Subject: -waves-
Author:
Posted on: 2014-10-22 04:22:00 UTC
I'm back from London! It was awesome and stuff. You guys get no chocolates because the guys at the office finished them, so you'll have to do with Bleeptea and this lame picture (neither me nor my friend are good with cameras).
Thanks for the Bleeptea! Is it safe to add honey?
Aww, no chocolate at all? Darn. And I'm gonna have to pass on the Bleeptea. ;)
So how was London? Is 'fun' really all we get to hear? (And this is bizarre; from what I can tell, your blurry picture looks just like the one Rats did in the thread further down the page.)
I was waiting for someone to ask. It was mostly a museums vacations - that picture is, obviously, from the British Museum - but surprisingly the two highlights were the raspberry and peach crumble I ate in a pub called Marquis Cornwallis and Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park, which is like reading YouTube comments only live and so much funnier.
I've wanted to go to the British Museum for several years now. :/ And now you've made me hungry. *mutters* Recipie for raspberry and peach crumble...
Do tell me more about this Speaker's Corner! *sits up eagerly* It sounds like that was your favorite part.
Basically, Speakers' Corner is the northwestern area of Hyde Park, near the Marble Arch. It's a place where everybody can take a stepladder, a chair, or whatever and start talking about whatever, and crowd heckles them (the good ones respond to the hecklers). Like everything else, the speakers are covered under Sturgeon's Law, which means 90% of them are rubbish, but even the rubbish ones can be amusing.
Two cases in point: there was this Muslim (probably Pakistani) guy with their weird head-covering and an honest-to-God Abayah who talked about the usual religious stuff; heckling him was a fat, bespectacled and thoroughly unpleasant Briton. As I've said before - YouTube comments, but live and funnier.
The other case was a sort of Evangelist with a huge Bible in one hand; he spent his time shouting through a toothless Egyptian cabbie.
What left me impressed, however, were two guys I met in random. One was born in 1939 and remembers the German Blitz; talk about history (he also believes Jesus converted to Hinduism for some reason, but that's another thing). I met the second guy when I commented to nobody in particular that Abayah guy and his hecklers didn't know how to debate, and this guy agreed with me. Turns out he's from Kuwait, and the sweet part that when I told him I am from Israel, he didn't start spitting curses at me and in fact remained civil and polite. Makes me think there's hope for this place yet.
Seriously, why aren't the rest of you wanting to know more?
Des, if you ever want to talk about anything random, I'm more than willing to listen. :D Even if I'm not much a fan of tea. *ducks*
How dare you imply that tea isn't the single most important desire of all humanity!
Kidding. I'm a live-and-let-live person. Plus, all the coffee-drinkers simply mean I have more tea to myself.
That said, I do usually have a tendency to rant. Like about this interesting fact: the Ancient Egyptians put little figurines called Shabti in their graves, to go to work in the afterlife in their stead.
Maybe it changed over the centuries.
And as much as I love coffee, I'm not allowed to have it except on special occasions, like road trips to see the grandparents. Mom thinks it'll make my ADHD worse. D:
I suppose I could try tea again sometime...
There were two major types of Shabti. One type is where the figurine is part of a spell, in which case there's usually a cartouche with at least part of the incantation on it. The second type is that servant/go to work in my stead thingy.
Anyway, re: coffee and tea: I know that coffee has a bad effect on you if you're not used to it - last time I drank coffee, I got all jittery and my knees became wobbly-er than jelly. Tea doesn't have that effect on me, and anyway it tastes so much better.
I pretty much started drinking coffee at work (sometimes you just need the caffeine) and one of the first times one of my coworkers saw me drinking coffee was also the first time I talked about the current, absurdingly stupid Formula 1 rules with him.
His comment on the matter? "No more coffee for you."
