| March 27, 2003 - I'm baaack |
| Dear Friends, I'm back from my wonderful vacation in swinging London! All I can say is that I arrived needing a vacation from my vacation because I was sooooo exhausted from all the activity. I can't really go into a lot of detail about everything I did without spreading my adventures over several pages, because Geocities starts having problems with large pages and I find myself having to work with the frames too much when I type a lot. Suffice it to say for my first entry since I've been back, that I had a great time and am looking forward to going back again. Now I mentioned on another page somewhere that I wanted to visit the British Museum and see the Rosetta Stone and the Elgin Marbles. I know you're all practically panting to know if I achieved that lifelong ambition. Yes, Dear Readers, I did! It was wonderful, but it would have been better if there hadn't been so many school children crowded around the Rosetta Stone listening to someone pontificate about hieroglyphics who only had a rudimentary understanding of what he was talking about. For you see, Dear Friends, when JOHNNYLEEN was at Big Name University, he took a semester of Egyptian hieroglyphics and knows way more about them than that pontificating buffoon. That said, the Elgin Marbles were truly spectacular and, since the school children had no interest in them, I was able to contemplate them at my leisure. In the foyer just before the Elgin Marbles room was a guy playing a flute, who was, I think, trying to make it sound very Ancient Greeky. Whether it was accurate or not is beyond me, but it did add a certain "je ne sais quoi" to the whole experience. Of course, no outing for JOHNNYLEEN would be complete without an encounter with a strange person. The friend I was staying with and I stopped at a genyu-wine British pub and were having just the merriest of times, when this guy came in, sat at a table, and started talking to himself. A bit later, JOHNNYLEEN had to go to the urinal (the British pronounce it ur-eye-nal). The guy followed me in there, walked around me to the toilet, grabbed a handful of toilet paper, and hacked a lung into it. It was quite charming; just like being back in the Big City I live in! Now here's some advice for you if you ever go to London. You need to be a bit aggressive because Londoners are actually pretty rude. You'd never think that, would you? All of the signs in town say things like "Visitors are kindly requested to deposit all papers and cups into the rubbish. Thank you in advance for your understanding and co-operation" whereas in America we'd say "Don't litter!" Anyway, when you stand at a bar in London to order a drink, the bartender will make it a point to serve everyone but you if you're not quick enough. I don't know how many times I had people leap ahead of me when I was dying of thirst! Finally, at one bar, when the bartender deigned to notice me, I said, "Well, I was going to order something, but since you let everyone else jump ahead of me, I'm going somewhere else." Yeah, like that really bothered him! His response was something like "Cheers, mate." They also aren't terribly interested in letting people off the bus before they start piling in. The older double-decker busses have an open door at the rear that people leap in and out of; particularly if they see their connection just ahead of them. (It's amusing in a way to see people leaping on and off even when the bus is in motion.) At one point I got separated from my companions because some chickie shoved me out of the way so she could get on the bus ahead of me. When my friends asked what took me so long to get up the stairs to their seat, I told them that some wench had knocked me aside and that I wished I had tripped her. Of course, the wench in question was sitting only 2 seats back, so she heard every word; hee hee hee. On these older busses they have conductors who check to see if you have a ticket. They also control the number of people allowed on the upper level because they don't want people falling down the stairs as the busses careen around traffic circles and come to jolting halts. Well this one conductor from Africa decided to use Mugabe as his role model and ordered several people to get off the bus even though there was still plenty of room. They tried to argue with him, but to no avail. It was silly really, but I guess his uniform and gigantic change maker just kind of went to his head. Well, Dear Readers, I've written just enough to keep you coming back for more. Be certain to check back often! Next entry Previous entry Go to diary entries Go back home |