Impressions and more word use

A post without a mission...
Means
It's observation time!

-- Anytime you turn on British TV and there's someone who's overweight on it, the show invariably is about this person's desire to lose weight. Next week they're plying THE HALF TON MAN out of his flat.

-- The British communicate almost exclusively with their eyes while they're on the street. Don't say hi to anyone, merely look up and blink and carry on. Then cover your face with a paper while you're on the Tube. In such a culture*, cosmopolitanism can't really exist. It's all individuals doing their thing. You need ideas bouncing off one another in a public setting in order for such a dynamic culture to foment.

*They're actually good people when you get to talking, not much different than Americans or Spanish or Italians or Russians or people from New Jersey. One of them asked me to be his bodyguard a couple weeks ago because he said his friends were getting "flabby."**

** I had to decline the offer. We can't take money here, acc. to our visas.

-- Also: the culture's obsessed with race. Issues that we had to deal with about 140 years ago, they just felt after WWII. There was a long story on Michael Jordan the other day based on the fact that he was "the first black athlete to be accepted by America."

-- In the past week here, they just banned smoking in all pubs and clubs, made PINs necessary for every purchase and will vote for legislation against "glorifying terrorism." Some nails legislation, if you ask me.


I'll try to come up with more adventures this week, but I gotta pile up some stiff £s before they change over to €s for my WEEK IN GERMANY WITH NILS NEXT WEEK!