I went a private doctor last Thursday to get my bandage changed and learned the needles that are used to give jabs (shots) are called “sharps”. Thus, after giving a flu jab, the doctor is instructed not to throw the sharp in with the regular trash.

One of the things that Judie and I have noticed is that you never smell marijuana when you are walking around, which is very much unlike New York or other US cities. This is certainly a place with a drinking culture, but we both find it surprising, especially in a young, hip place like Shoreditch. Do the police crack down very hard on that sort of thing here? On the other hand, you do see people rolling their own cigarettes a lot in this neighborhood (more than in other parts of London). Maybe there is something in there in addition to tobacco?

Another thing you don’t see here are ads for Viagra and similar products, in contrast to the US, where you can’t watch sports on television for twenty minutes without being subjected to one. My British friends might contend that this says something about English men versus American ones, but I suspect it is probably more about the drugs being covered by National Health.

James arrived yesterday, after an endless, three-flight trip from Greensboro. The rest of the kids arrive during the week. Judie and I have been planning for this for months and are looking forward to the next few weeks.

I decided to some research about the building we are in. According to the Internet it was built around 1900 as a telephone exchange. It seems like a huge building for that, but I suppose that this was in the period when a human being would have to make the connection and this place was filled with operators. But that use could not have extended through the Twentieth Century, since I am sure that automatic switching took over by the 1930s at the latest. Fro the rest of the century, this must have been a nice structure in a fairly terrible neighborhood. Wikipedia refers to the building as an Art Deco tobacco works, so maybe that was its later use. The building led the gentrification of the area when it was converted into a residential building in 2000. (That would have been a great investment.)

Commercial Street (where we are) is a relatively new street for London. It was built in the 1830s to connect the east-west thoroughfare through Whitechapel to Spitalfields Market to the North. It was eventually extended up to the Shoreditch High Street. and when it was further connected to Old Street, it became a route to get around central London (which was actually the goal of the planners in the 1800s). It is now at the edge of the Congestion Zone. (In London, you have to pay a significant daily fee to drive in the center of the City.) This explains why there is a perpetual traffic jam outside our building until late at night.

Here’s an embarrassing way to join a museum: I decided to take James to see the last day of the Ai Wei Wei exhibit at the Royal Academy. But when we got there, the ticket taker pointed out that the tickets were for 5:00 AM (they had kept the museum open 24 hours for the exhibit’s last day and I’d read the website wrong.) But they agreed to credit us with the unusable tickets and let us in if we became members on the spot. Oh well. I like joining museums as a matter of principal and now our visitors can attend future exhibits….