Lon-dong

When I have more energy-- perhaps later tonight or tomorrow, I will blog about London. (And post a few photos in the Picasa album.) I suspect it will be like Roger Moore Weekend in that it will take me multiple posts to tell all the stories. To give a brief summary, I must be candid with you, fair readers, and say that London was not what I expected. It reminded me of the first time we went to Hollywood and saw dirt, hobos, doo-doo, and garbage all over the streets. Now I came to love LA once I realized it for what it was/is. London I don't know about. It will be a long time before I would want to go back. This is not to say that I thought the city was bad or was unsafe; the best way I can think to put it (to use some free association here) would be words like overrated, gloomy, bleak, gray, too many rude people, decidedly unglamorous. To give one small example, the entire time we were there, my nose ran like a faucet and the mucus came out black. Now that should tell you the level of pollution and grime of the city. Funny, when I told people we were going to London, no one warned me about that phenomenon. I told several people that being a fan of The Saint and The Avengers, I feel like I arrived in London about 50 years too late. I only saw one classic car whilst there-- a red-orange MGBGT-- which made me a little sad at heart. Alas, no Simon Templars or John Steeds walking about. Very few proper English gentlemen at all, far as that goes.

Still, it was not an all-bad experience. I don't want to make it sound as though we didn't have fun or didn't learn a lot or didn't have some truly once-in-a-lifetime experiences. My new buddy, K-Cran, stuck George Michael's rejected towel in my face and asked me, "Is there anything wrong with this towel? Why do you think George Michael wouldn't want it?" Meanwhile, I'm sitting there thinking, "Maybe 'cause it's rough as sandpaper." We feasted at Angry Chef's restaurant and had a good food-high afterwards. I had 2 of the best vodka tonics of my life. I met London's most perverted and randy cab driver.

I'll offer more later when I possess more energy. Suffice it to say for now that we did have fun BUT when the day came for our return flight home, we were more than ready to come back to American soil. I do believe I said something like, "Now I see why Count Dracula needed to take boxes of his native soil with him when he came to London; he probably kissed the earth of his homeland every single morning when he went to bed!"