The Best Thing About England
Here is my friend Liv and her dog Coburn in their English garden. She refuses to be photographed without makeup.
And here is an old wheelbarrow in her backyard.
I love the fresh clean air of the English countryside. It is serene and so green. There are lots of places to discover near her home. I’ve always loved this old graveyard by the church down the road and on a hillside.
A little further down the road is an area called “The Hythe.” I had to return a rental car there once and was scared shitless to go there just because of the name. I imagined cloaked rippers and ghouls down fogged alleys, glowing eyeballs in the darkness…
Everytime we’d see a sign for that place I’d hiss at the girls in my Jekyll voice, “The Hythe, heh, heh, heh.”
But the scariest things about The Hythe are the roundabouts on the way there. One is so big it is a roundabout in a roundabout and the people who know how to drive in them must be psychic. A roundabout is circle for an intersection instead of stopsigns. In England they move clockwise. In the rest of Europe they move counterclockwise. I squeal while driving through them with my fingers crossed.
No matter what sort of place we’ve stayed in England, and we’ve been to some dives, there is always an electric kettle with tea bags and instant coffee. Funny, we have ice at all our places here, they have boiling water. Maybe it is the difference in weather. Liv’s neighbor has an American fridge with an icemaker in the door, unusual for England, not that I saw it, just heard about it. I asked Liv to tell her I knew about the fridge and still didn’t go begging for ice even though I was jonesing for it pretty badly.
This is for AJ, a band she told me about that we saw at Download and enjoyed trememdously, Wolfmother. Everyone liked them.
Picadilly Square in London is my favorite spot in the city. There is a Virgin MegaStore (record store) there that I go in and get lost for hours. Four floors of bliss.
See that sign for the Underground? Years ago Sweetpea was scared to death of riding the subway there. She’d do okay in Paris and other cities with a subway system. I kept calling it the “Metro” or the “Tube” and didn’t understand why she’d kick and scream not to go in there. Until she drew a picture of “The Underground.” It had scary bent up fingers with long claws coming out of tunnels and the word “underground” written in spooky letters. Doh.
Sweetpea has a good eye for things interesting. She took this photo of a tricked out bicycle:
One of my favorite things about walking London are the endless reminders that they drive on the other side of the road. You wouldn’t think it mattered much to pedestrians. Think like that and you could get run over quick.
So it is printed on the streets. 
Seems stupid, but it is helpful. I look right, left, right, left, OCD style because I’ve seen too many “ghost cars” come out of nowhere on my first trip there.
One of the best things about England this time? Leaving there. Here’s why.
On the Eurostar from England to France I had an empty seat next to me. In front of me, a woman tapped this guy and said he was in her seat. When he stood up, it nearly stopped my heart. Gorgeous, tall guy with beautiful hair. I thought some people have all the luck, why couldn’t that guy be next to me? The Gods must have heard me. He was on the wrong row. Plopped himself in the correct seat right next to me. He told me he was a male model headed to Paris for a photo shoot. Since I fell asleep on that train can I say that I…? No. Better not.
Okay, the very best thing about England was seeing my friend Liv. Dear friends like this don’t come along too often and I am grateful to have her in my life. She is not English but Norwegian and she’ll be after me if I don’t mention that. She just lives there and that is mainly why we go.
Pissed
One of my favorite differences between American English and British English is the meaning of the word “pissed.” For us it is about anger, for them it is about being totally drunk. I have a whole new meaning for this word. You’ll see what I mean. If you are known to faint easily, you may want to skip this post and wait for the Swiss stuff.
So we are in England and My Chemical Romace is playing at Download. The girls begged me to take them again for at least one day. Okay they didn’t have to twist my arm. This is probably the only band the three of us have on our top ten list.
I wasn’t going to talk about this…
Okay. So the girls and I are wiggling our way to the front of the crowd at the main stage where they are going to play in an hour. It’s easy, there’s no excessive crowding. Other girls are dragging their boyfriends up there. You could just read those poor bloke’s faces, what I do for this girl.
The girls and I are ecstatic that we’ve positioned ourselves closely to the stage. Then a guy to my side looks at me with a very sad face. He asks, “Do you like My Chemical Romance?”
I look down at my t-shirt and laugh.
With a hint of shame he warns, “Better watch your head.”
My heart went into a freefall, straight down into my left shoe. How could I be so stupid? How could I not guess this? I tell the girls and we all agree to go to the back of the audience. Waaaaaay back. As we amble back there we notice pockets and hands loaded down with ammo. These are all guys. Jealous guys.
Look what they did.
These are plastic bottles as glass is not allowed at the festival. The fucktards fill them with a little liquid to make them projectile. Water. Soda. Beer. Oh, look back at the title of this post. That stuff too. Pissing on my Black Parade.
To all the bottlers:
Not my shirt. But it’s useful.
MCR kept playing but Gerard Way’s eyes were sweeping back and forth real fast, like windshield wipers, looking out for missiles (saw it on the bigscreen). The bottling stopped after about a couple of songs and those same idiots throwing bottles were actually dancing and singing the songs toward the end of the show. He looked gorgeous, BTW and it turned out to be a great show. Oh, and we didn’t get hit.
No band deserves this and it is unfair and unsafe to the audience as well. There were quite a few children there to see MCR. Some probably got hit. I don’t understand why they can’t control this problem.
Kisses From Paris
I hope no one thinks I could leave Paris without sending some “grand baisers.” Here they are, four big ones, two for each cheek. O la la.
Paris is wonderful as it always is. I’ve been there for about ten days I think and have only seen the Eiffel Tower from a distance this trip. Sometimes we do that, go there and do not see it. There are a couple of things I wanted to do and did not get a chance. That is why there is next time. One can never see all of Paris. It’s a good thing.
The weather has been cold. I don’t ever remember it being this cold in France in June. It has been a little rainy also but fortunately only at night and in the early morning. The rain has been chasing us this entire trip. It’s the funniest thing. It seems the day will be ruined and just before we are ready to go out, the sky clears and the sun comes out. This has happened about 20 of the 23 days. Three different times it began to rain just as we were leaving to go back in for the night. Unbelievable.
Right now I am at the airport in Paris. My flight does not leave for another three hours and I did not sleep at all last night because I plan to sleep on the plane. Why waste my last night in Paris sleeping?
It is strange, the sun goes down at about 11PM and rises around 3:30 or 4AM. Strange because I get up to sleepwalk and it is daytime. It wakes the sleep zombie.
Kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss…
Swiss Blogging
I’ve had computer and internet access for the last five days, but just not enough time to do any blogging or check email. The girls have also managed to hog the computer with what little time we have for it.
The alps are gorgeous and the Greenfield Festival fabulous. Tomorrow we leave for Paris by car. As much as I love Paris, I’d love to spend a little more time here. I’ll tell you all about it later. Don’t let me forget to tell you about the male model and the boots. Two different stories. Oh, and I got to meet Jared Leto today. Did I tell you I’m having a great time out here?
I’m not sure if I’ll have internet access for the next ten days, so I’ll just have to let you all moderate your own comments here. That’s right AJ, here is your opportunity to tp my blog. Take advantage of it while you can.
London blogging
I am in an internet cafe in London while waiting to check into a hotel. Sweetpea is about to lose her mind without her MySpace. Kids her age use that for everything… mail, photos, blogging, etc. There are a bunch of internet computers in airports and other public places, but she can’t log on to her page from those. Expensive, those bastards, about $3 for fifteen minutes.
This internet cafe, $2, and you can stay on the computer all day long. No breaks though.
Anyway. London. I don’t love this place. Okay I don’t even like it. Sweetpea said she loves London and I really think she just likes that they speak English here. The English countryside is okay. But, London. I say every time, “This is my last trip to London.”
We just got to the city last night, were in another part of England visiting a friend for a few days and then another place for a couple of days. The friend, Liv, had me laughing for about 4 solid days. Good cure for jet lag.
She showed me her Book of Nightmares and Joys. This is the book where she keeps one photo of each student she hosts. These students are people of all ages, foreigners who come to the university nearby to polish their English. They stay anywhere from one week to nine months. I loved hearing her stories about each one of these people.
The one that stands out the most is the sound engineer from Tokyo who took a six hour train ride from her house to Liverpool just to walk across Abbey Road. He then hopped the train and rode the six hours back the same day.
Back to London. Last night the girls and I nipped into a bookstore and bought a slew of tabloids and just sat on the beds and read all this crazy trashy stuff about people we have never heard of. Shocking, those things. Oh, oh, oh. I saw that documentary about Princess Di where they showed some never before seen photos of her fatal car crash. If you haven’t seen it, you haven’t missed anything. There may be one photo they showed of her in the car and it is so grainy and has her face blurred. What a scam. I couldn’t tell what I was looking at.
Will be off to some museums now. Ta…
