The Day I Jumped In Regent’s Canal And Tried To Save My Wet iPhone With Uncooked Rice

There are plenty of ways for Americans to make a good impression in London. Scurrying into stores dripping wet, asking for large sacks of rice and zip lock bags isn’t one of them. I was enjoying a relaxing walk along Regent’s Canal after a visit to the Camden Lock Market in North London when, daydreaming, I tripped over a mooring post. I fell to the ground and my backpack, containing my Nikon D7000 DSLR camera and my iPhone, tumbled right into the canal.

It only took me an instant to realize that I needed to jump in the water to retrieve the bag and in my urgency, I didn’t think to ditch my wallet or take my shirt, pants or shoes off before taking the plunge. Recovering my bag was easy, but hoisting myself back out of the canal took some doing. And as I pulled myself out of the murky, smelly water, a small crowd had gathered to watch the spectacle, perfect theater for a Sunday afternoon.”You oh-roight, mate?” one man asked as I stood on the narrow walkway, dripping wet and feeling ridiculous.

“Nice day fer a swim, innit?” quipped another. Indeed it was a lovely day for a swim; 61 degrees with London’s characteristically ominous, fast-moving clouds.

A passing boat pulled over and a couple rushed over to me with a bath towel and a clean T-shirt. The man said the shirt was mine to keep and the woman helped me dry my camera and iPhone.

“You’ve got to find a sack of rice and fast,” the man said. “The sooner you get your electronics sealed inside a bag with rice, the better your chances.”

I walked back to the Camden Lock, my pants feeling oppressively wet and heavy, with water sloshing around in my shoes. I consoled myself with a roti at a Pakistani sandwich stall and the owner confirmed that I needed to find some uncooked rice and fast.

A South Asian clerk in the nearest supermarket I could find, eyed me warily as I asked for a big bag of rice and zip lock bags.

“Why are you all wet?” he asked.

I explained and suddenly he became interested in my quest.

“I have a wet iPhone too,” he said. “Let me know if the rice works, will you?”

He didn’t know what zip lock bags were, but we found the British equivalent along with a few small bags of rice. After I paid for the items, I crouched down in the corner of the store and put my camera and phone inside the bags, then began poring the rice over them. An over-officious middle management type in a short-sleeve shirt and clip-on tie came over to me, and in the sort of vaguely hostile way a store security guard might approach a homeless person, he asked, “What uh you doing there, sir?”

But thankfully my new friend rushed over to explain. “It’s OK,” he said. “He just took a swim in Regent’s Canal and is trying to save his gear.”

I returned to my apartment in Earl’s Court, still wet and smelling like something unpleasant dredged from the bottom of the canal. I rather liked my new T-shirt, but felt sick thinking that I may have just pissed away $2,000 worth of electronic equipment into an old canal. I heard different stories about how long I needed to keep my gear turned off and inside the bags of rice. Some said you needed just 24 hours, but others said 3-4 days. I was in town to cover Wimbledon but played it safe, resisting the temptation to snap photos of the All England Club for four full days. On my last morning in town, I nervously took my items out of the rice, like a teenager opening a slim-looking admissions letter envelope from their dream college.

The camera worked, but the iPhone was displaying gibberish. I took it to a cellphone shop on Earl’s Court Road and a Pakistani man named Akbar, who sat on a stool surrounded by phones and phone gadgetry, read my iPhone its last rites.

“This phone is dead,” he said, grim faced and stoic. “Very dead. I’m afraid there’s nothing that can be done.”

I felt a bit like a dog owner facing up to a grim diagnosis from a veterinarian. As I boarded a train for the brilliantly named tube stop “Cockfosters” I took stock of my trip. I was leaving town without a working phone but I had an unforgettable story to tell. And a new T-shirt.

24 Hours On The Dark Streets Of London

Walking near London’s 16th-century St. John’s Gate in the city’s East End, I was looking for an old pub called the Jerusalem Tavern early on a misty Saturday night when a young woman in a skin-tight miniskirt approached me with a question. I was about to apologize and say, “I’m not from around here,” when she pointed to her friend, who was wearing a dress with deep slits practically up to her waist on both sides, and said in a distinctive Cockney accent, “What do you suppose she’d be good for?”

She extended her right thumb and said, “I think a snog,” released the index finger while saying, “a wife,” and then flipped down the third, suggesting a possibility that rhymes with truck. I had just arrived in town after a sleepless night spent on a plane, followed by a layover in Germany and another flight west to London necessitated by the vicissitudes of using miles for reward travel, and I could barely process their accents or what was being asked. As I gave them a confused look, she repeated the question as her friend turned and looked away, horrified.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe all three?”

Samuel Johnson delivered the famous line “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford,” when America was but a year old. He’s still right. I’ve been visiting London intermittently for 25 years and there are always serendipitous encounters and new discoveries to be made. The city is always changing, always evolving and you need to keep going back to see what you’ve missed. On a recent six-day trip to London to cover Wimbledon, I had 24 hours to kick around town before the tournament started. I’d seen many of London’s most famous sights before so I set out to break new ground in one of my favorite cities.

Saturday

6 p.m. Bosphorus Kebabs in South Kensington

I’m always on the lookout for cheap eats in London and this place is a find. There are just a few tables, and you might have to wait, but the intimate setting gives you a chance to listen to the regulars bantering with the cooks.

“C’ah mon mate, don’t be stingy wit tha doh-nah, oh-roight now, that’s wot I’m talkin’ bowt,” said one obnoxious bloke, who’d clearly started drinking early on a Saturday.

I had the spicy Adana kebab, which was outstanding and came with rice, salad and bread for £6, a bargain by any measure in this pricey megacity.

7:30 p.m. Jerusalem Tavern

There are at least 7,000 pubs in London so to recommend just one is almost perverse. But a surprising number of London pubs offer just mass-produced beer and no craft beers, so even though there are pubs on nearly every block, it’s not always as easy to find good beer as you might expect. The Jerusalem Tavern is operated by London’s St. Peter’s Brewery, so it has great beer, plus atmosphere in spades.

It’s a tiny little place, with just three rooms and a row of wooden casks behind the bar. The tavern has occupied different sites in the neighborhood since the 14th century and the present building dates to 1720, though it’s only been a pub since the 1990s. I had a tasty pint of St. Peter’s Brewery Pale Ale and enjoyed something you never find in an American bar: quiet. No music, no TV, just the hum of quiet conversation.

9 p.m. A Stroll Through Shoreditch in London’s East End

London’s East End, once home to Jack-the-Ripper, has historically been the city’s gritty, working class underbelly. But in recent years, Shoreditch and other East End hoods have been transformed into the creative hub of the British capital. On the second longest day of the year it was still light out after 9 p.m. and swarms of fashionably dressed young people were lined up outside Cargo, a bar/restaurant with thumping dance music, while over at a bar called Kick on Shoreditch High Street, guys in French Maid costumes sang drinking songs and toasted each other on the veranda.

Shoreditch is filled with bars, restaurants, music venues and galleries, but it’s also a neighborhood that rewards aimless wandering, particularly on buzzing streets like Curtain road, near Rivington street, Bash street and Hoxton Square.

Sunday

8 a.m. Hyde Park

I like to start the morning with a long walk in a pretty green space and in London, Hyde Park is a serene and scenic place to start the day with a little exercise. Henry VIII appropriated this chunk of land in 1536 from the monks of Westminster Abbey to hunt deer and the place has been open to the public since the early 1600s.

I visited London for the first time as a 16-year-old and one of the few things I remember about the trip was a Sunday morning visit to Speaker’s Corner, where Londoners of all stripes can stand up on top of a milk crate and speak their minds. I was thrilled to learn the term “wanker” and various other bits of slang, much to my parent’s chagrin, so I was eager to experience the spectacle again after all these years. But alas, the speakers don’t get fired up until later in the morning, so if you want to take in speaker’s corner, stop by on Sunday afternoon.

11 a.m. Sung Eucharist at St. Paul’s Cathedral

Cross London’s Millennium Footbridge at 11 a.m. on a Sunday morning and you’ll be beckoned into St. Paul’s by the glorious chiming bells. The smell of roasting nuts fills the air as you cross the bridge, and even an atheist could enjoy the splendor of this magnificent cathedral, designed by St. Christopher Wren in 1675 on the site where a cathedral was first opened in 604. Stick around for the 11:15 a.m. Sung Eucharist to get the full experience of this magisterial place, which was the tallest building in London until the 1960s.

12:00 p.m. Tate Modern

Even if you don’t like modern art, walk back across the Milennium Footbridge after your visit to St. Paul’s and check out the sixth-floor café of this museum for spectacular views of the cathedral and the city. You can visit the permanent exhibits for free and the gift shop is also a great place to stock up on souvenirs. The highlight of my visit was an exhibit featuring the works of Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide, but I found many of the other exhibits best left for the Sprockets crowd.

1:30 p.m. Bánh mì Time

Take the tube to Goodge street and then walk west on Goodge between Charlotte and Cleveland streets to find this outdoor stand selling freshly grilled mouth-watering bánh mì sandwiches (beef, pork and chicken) £5.

2 p.m. Dickensian London

Walk up Cleveland Street, north of Goodge, to check out Charles Dickens’s first London home, now an apartment with six buzzers sandwiched in between Indian and Greek restaurants. (Look for the blue plaque.) And just one block north, check out the workhouse that gave him the inspiration for “Oliver Twist” across from the King and Queen Pub.

Then head east to the fascinating Charles Dickens Museum at 48 Doughty Street, where Dickens lived from 1837-9, writing “Oliver Twist” and “Nicholas Nickelby” in his mid-20s. Seek out American novelist Jennifer Emerson, an American writer who volunteers at the museum. She can tell you all about Dickens’s troubled childhood, complicated love life and nomadic tendencies. (Look for more on the Dickens Museum on Gadling soon.)

4 p.m. Camden Lock Market

Camden is a shopper’s paradise but the Camden Lock Market is also a great place for budget ethnic dining. The problem is choosing what to eat. I was temped by Portuguese cakes, fish and chips, Dutch pancakes, Polish kielbasa, Peruvian ceviche and Argentine burgers before I decided on a Pakistani chicken curry roti, which was outstanding. Don’t miss having a cup of the organic Ethiopian coffee; Ethiopian sisters Eden and Mercy roast the beans in a tiny little pan over a burner and they’ll tell you all about their coffee.

“People think coffee comes from Italy!” said Eden. “No! It comes from Ethiopia!”

Grab your cup of coffee and wind up with the day with a long ramble through the labyrinth of market stalls and then take a nice walk along Regent’s canal to burn off the calories.

WHERE TO STAY

On each of my previous visits to London, I stayed in hotels, but this time, I rented an apartment on Nevern Square, a stone’s throw from the Earl’s Court Tube stop via Trip Advisor’s Flipkey website. Hotel rooms tend to be small and expensive in London, and apartments aren’t cheap either, but at least you can stretch out a bit. For about the price of a mid-range hotel, I had a beautiful one-bedroom apartment that was fully equipped with a kitchen and a washing machine. Even better, the management company included use of a local iPhone, with free data, local calls and texting. It’s a beautiful neighborhood of handsome brick row houses, gardens and squares, handy and central for seeing all the sights, not to mention Wimbledon.

Shop London – where to go, what to get


One of the best things to do in London is shop. While prices may be steep, as £10 currently equals $14.92 (as of writing, via Google), there are a number of unique districts and stores you simply won’t want to miss — and a number of bargains at any price. In this article, I’ll talk about a few of my personal favorites — feel free to add more of yours below!

Carnaby Street and Newburgh Quarter

Carnaby Street is a legendary Soho street which showcases cutting-edge fashion artists from all over London and around the world. The address itself basically means “one of the next big things.” Naturally, a street grows into an area, and I’d include the Newburgh Quarter as part of the experience — it’s right there, so you’re a fool to do one and not the other. There’s also amazing food on nearby Ganton Street and several big open-air courtyards in the vicinity for hanging out and watching the trendy people go by.

The best way to do Carnaby Street and the Newburgh Quarter is to window shop and go inside when you like what you see. I’d recommend a visit to The Great Frog, the jeweler who has designed bespoke pieces for everyone from Aerosmith to Metallica as well as the Harry Potter movies, the quirky and delightful (and very stylish) Beatrix Ong, who hand-draws Alice in Wonderland characters on the walls of her eclectic shop, the promising generation of designers at Beyond the Valley (above) where neck ruffles rule and the mind-bending photography shop Lomography. If you’re thinking about buying at Lomography, keep in mind that they have a New York store, and it might be best to wait until you’re home to order, currency-wise.
%Gallery-86752%Shoreditch

Shoreditch is a hot area in London for many reasons, but to me, there are two things you must see:
1. Robots. ‘Nuff said.

2. Laden. Laden is a carefully curated showroom for young designers. The Brick Lane store, founded by Barry and Adele Laden, makes a point of not just selling clothes, but nurturing the up-and-coming designers. It’s a trendy place to have your clothing sold; even celebrities come and dig through the racks like the rest of us. Anna Friel was recently spotted in one of the designer’s vintage-style dresses. My verdict was that some designers were better than others, but the store definitely held surprises at every turn. You’re certain to find new, unique pieces at Laden.

Camden Market

Camden is London’s own little Amsterdam, where everything goes. Known especially for its goth scene, the Camden Market is full of strange little themed shops with all tights, all leopard print, all this, all that. If you’ve watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer more than twice, get thee to Camden Market, where ye shall find thy broheim. There’s a burgeoning steam-punk influence, as well, and a dash of Harajuku — all for rock-bottom prices.

Fortnum & Mason

Everybody talks about Harrods, but if you want to be a little cooler than that, consider Fortnum & Mason as your luxury food and gift shopping destination. Located right in the heart of Piccadilly Circus, Fortnum & Mason is a relatively small department store, but what they lack in quantity they make up for in quality. For example, it’s the only English-speaking store in the world (except for one other in Australia, which is far away) where you can purchase tights by Les Queues Des Sardines. If the style doesn’t get you, the history will; they’ve been there since 1707. Video here!

Portobello Market

Even if you’ve never been to the UK, you’ve probably head of Portobello Market. Well, there’s a reason for that. The reason is: it’s awesome. I spent a whole day just meandering down through the stalls, each one offering unusual things — a lot of it junk, much of it treasure. I ended up walking away with these two Antiques Roadshow candidates for £5 for the pair.

Even if they’re worth nothing, I couldn’t say no to the reproach on those faces. I also had a decidedly lovely lunch, including the most elegant-yet-true-to-its-roots serving of fish and ships I’ve ever had at Ground Floor, part of First Floor Bar & Restaurant, a cozy hideaway in the middle of the market madness.

Where in London do you like to shop?

This trip was paid for by VisitBritain, but the ideas and opinions expressed in the article above are 100% my own.

Photo of the Day (3/31/07)

Don’t ask me what it is about this particular photo that grabbed me after looking through this collection of London snaps taken by Teal Moss. When I look at the others they scream “London, London!” When I look at this one I’m left scratching my head on where I might be? That goes to show how many times I’ve been over the pond to visit the area. Anyhow, Moss apparently took this photo in Camden right after being stopped by the police. He was being fitted for the description of a purse snatcher in the area, but the police had to carry on with their day and Moss with taking his photos. Check out the entire gallery.