A couple of weeks ago David from Malta was at a conference in London and with phones running out of credit and communication through his wife back home we managed to meet up in central London one evening. David is a thoughtful guy – as you can tell from his blog – and I always enjoy talking to him about politics, life and anything in between.
The week after we had another blogger passing through. This time it was Karen from Wisconsin. She had to leave Prague prematurely due to visa issues but was heading back to try again. On the way back to Prague she was making her way through Europe and London was the first stop. We had some entertaining days with Karen who was excited to be here. Here she is at Covent Garden with a Jack Sparrow look-a-like (and smell-a-like).
This weekend we again should thank a blogger for the entertainment. At the Blogger Meetup in February there had been a competition for rugby tickets and although we didn’t win (Ann got really close). However Peter – one of the winners – wasn’t going to use his tickets and gave them to Ann. I was soo excited about the chance to see a rugby game and had been looking forward to it for weeks. But yesterday as we were starting to get ready to get out the door we couldn’t find the tickets… We looked everywhere and got the room cleared out but the tickets didn’t appear.
I grumped about the lost tickets for a couple of hours but luckily enough we had an alternative event to go to. Instead we went to The Barbican for a show called the The Manganiyar Seduction where a group of 43 folk musicians from Muslim region of India was sitting in boxes as they played. A very impressive show as you can see in the clip below – but still a poor replacement for a rugby match.
Anyways big thanks to Peter Marshall for the rugby tickets, that was a nice gesture. He blogs about photography at Re:Photo and writes about the many protests and walks he photographs in My London Diary. Peter has been walking around London taking pictures since the 70s and has some really interesting stories and observations.
One of the things I love about being here in UK is the hand pumped beers or cask ales as they are also called. These are unfiltered and unpasteurised beer that are not drawn from the kegs or containers by carbon dioxide but instead by hand pump or gravity. In UK you just have to look for the Cask Marque sign and you know the pub serves some good, traditional cask ale.
If you go to the north of England you will get your pint like the one on the left, smooth and creamy. If you ask for a pint in the south you will get one like the one on the right, clean and crisp. The two pints shown are the same beer but poured in two different ways that produces slight differences in taste. There is more of an explanation here.
Thursday Ann and I went to the February edition of London Bloggers Meetup. The meeting was sponsored by Greene King brewery who wanted to show of their new beer engine that could produce both Northern and Southern style pints. The head brewer John Bexon was there with another guy to tell about the beers and explained how to taste a beer.
I enjoyed speaking to other bloggers and having a night out. The beer was very good I enjoyed both versions – and it was free which makes it even better. We had a great evening where we got away with goody bags filled with interesting beers from the brewery and tickets for a rugby game but more on that some other time.
I really feel old when i realize that something I thought happened recently happened 10 years ago. This is one of them.
10 years ago it was getting close to the Christmas break. I had finished high school six month earlier to work at a photo development lab to make some money. Previously I had made a website together with my dad for a couple of years but now I wanted my own domain so I could have my own website and email without having to use hotmail or any of the other free email services of that day.
In high school I had acquired the peculiar nickname Gelle among my friends and since it was short and I couldn’t think of anything else I picked that. Not that I really like the word – it looks and sound a bit like gele but I got it now, it’s fairly unique and it’s my username on most websites if I can get it.
The first thing I was really using the site for (except for a page of quotes about beers) was to write about the preparations before, and keep friends and family update during, a trip to USA for 3 month in 2000.
I have lost the actual updates I wrote during the trip and only the shell of the site is left.
The first front page from 1999 is again lost in history. After I came back from US in summer of 2000 I started university in Aalborg and this became my for next couple of years. A collection of links to small websites I’d made for myself and friends.
In 2005 I was heading to US again, this time for an internship in Ann Arbor so I created the blog you are reading in April 2005 and started blogging in Danish about my upcoming trip.
Blogging became a habit with about a post a week which I try to keep up. About a year and a half later I was back in Denmark and switched over to blogging in English.
The design of the blog has changed slightly every now while the tone of the blog has stayed more or less the same throughout the past 4 and a half years, I think. I have blogged a lot about place I have gone, things I have done and very little about my company, thoughts and reflections. And I think it will stay that way.
Who knows what will happen in the next decade but for some reason I doubt we’ll still be using domain names and URLs to find each other. If we do you’ll maybe find a strange 40-year-old(!) behind gelle.dk rambling about and taking pictures of whatever he comes across in his days.
