Wrapping up on London

Out of all of the places I've been I have found that London is the most challenging place to write about. Maybe it's because I didn't have as much free time to explore, maybe because the whole week "Smile" was my number 1 priority, but whatever it is I just didn't find time to finish a second blog entry when I was there. So here I am, back in the states, attempting to describe the rest of my London experience.

To begin let me properly describe Brixton. In simplest terms it is the ghetto of London. Not that ghetto mind you, but at certain points you might be offered drugs and it's not advised to make eye contact with people on the street. But besides that the area is really nice and diverse. There is a market that serves all kinds of food. Funny thing is that in London I've eaten nearly everything but London food. I had Jamaican, Chinese, Mexican, Brazilian, Japanese, Italian, and KFC and only had a proper English meal twice (once for Fish'n'Chips before Inception and second for an English Breakfast at Heathrow airport). Funny now that I think back that in my first blog entry I mentioned I would want to return to London. I definitely got my wish.

Back to where I left off, when I said that we only had one more day of shooting left I lied. As with all movies, time passed by a lot quicker than we could have hoped and we ended up shooting late into Saturday and even a bit Sunday morning. This sucked because we had to 1. Miss Field Day (an annual event in the park that's supposedly amazing), and 2. Miss our friend's BBQ (we didn't actually miss it, we just got back so late we needed to BBQ for ourselves and then ended up being to exhausted from a days work to make the trip out to East London). We still had a nice little wrap party at a pub/club or whatever it was that had a bar and dancing.

Saturday also included a lot of traveling to sights to get shots. I was incredibly happy that we shot the leaving scene at King's Cross cause I wanted to take a picture at Platform 9 3/4. To my dismay that platform is actually harder to find than just going between 9 and 10 and we had to move on before I could get a picture. But it was cool to see the station where they shot a few Bourne Ultimatum scenes.

Friday night was fairly fun as I got to meet up with Thomas (another friend from Cannes) and explore a different section of the city. Crazy thing about London is that every section of the city has everything you'd ever need. Even Brixton has it's own nightlife, parks, market, and movie theater. So yah traveling to other places usually means staying there for the night because there is just so much to do and experience.

Then came Sunday, finally wrapped on the movie and ready to relax. We started out meeting up with Greg's parents then going to the Arsenal game. It was actually a 2 game show with AC Milan playing Lyon first (Tie game) and then Arsenal playing Celtic (3-2 Arsenal which meant they won the Emirates Cup). Definitely an experience and I loved the atmosphere of the stadium. Much like baseball games they have a lot of rituals, but unlike Baseball games they have team specific chants and movements. It'd be hard to learn them all but I did learn one cheer "Ahh-rsenal". That's a great one.

Following the games we hit major people traffic that would put LA car traffic to shame. Instead of waiting forever for the Tube we walked to the next station and what sucked is that we were starving and we happened to walk on a street with all restaurants. We couldn't stop though cause we had to make it to the screening of Manhattan in Somerset Square. The Square, when we finally arrived, was an amazing location and we bought a lot of food and brought it in before hand. The movie itself I had never seen, and I thought it was quite good. Only thing was I definitely didn't agree with the Woody Allen 17 year old romance going on and the 17 year old was actually quite ugly imo. Anyways I digress, it was a great experience and it topped off an amazing week.

Monday consisted of getting up and going back to Heathrow where it all began, bringing my trip full circle. The flight back was nice, I flew on the biggest plane I'd ever been on and watched a lot of movies and read the feature script I was sent during London. I'm happy and sad to be back in the USA. Right now I'm just tired honestly though, and I wrote all of this in a semi-trance. So hopefully it wasn't too confusing. But I edited a rough cut of "Smile" today and it's looking great! Get excited to see it!

So that's it. Back from an epic European adventure to continue my career as a student and finish off the second half of summer. I have a wedding and a lot of movie making to look forward to (As well as gym and attempting to maintain my brilliant tan) but overall I'll be keeping myself busy don't you worry. It's inevitable that the depression of Europe will hit me but I have a new found 21-ness to look forward to and experience here in Cali. I'll be doing one more entry after this one summing up my whole trip and giving out awards so don't sign off just yet. Until next time.