London Calling

My first trip to London was a wildly colorful experience. Before launching into any description of the weekend, we must thank Selwyn and Brenda Bloch for their gracious hospitality. Brenda helped reintroduce us to good food after five weeks in the culinarily deprived nation of Germany.

We landed at Stanstead Airport and quickly rushed to the train that shuttles you from the gate to the main terminal. Inside, we were standing next to a rowdy group of men. They looked like miners who had just returned from holiday in Spain paid for by their union. They had thick working class accents and were already discussing how "pissed" they were about to get. I could have sworn that we were part of a Guy Richie movie (by the way, I'm very distressed about the rumors flying around that say he and Madona are going to split up...such a lovely couple).

It was overwhelming to arrive in a city of over 10 million after living in a small town of 200,000 for the past month and a half. Whenever we boarded the Underground, we were crushed by thousands of people heading to a multitude of places around the city. When we weren't busy dodging putrid vagrats and their dogs riding the subway, we were able to squeeze in some great people watching. One man obviously drunk man was sitting across from us with his girlfriend. I looked down I noticed that he had scratch marks all over his legs that were bleeding. It looked like he had been walking through a thicket of some sort. But as far as I know, London doesn't have any jungle areas accessible via the Tube.

The highlight of the sightseeing portion of our trip was being drawn into the Gay Parade in Trafalgar Square. Dani and I had our picture taken with a group of transgender and crossdressed cops (plus a very happy prisoner). Many people were sporting pink Union Jacks which looked like they had just been through the laundry with red socks. Even though this was a Pride event with diffenent organizations handing out a cornucopia of material, the British found ample opportunity to drink...and drink...and drink. The trash containers were filled sky high with debris from all sorts of alcoholic beverages. We even saw a group of girls (aged fourteen through sixteen?) adding Coca-Cola to their nearly empty vodka bottles.

Our flight back to Bonn was on Sunday evening and Dani and I were sad that we couldn't spend more time in an English speaking environment. Fortunately, Dani's family loaded us up with some English books to help make us feel more at home here in Germany.

You can see more pictures from our trip on the PicasaWeb site.