Bay Area Friends of Europe - The Movie

This is Geoff Lewis's, who is the man behind the Bay Area Friends of Europe, little video about the group. I think it is rather cool, although there is no interview with me as I wans't there that day. My friend Daphne is, from memory, the second interview - she is the one taking about what she misses most about the UK is British sarcasm.

The Link Ups with the Beatles Kareoke

I just came over these little video files taken with my Leica camera when I just bought it, so I thought I'd share them with You Tube and the world, as they bring back happy memories.

This was a really fun party. For a while Bay Area Link Up (www.bayarealinkup.com) had a number of musical events and people were asked to bring instruments along. This morphed into a band called the "Link Ups".

This was a party we had in San Francisco on the 16th of December 2006 at Fort Mason. I was there with my little Turkish friend, you can see her dancing around near the backing vocals mike in the videos. I had a beer or two and decided that I would sing backing vocals all night.

I remember a particularly dodgy solo version of "House of the Rising Sun", well the beginning of it, before I forgot the words. Hapilly, I can't easily sing and take video at the same time, so my performances are in the dustbin of history where they belong.

In case you are wondering what these songs are meant to be, they are "Happy Christmas, War is Over", well it was Christmas after all, and "Rocky Racoon".

Back in the land of the living (almost)

Having managed to go to India and back in a week and covering three different Indian cities when I was there, I had quite a contrasting week last week, in that I only managed a brief and unmemorable trip to Menlo Park, but apart from that I didn't leave the apartment at all from Monday night to Friday night. I feel like the rest did me good, but still can't completely shrug off this bloody cold virus.

I have been busy re-creating www.kirkcaldybands.com using Dreameaver this weekend. Dreamweaver is a very complex web creation and site management tool and I've only mastered a tiny amount of its functionality. However, I think the new site is looking good. It'll probably be next weekend until I have it in a state to upload and replace the rather tatty looking Rapidweaver version (or rather, it looks tatty now compared the new version).

I was at the Ex - Pat European's club in San Francisco today, although it's now been re-branded "Bay Area Friends of Europe". It was good fun and I finally met someone from the same country as me, an Aberdonian no less. It was the very first time that, when I had that sinking feeling in my as I was asked one of the "stock" questions that I always get asked - "which part of Scotland are you from", that I had finally met someone who would know where Forfar was!

Geoff Lewis, who is the brains behind Bay Area Friends of Europe (or BAFoE), is pictured in the middle of the group above. Erdem from Turkey is on the right.

Friends of Europe Sunday

I was at the Friends of Europe meeting on Sunday. I've been going here around once a month since November 2005. The organisation started just at the right time for me, when I was looking for ways to meet new people.

Click here to check out
The Bay Area Friends of Europe!

This is run by a guy from England called Geoff and he has put together a website to publicise the group - www.bafoe.org

I took a load of photos, which Geoff has uploaded, you can see them here:

http://euro.meetup.com/80/photos/?photoAlbumId=175085&photoId=1567419

This was the biggest, in terms of the number of people we had there, ever. Loads of people from different countries.

South Bay Veggies in San Mateo

I didn't get too much time to spend at the zoo though, as a friend was hosting a lunch for the South Bay Veggies. This was up in San Mateo and was pretty easy to get to from the zoo.

Despite never having enjoyed the term "veggie", I've been one since March 1986, when I discovered what cheap sausages were made out of and how many cute girls were vegetarian.

This was a really nice day and I met some interesting new people.



We also had a good old wander round San Mateo and I found this huge store called Draegers, with a large UK foodstuffs area, much better that Safeway. They had brown sause, Safeway has not had that for months.



Also some rather nice chocs, I didn't buy any. San Jose is pretty big and spread out, so it's nice to be able to visit a downtown where you can easily walk everywhere.