I'm visiting London for a week towards the end of March. Myself, two of my brothers, and my dad. From the looks of things we'll spend most of the week wandering around various armories and museums bugging the curators to let us have a good look at the swords.
The planning of the trip has been given to me, so I'm now hunting through the internet looking for interesting things to do. To me this means 1. Clubbing, 2. Sharp pointy things from 1000ad, 3. Heavy stone things from 4000bc, 4. Clubbing, 5. Food.
So far I've discovered that London is just as confusing as any other city I'm supposed to navigate having never before lived there. I spent two and a half years in Minneapolis and barely know the place, and here I'm supposed to pick apart London in a matter of weeks from a distance of half the world away?
I suppose the Jet-lag won't be as bad as it could be. We're -9 hours from Greenwich. It's not like we're coming from Mars or something, where they have 48 hour days. Imagine adjusting to that! Yeah.
So.
Day 1. - Take painkillers, bitch about jetlag, sleep.
Day 2. - Take painkillers, bitch about jetlag, stagger around a castle or something. sleep.
Day 3. - Take painkillers, bitch about jetlag, get horribly lost.
Day 5. - Find the hotel again. Sleep.
Day 6. - Oversleep alarm. Wake up towards midnight. Take painkillers. Stagger around an unfamiliar city in the dark in search of something that serves food at this ungodly hour.
Day 7. - Pack. Search desperately for passports. Try to find a cab to the airport. Fly home.
Day 8. - Home. Take painkillers. Bitch about jetlag. Go to work.
Ahh, Vacations. I hate vacations. Going to a foreign country for one week at a time doesn't rate very highly on my list of things to do. I'm sure if I had a more devoted interest in tourist attractions I'd be all about it, but I'd really rather spend a few months meeting people and idly loitering in museums. I dunno. It should be a lot of fun, assuming we can deal with the jetlag. Which I think means keeping everyone awake for forty eight hours before we get on the plane.
I suppose in this case I at least have the advantage of speaking the same language as the nation I'm visiting, give or take two hundred years in which we've developed distinct dialects. Which could be interesting. I can barely understand some southern accents and California jargon is beyond me. I'm given to understand that Britain takes incomphrehensible regional dialects as a matter of national pride, so we'll see what we can work out. If all else fails I can start speaking in tongues and communicating with rude sign language.
In an attempt to practice my best John Wayne accent for use on anyone who assumes that American's talk like John Wayne (I know, I know, most people aren't quite that bad) I've determined that between living in the Midwest, Texas, and accent-neutral Alaska my accent has become infinitely mutable and unfixed.
I've decided that for me, the perfect excercise equipment would be a large framework of metal pipes. Playgrounds used to have big geodiesic domes of interconnected pipes for climbing on. If I could just get one of those in the living room or the back yard I could go and have a run around the inside of it a few times a day and get all the excercise I need. As it is it's fucking freezing outside, so exploring the countryside is out of the question, and I don't have heavy things that I can use to work out my legs here.
London Vacation Progress - 1:00pm Mar 6
- Have determined that the people of London are 'Men who eat bread, like us'. According to Odysseus this means that we should storm the city, kill all who oppose us, and take what we will as spoils. I've never liked Odysseus much, so I'm going with option B: Drive on the left, eat curry, try not to offend the customs officials.
- I called up the Google Maps satellite image of London. I am now, officially, terrified. Technically, Tokyo or New York look far more complicated from space, but still... There is a lot of civilization packed into a very compact space there.
- Searching for hotels. Preferably a five or six star located five minutes, by foot, from everywhere of interest, and at a reasonable budget price. Wish me luck.
6:12 pm, Mar. 6
- The proper term for my dad is pissant. He's always unhappy and defensive. It's very frustrating. It's obnoxiously easy for any conversation with him to escalate into an argument, and he doesn't do anything to try to curb that.
- The Captain has stated that the only things he requires from this trip is eating lunch at pubs and dinner at local places. I think I'm going to deal with this by finding a couple of reputable pubs and interpreting 'local places' to mean sushi or indian. When asked for suggestions as to where he wanted to visit he suggested brighton beach. When asked to elaborate as to just what brighton beach is, he supplied 'A beach', and did not go into the matter further. *sigh*
no, look, don't get me wrong, I'm sure pubs are very quaint and picturesque and whathave you, but I'm not interested in them as a destination in and of themselves. If it's somewhere to go and get a bite to eat, yeah, sure, why not? But frankly I'm not interested in going very far out of my way for one.
This vacation is going to be fairly miserable with me, my dad, and my brother all pushing each others buttons in a foreign nation.
The planning of the trip has been given to me, so I'm now hunting through the internet looking for interesting things to do. To me this means 1. Clubbing, 2. Sharp pointy things from 1000ad, 3. Heavy stone things from 4000bc, 4. Clubbing, 5. Food.
So far I've discovered that London is just as confusing as any other city I'm supposed to navigate having never before lived there. I spent two and a half years in Minneapolis and barely know the place, and here I'm supposed to pick apart London in a matter of weeks from a distance of half the world away?
I suppose the Jet-lag won't be as bad as it could be. We're -9 hours from Greenwich. It's not like we're coming from Mars or something, where they have 48 hour days. Imagine adjusting to that! Yeah.
So.
Day 1. - Take painkillers, bitch about jetlag, sleep.
Day 2. - Take painkillers, bitch about jetlag, stagger around a castle or something. sleep.
Day 3. - Take painkillers, bitch about jetlag, get horribly lost.
Day 5. - Find the hotel again. Sleep.
Day 6. - Oversleep alarm. Wake up towards midnight. Take painkillers. Stagger around an unfamiliar city in the dark in search of something that serves food at this ungodly hour.
Day 7. - Pack. Search desperately for passports. Try to find a cab to the airport. Fly home.
Day 8. - Home. Take painkillers. Bitch about jetlag. Go to work.
Ahh, Vacations. I hate vacations. Going to a foreign country for one week at a time doesn't rate very highly on my list of things to do. I'm sure if I had a more devoted interest in tourist attractions I'd be all about it, but I'd really rather spend a few months meeting people and idly loitering in museums. I dunno. It should be a lot of fun, assuming we can deal with the jetlag. Which I think means keeping everyone awake for forty eight hours before we get on the plane.
I suppose in this case I at least have the advantage of speaking the same language as the nation I'm visiting, give or take two hundred years in which we've developed distinct dialects. Which could be interesting. I can barely understand some southern accents and California jargon is beyond me. I'm given to understand that Britain takes incomphrehensible regional dialects as a matter of national pride, so we'll see what we can work out. If all else fails I can start speaking in tongues and communicating with rude sign language.
In an attempt to practice my best John Wayne accent for use on anyone who assumes that American's talk like John Wayne (I know, I know, most people aren't quite that bad) I've determined that between living in the Midwest, Texas, and accent-neutral Alaska my accent has become infinitely mutable and unfixed.
I've decided that for me, the perfect excercise equipment would be a large framework of metal pipes. Playgrounds used to have big geodiesic domes of interconnected pipes for climbing on. If I could just get one of those in the living room or the back yard I could go and have a run around the inside of it a few times a day and get all the excercise I need. As it is it's fucking freezing outside, so exploring the countryside is out of the question, and I don't have heavy things that I can use to work out my legs here.
London Vacation Progress - 1:00pm Mar 6
- Have determined that the people of London are 'Men who eat bread, like us'. According to Odysseus this means that we should storm the city, kill all who oppose us, and take what we will as spoils. I've never liked Odysseus much, so I'm going with option B: Drive on the left, eat curry, try not to offend the customs officials.
- I called up the Google Maps satellite image of London. I am now, officially, terrified. Technically, Tokyo or New York look far more complicated from space, but still... There is a lot of civilization packed into a very compact space there.
- Searching for hotels. Preferably a five or six star located five minutes, by foot, from everywhere of interest, and at a reasonable budget price. Wish me luck.
6:12 pm, Mar. 6
- The proper term for my dad is pissant. He's always unhappy and defensive. It's very frustrating. It's obnoxiously easy for any conversation with him to escalate into an argument, and he doesn't do anything to try to curb that.
- The Captain has stated that the only things he requires from this trip is eating lunch at pubs and dinner at local places. I think I'm going to deal with this by finding a couple of reputable pubs and interpreting 'local places' to mean sushi or indian. When asked for suggestions as to where he wanted to visit he suggested brighton beach. When asked to elaborate as to just what brighton beach is, he supplied 'A beach', and did not go into the matter further. *sigh*
no, look, don't get me wrong, I'm sure pubs are very quaint and picturesque and whathave you, but I'm not interested in them as a destination in and of themselves. If it's somewhere to go and get a bite to eat, yeah, sure, why not? But frankly I'm not interested in going very far out of my way for one.
This vacation is going to be fairly miserable with me, my dad, and my brother all pushing each others buttons in a foreign nation.
alpo:
From my vague memories of visiting London at a tender age, you'll have no problem finding plenty of curry to eat in the wee hours. Yum. 