#64 London

Man am I exhausted. 12 hours of air travel both ways and two days of late nights at pubs is tiring. The Sanderson, where I stayed, is a beautiful, but expensive hotel in a very cool part of London called Soho. The decor reminded me of the end of 2001. There was plenty of shopping near the hotel. I found some cool stuff (I'm Alan Partridge and League of Gentlemen DVDs and the two recent issues of the excellent video game magazine Edge) at HMV, Virgin, and WH Smith. I ate at Pret A Manger again (I love those sandwiches) and found an excellent hip-hop record shop called Mr. Bongo, which has a really nice latin music department in the basement.

Nokia's presentation was impressive. They made their pitch on a series of boats on the Thames, showed us the device while we sipped champagne on the London Eye then let us booze it up at a club called Motion. Even though the fine folks at Nokia bent over backwards to make us happy, the highlight of my trip was simply meeting the other journalists. I shared drinks with folks from IGN, Men's Journal, Happy, Loosie, YRB, Gamespot and TechTV just to name a few. I'm beginning to feel that quitting my job was a smart move.