This week I was in Denver – OK actually in the middle of nowhere half way between Denver and Boulder. I was there for our sales conference, much like Lisbon, where I had to give a session. All in all not much to say really – the highlight was an evening in Boulder, which seems like a great little city.
Where I live, near Waterloo Station is not really the best area for “general living” – there’s not a lot of grocery stores or that sort of thing near by. The closest thing I have to a neighborhood street is a place called Lower Marsh, over on the other side of the train station. Because of the way the station is situated, and as a result of some other very large buildings, it’s not that easy to get over to Lower Marsh. That was, until I discovered a tunnel that goes under the station, with an entrance across the street from my building. It was great, very convenient – until a couple of weeks ago when I went to use it, and it was all boarded up. I didn’t think anything of it – figured they were doing to maintenance work or something.
On Monday (which was a bank (stat) holiday here in the UK), before I headed to the airport, I needed to swing by a store on Lower Marsh. I headed over to walk the long way around, and noticed this huge crowd of people milling about, near the entry to my tunnel. I was puzzled, but didn’t think much of it. I went over to the store, but on my way back curiosity got the better of me, so I joined the crowd long enough to ask a security guy about what was going on. Seems they had set-up some sort of art exhibit in the tunnel, and this was a queue to check it out. From the street, it didn’t look that organized, but from my apartment window (which I hadn’t noticed earlier), there it was – this monster queue to enter the tunnel. I’m not one for queues, and I had to get to the airport anyway, so I didn’t think any more on it.
Today, after getting back from the airport I noticed that the tunnel was open again, so I thought I would check it out. I am glad I didn’t wait in the queue to get in, but damn is it ever cool! It seems that they opened the tunnel to graffiti artists to do their thing – and to great effect. There are some really cool things that they’ve done – I’ll try and go back and snap some pictures. The best is along a stretch of the sidewalk, where someone has painted a huge (50’+) model race car track that spells out something – you can pick out words like “boys” and “their toys”, but I couldn’t make out the whole thing. Very, very cool.