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Within Holland Park there's a lovely Japanese garden complete with a waterfall, koi, and plenty of rocks arranged in a feng shui pattern, I'm sure. (Crap, feng shui is Chinese, not Japanese. I'm never going to hear the end of that one.) In order to take this picture, I disobediently Kept On The Grass.

At least one of you (okay, so technically ONLY one) has complained that I'm not sending pictures with ME in them. This is because ever since Camera and I became best friends, I am reluctant to hand him over to others to take my photo. Knowing my obsessive-compulsive behavior about "my things," I'm sure you can understand this. Here's one that Eric took after we ate lunch at the rooftop Members Only Lounge at the Tate Modern (just one of the perks of hanging out with him). Warning - hips may appear larger than they actually are.

And here is one from a Houston rodeo in 2003.

Here's a Globe Theatre actor/musician making a face that appears to imply something inappropriate about playing his skin flute.

I'm definitely going to be in trouble for calling my mother a crazy, old hag

The stage. It was a nice gesture that they painted the ceiling so us paupers in the Yard could look up and have something nice to view.

The rich folks' seats. They actually weren't that plush; you could rent a cushion for £1 so that your backside wouldn't have to suffer the unforgiving wooden bench for hours. Maybe standing wasn't so bad.
Here is Eric sitting before the show. When I went back to stand next to him, I found that he had been singing to himself, securing himself as my favorite person in London.
After the show we walked along the river towards Tower Bridge. I expressed my fears about the Thames, large bodies of water, and large things in general. Buoys included. I pointed at these orange ones and told him that I found them to be quite petrifying. He told me I was being silly considering we could crush them. And then he did for me.

Tea at a cafe. Right before his iPhone rang, I was fiddling around with it and decided that maybe people who sell their souls to Apple for gadgets like that aren't so bad after all. I NEED ONE!!!!!!!

Is it wrong that I just kept picturing Gwyneth Paltrow as a man?

Secret identities, gouged-out eyeballs, names like Cordelia, Regan, Edgar and Edmond, strangulation, sword fights, bastard sons, a character named The Fool, sororicide, and more “whilsts,” “thees,” “eres,” and “betwixts” than you can shake a stick at. You know what it all means, don’t you? Why Shakespeare, my good friends! King Lear at the Globe Theatre to be specific. I know, I know, I might as well wear a t-shirt that says “London’s #1 Tourist!” But I had to go. It’s just something that needed to be done in London.

Life advice #88 – If you aren’t familiar with a Shakespeare play, for heaven’s sake, buy the Cliffsnotes, read Wikipedia, ask your mother, or call up your 10th grade English teacher for a synopsis before you go see it. This will avert spending 3 hours standing in the Yard thinking ridiculous notions such as:
“Wow. Those costumes have mesh holes at the armpits. What a great idea! We should totally incorporate that into today’s fashion.”
Or.
“Those pigeons are definitely gonna crap on my head. They keep flying over me and there’s no way I’m lucky enough to walk away from this without a huge green and white glob on my shoulder. What do I do if it does happen? Do I ignore it? What if people look at me? Oh God! What if the actors look at me?”
Or.
“I am SO sick of standing. £5 for a ticket is great, but 3+ hours standing in one place? I don’t think I can make it. There is only so much shifting back and forth I can do. Were they serious when they warned us beforehand that we couldn’t sit down?”

Shakespeare. Sure he’s a brilliant guy. But oh boy is he good at making me, not to mention those other ditzy-looking American tourists, feel unbelievably dumb for not being able to understand our own language. Having said/complained that, I really did have a great time; even if I was dangerously close to being spat on by the actors who approached the edge of the stage.

One last thing. I would like to point out that my mother quite frequently reminds me of her favorite King Lear quote: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.” I don’t believe she actually deems this true, though. That crazy, old hag will say anything.

Gayer than a tree full of bluebirds

If you decide to come visit me in London, make sure to tell me that your plane arrives 30 minutes before it actually does. This will give me ample time to get on the wrong bus to Paddington Station, get off in a sketchy neighborhood, walk three blocks to a bus stop in the middle of nowhere and catch a bus back to where I started from. It will also ensure that you don’t shell out $2 to use the public toilet and make it safely back to my apartment without having your bladder explode. You know, just an fyi.

The only celebrities that exist to the British media are: Prince Harry, Kate Middleton, Kate Moss, Pete Doherty, Amy Winehouse, and Lily Allen. If you aren’t one of those 6 people, your face will not be pictured in the daily news. It’s just a matter of fact.

Another life fyi for you (you can all thank me later for these bits of wisdom): If you finally suck it up and buy chives to put in your egg salad even though you will have no use for the leftover chives once you’ve used one sixth of what you’ve purchased, for heaven’s sake! Don’t forget to put the chives in the egg salad!
(Is anyone else reminded of Pee Wee Herman whenever they make egg salad or see a row of scooters/motorcycles all lined up on the street? No? Just me? Okay.)

By far, the most resonating consequence of the London subway bombings is the fact that you have to walk at least a mile in this city to find a trashcan. Seriously. They are just nowhere to be found.

Joke o’ the day: Why haven’t you heard the joke about the bed?
It hasn’t been made up yet.

Tonight after eating delicious bowls of hummus goodness, Theresa and I went to see Agatha Christie’s Mousetrap. This is the longest running play in either London or the world, depending on how closely you read the flyer; tonight was performance #23,071. I’m a big fan of Ms Christie and I remember reading Ten Little Indians and deciding it was the greatest book ever (not that I can remember the end or anything vital like that, but still…it was good). Despite loving her books, the play tonight was just so-so. I don’t know if it was because I did the fishing/bobbing thing with my head as I almost nodded off countless times or just that it was a little slow going, but I give the play an overall B-.
But it’s unarguably a London staple and so I am glad I finally saw it and can cross it off my list of Things I Have To Do In London, right after Pick The Guards’ Noses At Buckingham Palace and Find Hugh Grant And Make Him Love Me.

Microsoft Word agrees that both ‘inarguably’ and ‘unarguably’ are words but can offer no synonyms for them, leaving me without an answer as to which, if either, is the right word to use. I apologize for this technical difficulty.

Running on empty

I have never felt like more of a sheltered, middle-class white girl from Podunk Massachusetts than I did last night. Kim and I went to see the show Afrika Afrika. To be trite, you could say it’s an African version of Cirque de Soleil. While I knew that what I was seeing wasn’t just a bunch of physically fit men and women doing circus tricks, I am really glad K was there to fill me in on some of the details. (K is not Asian as you might have suspected; he’s from Nigeria.) For each performance he told me what part of Africa it was representing based on the music, dance, act, and/or costume. Not all the acts are native to Africa (break-dancing and fancy basketball to name two), but they are still all part of the culture, many being performed by street entertainers. Among the acts were an insane juggler who impressed me when he used only 3 balls let alone the 8 that he was up to by the end, pole climbers who made the little Chinese dude in Ocean’s 11 seem like an amateur, contortionists who made me cringe and shield my eyes from the horror, men on unicycles doing double dutch, girls lying on their backs and spinning huge clay pots and tables on their feet, and of course, men who climbed on each other building man-towers 5 people high. I really enjoyed the show; I know there was a lot that went over my head since I’m vastly uninformed when it comes to knowing about African culture. But I understood that there was meaning behind it all and I could certainly tell that it was more than just a show to the 4000 people or so who were in the audience. All in all, I’m glad I bailed on another relationship-filled-with-drama play to see it.

I have become friends with two people from Africa in the past month. That is two more than I’ve befriended in my entire life.

Last night I found myself asking K, “Do you want to walk to London Bridge?” I realize this isn’t that far-fetched a question to be asking, but it still seems funny to me.

I hurt my finger peeling a banana. (Oh and thank you everyone for your concerns about my general hygiene with respect to wiping my fingers on my chair. What would I be without your judging? Other than a decent human being who doesn’t soil office furniture…)

The afternoon paper has a one-liner joke every day. So far, I’ve surprisingly laughed out loud at every one of them. Yesterday’s joke was “What do you call a heavy Italian fog? A bigamist.”

This was a headline in the same paper: “Official: Tube signs really do tell porkies.” Even after reading the article, I still don’t know what that means.

All played out

I think maybe I’ve been seeing too many plays. I was ready to go five minutes into tonight’s one-man play about a psychiatrist. It was even more boring than it sounds. I suppose ‘discretion’ should be the word of the day.

To prove my point about those deadly swans, I read the following quote about said birds in a London magazine today:
“Every British man seems to have a story about those graceful but homicidal birds, usually ending with the warning, ‘They can break your neck with one swing of the wing.’”

Today, for a brief moment, I thought the world was ending. I was sitting at my desk editing some silly word document when all of a sudden I heard this earth-shattering explosion and the table started to shake. My heart practically leapt out of my chest and my pulse started racing as though I were about to give a speech to thousands of people about the differences between swaps and futures. It was then that I realized the world was not in fact ending. Rather, G had just sneezed a sneeze that could have killed 17 horses or 25 small ponies.

*Blog update* I decided that I will start to post the occasional entry written by someone else. There are just too many good articles and stories out there that need to be shared. For example, today’s extra entry was about conformity and a delicious Subway sandwich. All non-Lisa entries posted to my blog will have ** added to their title as well as being tagged ‘plagiarism.’ Read them, don’t read them, it’s up to you. But I will try to only include entries that are qualified as truly awesome. Also, I’m not sure why it took me this long, but I figured out how to add pictures. Now you don’t have to settle for the poor quality email pictures.

(http://lisashoshana.blogspot.com/)

There's a popular graffiti artist named Banksy who is all the rage these days. Every market I've been to has sold prints of his work and I'm guessing I'll buy one before I leave. Here are a couple of his works:

Frozen soy milk

That’s what you get when you don’t realize your fridge is set on “Arctic.”

Here’s a fun mental image for you. The showerhead in this new apartment has four large holes around its perimeter that look as though they would have great water pressure. Alas, I was not lucky enough to find out whether or not this is true because the only water I experienced came in a light mist, except of course, for the very thin stream of water that had so much water pressure that I’m pretty sure it drew blood. So there I am trying to rotate the showerhead in hopes that it was just on the “Incredibly Irritating” setting and move it to the “Soothing Waterfall” setting. But that’s somewhat hard to do when you’re five feet tall and can’t quite reach said showerhead without getting that one Super Soaker-strength water jet right in your eye. I am surprised I didn’t fall down.

Why is it that every picture of Hillary Clinton I see she looks as though someone is either goosing her or she has just seen Alex Trebek riding a mechanical bull with a tiara on his head? Seriously. The woman needs to take the level of facial emotion down about 32 notches. No one is that happy about running for President.

Is Huckabee really still in the running? Are you kidding me? One of the London newspapers had a list of all the celebrities endorsing the candidates and Huckabee was the only one with a lone mention – Chuck Norris. That is sign Numero Uno that it’s time to throw in the towel.

I have learned something today. And not something crappy that I’ll just forget in 48 hours…something awesome. Maybe you all know this already and I’m just that much behind the rest of the world, but whatever, better late than never. Charles Dickens was in the middle of writing a book called The Mystery of Edwin Drood when he died. The kicker is that he set up this amazing plot with a cast of colorful characters, but no one knows how it ends because he dropped dead before he could finish it. Tonight I saw a musical/play that told the story of what he DID write and then, much like Shear Madness in Boston, the audience voted for who we thought was the culprit based on clues Dickens had given in the first part of the book. But can you imagine how frustrating this is? All this setup – one character who only made one appearance leading the reader to believe he would play a key part later in the book, a character who is thought to be a previous character in disguise whose real identity is never revealed, and a murder (or was it merely a disappearance) victim – all of whose outcomes will never be known! Arg! I’m in agony!

I ate McDonald’s tonight.

So tired…

It’s 12:45 am. I’ve been up since 6:30 am. The only mini nap I took today was during the one-man Shakespeare play. And I tried REAL hard to stay awake (I was in the front row and in prime the-actor-can-see-me territory).

The two reasons I’m not asleep and dreaming of candy bars right now is that a) I just moved into a new serviced apartment tonight and had to unpack all of my things and b) I now have internet access and need to watch that new Sarah Silverman/Matt Damon video. And all those Superbowl commercials I missed.
I am totally going to be regretting this tomorrow morning when my alarm goes off.

Today I set a record. I got lost before 9 o’clock in the morning.

Anyone who knows me knows that washing my hands isn’t high on my priority list. While I should be ashamed to admit this, I don’t really think it’s a big deal. But lately I’ve been finding that my hands are a LOT dirtier. After holding on to the poles on the subway and reading the newspapers, by the time I get to work, I don’t want to touch anything without washing my hands for fear of contaminating it. Why are things so much dirtier around here? Why are they making my life difficult and insisting I use soap? Who are the mean British people doing this?!

One of the perks of the proximity between London and Belgium are the waffle stands throughout this city. It’s both cruel and a blessing at the same time. Every morning I walk past this one stand that practically shouts my name yelling, “Lisa!!! Eat me! Buy me and a cup of coffee for 2 pounds and you will be the happiest person alive!” I am proud to admit that I have resisted this urge all 14 days or so that I have walked by. I am embarrassed to say that I don’t think I can hold out much longer. But unlike the roasted nuts carts in Boston, these waffles better taste more delicious than they smell or else there will be hell to pay.

Now I’m going to go pass out.

P.S. My new address is:
42 Princes Square
#234
London W2 4NL

You know, in case you want to send me something awesome.

Sweet potatoes! Am I glad I slept through THAT Superbowl!

I received a few responses on how to “deal with” the double kiss fiasco. I think Sylvia put it best when talking about standing on my toes to come up to them and said, “Just because we’re short doesn’t mean we should have to work harder at their customs.”

Here’s the deal with censorship in the UK. There is none. I saw a picture of a half naked woman in a store window today. Watching both tv shows and commercials as early as 7 at night it is possible to see full frontal (and back for that matter) nudity. And swearing? Anything goes with that, too. But even though the youth of England is exposed, no pun intended, to all of this, they still manage to grow up with more manners and less violence than American kids who can’t hold hands in an elementary school without getting suspended.

Saturday night I went to see a play called The Seventeenth Valentine. The play itself was okay; kinda depressing material and dialogue that didn’t really blow my skirt up, but was well acted nevertheless. What was most interesting though was the theater. In London, you can find pub-theaters all over the place. They’re basically self explanatory; it’s a pub in front and a theater in the back. The one I went to on Saturday, The White Bear Theater, was the dodgiest pub I’ve been to. Everyone was drunk and watching soccer when I came in and they hadn’t moved from that position when I left. Actually, as I was leaving there were two men getting into a pretty heated shouting match, or slurring match rather, over the Man United game.

Something happened on my way back home that night that made me remember the goodness in people. I was doing my crossword on the Tube and this older French couple was sitting next to me. After about five minutes, the British woman across from us leaned over to them and said, “I just want you to know. The two of you make a wonderful couple.” She hadn’t talked to them before this, she had simply just watched them whisper to each other. But she saw something in them and wanted them to know. Hearing her say this to them made me smile all the way home.

Mwah

I am in the land of the double kiss. So far, every one of mine has been awkward. I never know whether I’m supposed to hug AND do the double kiss…what is the appropriate amount of body contact? And am I really supposed to kiss each side of the person’s face or do I just do the air kiss? Do I do it both at the beginning of the get together AND the end? After doing the double kiss at the beginning, is it okay to do just a one kiss at the end or even not at all? And most importantly, what do I do when I meet up with someone who I really don’t want to do the double kiss with lest it give them the wrong impression, after all, they’ve been smothering me at work asking me to SLEEP OVER when they have a girlfriend? (I won’t name names, but his name beings with ‘R’ and ends with ‘ichard.’) Little help here?

As I was talking to a box office teller this week, I slipped in the word ‘quid.’ I’m not sure why, but whenever I use this word I think I am using it incorrectly and I feel like the person who I’m talking to can see right through me and knows I’m a phoney.

Gimme a ping = gimme a ring

In order to finance my coffee habit (and at 2 QUID a cup, it’s getting a bit expensive), I signed up to be a volunteer for a research study. Even I’M a little surprised I was able to find this so quickly in a new city, but it’s amazing the things this so-called internet has. I basically had to read a couple pamphlets on medicine and then answer reading comprehension questions. Despite the fact that reading comprehension was the only subject I ever got a C in (college, and therefore my D in “The Hebrew Bible,” doesn’t count), I did okay. Fine, truth be told, the girl had to point to the answer in the reading a couple times for me, but I still earned enough to pay for 12 coffees, so it’s all good.

Last night was my first play/musical in London! It’s called Blair on Broadway and it was at a tiny theater in the West End. I was distracted for a lot of the show because the guy playing Blair had a foundation smudge on his shoulder and I kept wanting someone to brush it off for him. Regardless, the show was really funny and well put together. I had to lean over to K a couple times to ask questions like “Who’s the fat guy on the left supposed to be?” “Did Blair really get arrested?” and “Did Gordon Brown really tackle Blair like that at 10 Downing Street?” (The answers being a Deputy PM (I think, but completely forget already), yes, and no.) Maybe I would have enjoyed the play even more had I known more about the politics of Tony Blair, but even as an ignorant American I could get the gist – he’s a lady’s man, he’s all smoke and mirrors, his country hates him as much as we hate Bush for going to war in Iraq, etc etc etc.

I will say this though…going to Sydney and London certainly help me learn who the current prime ministers are.

Creepy old British ladies and their “babies”

I completely accept the fact that America has terrible television shows such as 1 vs. 100, The Hills, Wife Swap, and Step By Step. But England, you’d better sack up and admit that showing a program called My Fake Baby about women who buy dolls that look and feel just like infant babies is crossing a line. One man was being interviewed about his stance on his wife’s infatuation with the dolls while she was sitting right next to him. He made the mistake of referring to the dolls as, gasp, dolls and his wife corrected him, demanding he say “babies.” Another woman was asked how her husband feels about her obsession. She said, “He’ll just have to get used to it.” I’m DEFINITELY going to have nightmares tonight.

I think my mp3 player knows I’m in the UK because it’s playing a lot more Queen than it usually does.

The theater website K sent me is absolutely incredible. I already have tickets to go see three shows in the coming week. And for $4 a show, you can bet I’ll see any and every show that comes along.

As I maneuvered my way through a few tube stations at rush hour today, I realized what it feels like to be a commuter in a city of 8 bajillion. It’s EXACTLY like you’re doing double dutch and it’s your turn to jump in but you have to wait for that perfect moment amongst the hordes of people making sure you don’t step in anyone else’s way, step on someone’s feet, walk into a wall, walk into a turnstile, fall down the escalator, step onto the train while the door is closing, or go down the hallway that takes you to the Jubilee line when you really want to go to the Bakerloo line. I’m not very good at double dutch.

Bar bouncer: “What’s yer ight?”
Lisa: “What’s my WHAT?”
Bouncer: “What’s yer ight?”
Lisa: “Umm….”
Bouncer (makes a motion with his hand above his head): “Yer ight, yer ight!”
Lisa: “Oh, my height! I’m 5 feet.”
Bouncer: “Nope. You’re too short to come in.”
Lisa: “What? No way…”
Bouncer: “Hahahaha.”
(Silence)

Can someone confirm what substances make stains visible on your jeans under a blacklight? Is it really just bodily fluids and blood? Because if it is, I can never show my face in that bar again…and apparently, I really need to wash these jeans.

My new cell phone number for the duration of my time in London is 0750 2258 801. If you’re dialing from America, dial 011 44 750 etc. If you’re dialing from Sydney, well, I have no idea what to tell you, sorry. Also, feel free to text! (International rates should be the same as domestic.)