazilian jui jitsu, so he'll be filling us in on all the stuff that we don't know about the rules and things.

The Olympics and Paralympics are still a long ways off, though.  In the meantime, look who got another letter delivered to our house!

On Saturday, I went to a bar in Camden Town called the Blues Kitchen for a free show.  A band called the Spyders was playing.  The vocalist / rhythm guitarist had a little curl in his hair, Superman style.  Or Elvis style, we couldn't decide until he started singing and then we realized he was definitely channeling Elvis.  They had a few original songs but for the most part they did covers.  We accidentally ended up in the very front row -- I could have untied their shoelaces if I had wanted to.  It was fun because I got to watch their techniques, pedals, etc.  They did a lot of Johnny Cash, Elvis, 60s surfer dude hits, and other stuff and it was a lot of fun!  I meant to leave the bar at 11 or 12 so I could get some sleep, but I ended up staying out pretty late.

The next morning, Lakshmi and I got ourselves out of bed at the crack of dawn (which is even earlier up here than in Nebraska) and hopped on a bus bound for Victoria.  All the tube lines near my house were down for the day because they're trying to make sure they are tip top for the Olympics, but that means that it's a pain in the butt to get anywhere on the weekends.  We were volunteering for the Sunwalk, a breast cancer charity walk.  Free t-shirts, free hats, and a good way to spend the morning.  I was stationed at a traffic light right in front of Parliament, so I fielded more questions from tourists than from the walkers!  Most of the people in the walk were only wearing bras, decorated with feathers and beads and things, including the men!  At some point an armed forces truck was waiting at the light and some of the male walkers gave them a bit of a show.  "Hey fellas!"

During the walk, I also saw the horse guards go tramping past!

Lakshmi, me, and the other guy on traffic light detail demonstrating our "STOP!" pose.

After the walk ended, we went to Trafalgar Square to see what kind of festivities were going on for Canada Day.  I went in search of maple syrup and all I managed to find was poutine.  Still better than nothing, I guess?  We observed a minute or two of a hockey game as well!

On the bus ride back we went down Oxford Street, which is very decked out at the moment.  Regents Street is equally decked out with all the flags from different countries.

Sunday night was the big game, Euro Finals, Spain v Italy.  Naturally, I was rooting for Spain.  The game started out fun, but then the more goals Spain but in the sadder I began to feel for poor Italy.  You can see the dismay on some people's faces (I was one of the few supporting Spain in our group).

Tomorrow I'm going to a hot dog eating competition to celebrate the 4th of July.  Dunno if I'll take part in it yet or not.  The record in 19 dogs in 30 minutes, which I think I could probably go for but I'd feel mighty sick, and I don't particularly want to spend tomorrow tossing up mushy buns.

I'm also going to help Sanjiv build a computer tomorrow.  I'm pretty excited.  We put together a few parts the other day, but the majority of the components are coming in the mail tomorrow!  Yayyy party!  Anyway, talk to you later!  : )