A Very Special Jonadams Post

I promised I'd write up a post, so here it is! It's a bit of my time at Google in London, and a bunch of other thoughts.

I worked at the Google office by Victoria station for a week and a half so I wouldn't need to take any unpaid vacation. I sat near the Docs/Drive Android team - they were very welcoming and friendly! They also had an adorable giant stuffed dragon as their team mascot, which made it easy to find my desk. While I was visiting I learned a bit about Android app development, which I thought was fitting given the team I sat near. The building also has a cute indoor tiny park with a skylight, some trees, and a little boat to sit in.

I ate at most of the cafeterias across all the 3 Google offices. Yes, I do miss the fresh sushi from the NY office, but all the offices had good food. The building I worked in (BEL) had a fire a few years back when barbecuing, so their cafe is appropriately named Pudding Lane, a reference to where the Great Fire of London started - complete with flames as wallpaper. We ate there occasionally, but we often went to the Google office across the street (123) for a better selection. The third Google office that Hannah and I went to (CSG) had the most varied and best tasting food of the three, and even some good sushi being rolled to order!

The London office is much more serious about its tea, with a wider variety and loose tea leaves in the microkitchens. I discovered a new delicious cereal in the microkitchens too - Crunchy Nut! It's a nuttier sort of Frosted Flakes but with honey, and I've never noticed it in the states, but I'll have to look for it now.

I also discovered two amazing desserts during the trip:

• Honeycomb ice cream - why is this not more popular in the US? It's got little crunchy honeycombs in it!
• Milhojas, which we found at the amazing tapas place Barrafina. It was a flaky pastry filled with light fluffy cream, and I want to always be eating it.

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One thing that took some getting used to was the different keyboards. I picked one up for the l desk I borrowed, not realizing what was in store. There's a \ (backslash) key where half of the left shift key should be, so every document I was in ended up with stray slashes.

The enter key is taller but narrower, and " (double quotes) claim to be in a different place but my computer just pretends they're where they were before, which was confusing if I ever looked at the keyboard while typing. There's also an "Alt Gr" key which I had no use for because I never had to type €. (the Euro sign)

I printed our train tickets from Paris to London using a French laptop, which was even more frustrating. Their keyboard layout is called AZERTY, with A/Q and Z/W switching places. The most ridiculous part was that you need to use shift or caps lock to type in numbers or a period! I did not notice the numpad on the right until after typing the numbers.

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I like how there's only some small differences between US and UK English. It made talking to people during our stay much simpler, but was different enough to still surprise me even after a month. People say "cheers" a lot, but I just kept saying "thanks". Also, we never asked for the "bill", and kept asking for the "check" instead, and they seemed to know what we meant.

Some of my favorite Britishisms were:

“poorly” (the adjective), meaning unwell

(the iPads used for ordering items at an Argos were all out of order)

"mind that child" which appears at the back of ice cream trucks

orange juice with “extra juicy bits" instead of pulp

and “fruiterer”, which appears to be someone who sells fruit

Also on the Tube, I found some new ways of saying exit. The announcer says "Alight here for Buckingham Palace" when approaching the station near it, and signs pointing to the exits read "Way Out". Once as I left a Tube station, a sign reading "Subway to Museums" confused me until I realized that a subway was just an underground walkway here.

We did not get used to the lack of proper shower curtains in Europe, and ended up buying our own for the flat. I don't really get how people shower here without getting water all over the floor, since the barriers tend to only go halfway.

(not our flat, I borrowed this from elsewhere on the internet)

The most ridiculous part of our stay was definitely when our hot water stopped working twice, and I had to pour water into the top to fix it. There's an extra container at the top of the boiler that is apparently vital to the boiling process. It definitely seemed like something that should be done automatically.

London is a lot like NYC with respect to public performances - people playing music, acrobatic feats like jumping over volunteering tourists, scamming people with the shell game, but there were a few notable acts I hadn't seen before. My favorite were:

• Three puppets singing "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" slowed down to half speed

• Various metallic dudes and possibly some Yodas pretending to float in place using a seat hidden in their sleeve

• and someone playing a tuba with flames shooting out at every note.

I enjoyed the British love for orderly queueing:

And their constant commitment to politeness:

But silly signs aside, I really enjoyed our time in London, and hope we get to visit again in the future!

- Jon