dissonance

Can't be arsed for a title

I wish I was able to update yesterday because...

I've been living in England for exactly one month!

The time has just flown by.

Unforseen complications in billing addresses have come up due to my move to another country and Bank of America being complete idiots about address formatting so my Typepad account was suspended for awhile.

I had so much to share and blab about but now I'll have to resort to bullet points because I just can't be arsed to go into details.

"Can't be arsed" is currently my favorite saying here.  It's so eloquent and gets the point across without getting personal.  It says "it isn't because of you that I will not go out and party, I just cannot be arsed right now."

Recent UK adventures include:

• I am thrilled to have found better than just decent asian food at Wagamama and only 5 minutes walk away!  Mexican food is still alluding me.  I should really just give up and just gorge on it whenever I take a trip back to the states.
• I found a knitting group!  I spent a really nice evening with them knitting away while munching on scones and drinking tea. For reals, you can't make this shit up folks.
• I'm still getting used to the fact that our fridge is about the size of the one I used to have in my college dorm.  As a result, I'm going grocery shopping about 4 times a week.
• They have really good cheese here and I've become a lot more adventurous with my sandwich making. My latest obsession is made up of: watercress, spinach, and rocket greens, some sort of English cheddar (white not orange) and some sort of carrot or cranberry compote (ie chunky jam).  YUMMERS! Food blog to be updated by next month as soon as I get my kitchen supplies and camera cable. In the meantime, you guessed it, I can't be arsed.
• This past weekend I made another trip to London to watch Maximo Park at Brixton Academy.  Both the band and the venue were bloody brilliant.
• TopShop is madness.  A heavenly, overwhelming, confusing, sublime, madness.
• But for all the hype of TopShop, my current favorite designer that I've come across is All Saints, which I discovered at Selfridges.  I want to make a special effort to visit their store in Soho.
• I've tried about 5 different kinds of English beer and so far, I have to admit that I love Guiness best.

Still no proper pictures, but I do have one from my phone that I took this weekend in London:

Wish you were here!

Day 8 - still no accent

Here I am a week later and this is the soonest I can get my hands on some sweet sweet internet.  I can't be arsed to fully detail out everything that's been going on but here's some bullet points to get you through:

• I like the phrase "can't be arsed"
• Two trips out to London this past week.  Once on Tuesday to watch The Subways and a weekend trip to meet up with Alana's friend Sita.
  • The concert was great, it was held in a theatre that reminds me of the San Diego Spreckels theater but much nicer and bigger.  The lead singer did a lot of crowd surfing and balcony jumping and the audience just loved it.  Afterwards I was really craving a burrito but the people I went with wanted, of all things, Burger King.  If you ever come to visit here, don't go to Burger King. It's awful.  My onion rings had onions of questionable onion-y value.
  • The weekend trip was also very fun, but it made me glad that I'm not living in London straightaway.  It's so crowded and hectic!!  But the shopping...ohhh the shopping.  Dangerously sweet and dangerously expensive.  I plan on doing a Just for the Girls post and that will go more into juicy detail.  In the evening I went to a couple of bars and they were just as I imagined it.  The loud bar was full of punk rocky degenerates and financial guru wannabes and the smaller quiet bar was very "posh".  It was awesome.
• Stil haven't found a place to live.
• The curry here is very good.
• The beer is not as warm as people complain, I like it just fine.  I recommend John Smith.
• The rudest people I have run into are Americans.   Last night at 1 am I woke up to the sound of some drunk pounding on my neighbor's door and yelling about something.  I wanted to open the door and tell him to fuck off but when I looked through the keyhole I saw that he was very fat with a ponytail and reminded me of a Hell's Angel and ended up calling the front desk about it.  Really guys, we can do better.
• The second rudest person was a British woman I saw at breakfast.  She was really snotty about the free breakfast and instead of just asking for things, she was really condescending saying things like, "My breakfast is cold.  Do you think it's at all possible to have hot eggs?"  and muttering rude comments to her wimpy husband the whole time.  I don't know about here, but if I were her and this was back in the states, I would probably not have dared eat anything from the kitchen after that because I'm sure there would have been some extra special ingredients added in just for her.
• I am very tired of eggs for breakfast.

There's more to say but it's getting late and I have to take a wee so I can't be arsed right now.  Be back in a mo'.

Life in England - Part 1

I finally have internet access! (ok how typical is it that that's the first thing I write?)

Anyway, I'm safe and sound in the UK and I already have so much to say!  Unfortunately I seem to have misplaced my camera cable so no pics right now.  In the meantime, this is the first part of a series that is yet to be named. It covers my arrival and I wrote it while sitting in a Starbucks-like shop in Reading.  I hope to update a lot more soon.

===

The plane ride over left much to be desired.  While waiting to board, there was a baby screaming his head off at the gate.  I could tell that everyone waiting for the same flight were praying to the diety of their choice, hoping that they wouldn't have to sit near the brat.  God must have been checking my attendance cause he ended up in my cabin.

He quieted down eventually but the next thing to plight me was that the airplane's interactive console system was down.  Lots of people told me about this thing and I was looking forward to playing with it.  Instead, I had to resign myself to watching Crazy Tom in MI3.

Finally, I got my first experience with the differing view of "personal space" in Europe. I was in the middle row with a seat between myself and my nearest neighbor.  Sometime in the middle of the flight I uncannily felt intrusion of personal space and woke up to see that my neighbor had decided to take advantage of the empty middle seat and lie down so that his head was practically on my lap.  Indeed.

JD had arrived on another fight and I met at the Hertz rental station and so we had our first experience with driving in the UK.  Let me tell you, those roundabouts they warn you about is only the tip of the iceburg.  There's hardly any traffic lights and no stop signs at all, just "give way" signs which are sort of like 4 way "california stops".  And by the way, "give way" only applies to other cars, they will NOT give you any way if on two feet.  Be thankful I had to get honked and flipped off at to bring you that lesson of the day.

Oh, and for all the complaining about how the US needs to be on the metric system, it took JD and I a while to figure out that everything is in miles per hour and short distances are given in yards.

By the time JD dropped me off a my hotel (the Lismoyne) (not as nice as it looks) we were both a little loopy and starving and went hunting for food in the center of Fleet.  Fleet's town center, it turns out, is just a street about a mile long.  We walked about a quarter mile before giving up and we ended up eating at McDonald's.  Yes, my friends. I move all the way to England and my first meal was McDonald's.  Freaking A.  At least I got a menu item I had never seen in the States, a grilled veggie sandwich.  It was... interesting.

Even though I was completely exhausted, I was determined to get over jet lag pronto so I stayed up as long as possible (til about 11pm) (I mean 23:00) watching British television.  Did you know they play an awful lot of American shows here?  I ended up watching Third Watch, which I never saw while living in the States.

In summary, on my first day of my new life in a different country, I ate McDonald's and watched Third Watch.

Coming up in the next installment: Grocery shopping, watching the football, and the British must be fantastic at Scrabble.