Thames River Festival

Grace and I took the day to head down to the Thames river to enjoy probably the last day of good weather for eight months. There is a big festival on this weekend around the Thames and, it being free, it sounded like the perfect event for us.



For me, I was particularly interested in two things.

1 - Fresh fried donuts
2 - The traditional boat race

Fresh fried donuts are delicious, but I can only ever find them at festivals. They are a priority at any festival - in fact, they are reason enough to go to a festival. We found some and settled down on the river to wait for the boats.



They were supposed to start coming at 3:00, and I had no idea what to expect. Apparently there were a lot of boats. More than 200 I think. They were on a 22-mile race.

Anyway, we waited, and waited, but no boats came. And the donuts were not as good as we've come to expect. A first time for everything. At 3:30 we gave up on seeing the boats and went wandering.



What's a UK street without living statues?




On the course of wandering around we heard from one of the stages this really cheesy DJ. But as we passed by, we realised it wasn't a cheesy DJ, it was one beatboxing guy, making all the noises with his own mouth (and throat and everything). We started to listen, and before long we were hooked on 'the Petebox' (get it?).

He started out simple, and cheesy.



Then, he showed how he could perform vocals and lay down a beat at the same time.



I was impressed. Grace was impressed. We kept watching. Next he showed how he could use pedals to loop his vocals (record them and then have them repeat over and over). With that, he could make layered songs, with recordings of himself backing himself up. And he did just that.



When he finished up, we went to a cafe to use some free wireless to download some stuff for Grace's computer, and then left to spend a half hour at an art exhibition in the National Gallery Grace wanted to see (it's on "Love").

On the way to the museum, we finally saw those boats.



When we got to the museum, we were extremely confused. The exhibition on love seemed to feature mostly portraits of old white guys looking straight out. There was one of a monk contemplating death. We were scratching our heads a lot.

Then we realised we were in the wrong room.