Back to London, here is the first of the drafts from my recent trip I couldn't post due to random macbook death.
Here we are, after a day of "decompression" (which for my workaholic ego means enjoying a day in a bank's headquarters hammering some code), and back on the road. This time destination is Paris: woohooo, ullallà, la Seine, les etoils, la Tour, Notre Dame (hunchback included) and so on. Even les lapìns nowadays. The official reason is the symposium for the 10 years of Sony CSL in Paris.
First thing I have to say: if you plan coming to London, consider doing it by day with the Eurostar or by night landing at Heathrow: both are quite awesome experiences.
The funny thing that's happening now as I'm cruising through London is grabbing bits and spare signals from dozens of wifi networks. Obviously you can't hook to any of them (trains run fast), but the simple fact of being able to "glance" at such a rich plethora of ssid gives me the feeling of an invisible landscape made of microwaves: it's the broadcasting landscape, that more than everything else could (if properly visualized) show us how much communication and media evolved during the last few years, from a hardcore monolithic/one-way model to a complex ecology of voices.
It's like moving from a lighthouse driven navigation to a crowded bazaar where you can either ask your way through it, follow the signs (and hope they have not been vandalized/falsified) or being lead by the loud voices promoting the goods (these are the lighthouse equivalent in this metaphor).
Anyway, back to Eurostar: it's a really interesting geo-social feature, potentially could lead to the perception of a unified entity formed by the London and Paris sprawl... if only it didn't have that airplane nuance.
Getting in Waterloo international station and having to: check-in, go through passport control and security checks really ruins the magic. This physical, real link between the isle and the continent is sadistically broken by this overdose of bureaucracy. Other things you'll notice emerging in France are:
- how "straight" the rails are (no, really!)
- Trashcans in stations (hooray!)
- London has double deck buses, Paris has double deck trains (in the Metro)
- Le Courbusier should be forced to dismantle his houses: alone, by hand, brick by brick.
