"Ellouw, Spankey hea saying "cheers" from London!"



(Which is another way of saying "Random things I learned in London this past week

- I keep trying but I STILL do not like the cold.

- London is big but feels "rural-ish" as soon as you get a few minutes out of the city.



- Toilet seats in Europe are lighter than those in the US or Anguilla, which is insignificant except when you lift or shut them and don't expect such a bang. Ok, perhaps that's still insignificant but it struck me as odd.

- For promotional purposes, some companies put mostly naked models in stores here. Quite entertaining to watch, actually. Can't even imagine the outrage this would cause in the US.


- Walking around all day may make your feet hurt. if they hurt really badly, investigate 'cause it might be your little toe that turned into ONE GIANT BLISTER while you weren't paying attention.

- Spanky the monkey came with me on this trip and as you may recall from my trip to Spain, he sort of likes to blend in with the local culture.  See below for his usual outfit and the torero outfit he was given in Spain.


So one afternoon, while walking tourist crap shop, Spanky found a souvenir bear with an outfit he wanted.
The bear refused so they got in a fight. Spanky fought dirty and pulled a scalpel out of his shirt and the whole thing ended with the bear having his head ripped off....



.... and Spanky having a new outfit.


- My internal dialog "voice" starts adjusting to whatever accent I am around, which I never noticed before, either 'cause it never happened before or 'cause it's either "speaking" English or some other language and hence dialects don't really show up.
It is quite odd when I "hear" my mind reading "De Em Zed" instead of "De Em Zee".
This is also a good time to apologize to Paul Mooney, for making SOOOOO much fun of him for his "improper" pronunciations of things.

- I am sorry though, Mooney - "roota" is still not an acceptable way to describe the mail routing task running on the server!

- I miss having easy access to cultural and artsy stuff, like the Tate museum's, Portobello Market etc. It was fun to make a decision to see "Wicked" a few hours before the show.



- In a geeky way, coming across a replication history dating back to 1993 feels "special". And just to put it in perspective, I was I was still a teenager when that database replicated last.