Hideaway festival

Things happening...

Last week I attended a festival in a massive warehouse in Seven Sisters. hideaway festival is called. People actually live there and they use the place for gigs and all kind of artistic performances. They offered me an indian welcoming tea and they also had  prepared tasty home made food for the party...I was really impressed to see that we were at least 200 hundred people there?!?!  There were all kind of creative people on dreadlocks and ponchos,  singing, dancing, playing music... among them one good friend of mine, who is a writer and that night was a great comedian-story teller. I am really looking forward to the next one.

These are my blackberry photos of the night  (taken the first two hours....out the 9 i spent there!)also a video of the second performance :-)

The farm

London has so many things to offer. I simply adore this city. This is a farm 5 minutes walk from Columbia flower market in Brick Lane.

En un radio de un km uno puede encontrar la granja y la ciudad en perfecta simbiosis :-)

Again sorry for the bad quality of my photos, I dont have a good camera at the moment but hopefully in some months time I will have some savings to get one!

I guess after a walk through the farm there is always place for a good typical english chicken roast!

Enlightenment

British Museum. 

There is a magnificent room containing an exhibition about  the Age of  Enlightment (18th century), a time when people used reason and first-hand observation of the world around them to understand it in new ways.

There is a section in the room that talks about ancient scripts. The search for knowledge about the past led to renewed interest in deciphering the mysterious forms of Egyptian hieroglyphs, Sanskrit and cuneiform. This scholarly activity eventually led to the "cracking" of their codes in the early 19th century, and thousands of years of history were opened up to research. 

The most important piece discovered: the Rosseta Stone, carved in Egypt in 196 B.C and found by the french in 1799.

Its written in 3 scripts:

Hieroglyphic: the script used in Egypt for important documents.

Demotic: the common script of Egypt.

Greek: language of the rulers in Egypt at that time.

After many years of studying the Rosetta Stone and other examples of ancient Egyptian writing, Jean-François Champollion deciphered hieroglyphs in 1822. :-)

Today I have been reading about the smog in London. Smog: combination of the words smoke and fog.

The thick fog was usually a mix of pollution from coal burned to heat homes and pollution from factories. These came together to create a toxic mix of sulphur dioxide and combustion particles.

During a week of smog in 1873 killed over 700 people in London. However, the largest air pollution disaster in Britain was the Great London Smog of December 1952 which killed approximately 4,000 people.

Smoke pollution, 19th century

Cartoon commenting on the pollution of the Thames, 1858

London, 1930s, image from The Guardian Archives

This reading has inspired me to draw.