You know, I haven't been culture shocked yet. I thought for sure just stepping off the plane and heading into Londontown I'd feel like MY LIFE HAS CHANGED FOREVER but it really hasn't. Thus far on my trip I've learned that English food is awesome provided you eat at the right places (and NO I have not had Indian food yet!), that it's a bunch of bologna that London is full of tiny cars. London is like New York City but like a million years old with quirkier people. It's like Central London is Manhattan and South London is like whatever the bad neighborhood of NYC is. Queens? Bronx? I dunno. Something I haven't visited since I was a kid and was clearly not impressed by it and decided to toss it out of my head. LOL.
So let's recap my trip thus far:
2/26:
Land at 1:00 pm at Heathrow. Instead of taking a cab we decided to take the tube from place to place because my dad said it was the way to go. Well, it turns out we were carrying luggage up and down gigantic flights of stairs (may I just add that my suitcase had a HEAVY tag on it and Dom had to do it for me) and I'm sure all the Londonites were laughing hysterically at the stupid Americans with all their fucking luggage and being lost and not knowing where to go. Finally, we all got sick of going from train to train because the subway system here is a fucking zoo so we got off and found ourselves a cab to take us back to the West Kensington Hotel.
Somehow my mom got this bright idea to book the room through American Express with the "American Express will never fail me" mentality. She booked the Kensington West. The West Kensington Hotel is actually not a hotel. It's more like a maze made for monkeys that you'd find in an animal testing lab. When we checked in they probably named us all "exhibit a, b, c & d" so forth and i would not be surprised if there were hidden cameras everywhere and being broadcasted live on the interwebz. First of all, you go up to go down to go to down, then through 50 doors to go up and then down again and each room has a front door then 1 foot away in front of it is a fire door. It makes for interesting ways of how to get inside the room itself. It's very reminiscent of MC Escher's "Relativity" (see pic at top). This place is a joke. A total fucking joke. The lift isn't really a lift. It's more a coffin that was purchased on clearance sale because your family doesn't love you and doesn't care where, how, or how well fit you are to your coffin. Fold you in half? Fine. Just get in. If the damn thing would have stopped for more than a minute I probably would have said my prayers because I don't think oxygen would last more than a minute in there. The room is the same size as my bedroom at home and the bathroom is no bigger than a phone booth. Honestly, I think I can shit better in a phone booth. The 1 foot by 1 foot shower is actually a phone booth style door which opens TOWARDS you so if you are fat you are not coming out. Come to think of it, I don't think my parents have showered yet. If you touch the water knob it's like a 10 degree difference and it circulates between boiling the skin and subzero temperatures so in essence it's torture. The room smells like fresh caca on a hot, humid day with a slight hint of musk. This "quad" room is really meant for four cats.... Four very thin, very poor cats. Granted the neighborhood is absolutely adorable and somehow this bed and breakfast place got good reviews so we didn't think it would be as terrible as it really is. Clearly the reviews were from people who live in a mud hut in Africa because this is not suitable for people. At least we are moving to a new hotel at Hyde Park tomorrow.
On the plus side, everything about this room has been a comedy show. I don't think my family and I have laughed as a whole this much since I was born. My mom doesn't stop complaining about everything, my dad is making my mom's life Hell, Dom's making jokes at both my dad and mom's expense and this is life here in London. It's fucking hilarious and awesome, in the most uncomfortable way ever.
So besides the fact that the Hotel is beyond rubbish, our first night we accomplished the hilarious. Somehow we strolled into a gay bar and ate dinner there. After getting to the what i am now calling the research facility, we took off for a walk and went to the first pub-looking thing we found. It is called Three Kings. It is a gay bar. We didn't know it was a gay bar. I mean, back in Los Angeles you go a gay bar and people are CLEARLY GAY. There is no football on tv, beer on draft or pub food. It's all about fashion, fruity martini's and dirty sex. Somehow this somewhat normal bar was a gay bar. But none of the men looked gay. or sounded gay. In some way this sort of depresses me because I love the gays and my dad gets uncomfortable WHICH IS AWESOME because he ends up babbling and embarrassing my mom. The poor waitress tried to warn us by saying this "isn't a normal restaurant" and my dad was like, "yeah, it's a pub!" and she she was like, "yeaaaaaaahhh... kind of like a pub..." I think we should have gotten the hint but I guess jetlag got the best of us. Dom got a couple of winkies and his good looks and charm should have gotten us free food and it didn't. For my first dinner in London I was disappointed because I ordered fish & chips and it was mush and crap and the peas were over cooked but I did discover this shit called HP sauce and it sort of makes my life. I will need to bring some home. After the gay "pub" we tooled around in the subway system where my dad decided to lead us to every single wrong station possible. It is there
that my mom almost had a mental breakdown and started crying and calling my dad a stupid man. I guess she is right that he is stupid but in some way I am happy she was the first to cry. I TOTALLY thought it would be me.
After fighting the subway systems we had this brilliant idea to take a double decker to Picadilly and Dom and I slept through the whole ride. What's interesting is that my dad normally sleeps like 20 hours in a day but being the Jew that he is, he figures if he's paying for it he will absorb as much of it as possible which means zero sleep for the weary. My dad does well in zombie-land I guess. I also discovered that the man does not stop drinking and wakes up at random hours to drink a tall can of carlsberg beer he keeps next to his bed.
Anyway, I think this blog is long enough. I will post about 2/27 when I wake up since it's 3 something am and i'm taking a break from sleeping.
On the plus side, everything about this room has been a comedy show. I don't think my family and I have laughed as a whole this much since I was born. My mom doesn't stop complaining about everything, my dad is making my mom's life Hell, Dom's making jokes at both my dad and mom's expense and this is life here in London. It's fucking hilarious and awesome, in the most uncomfortable way ever.
So besides the fact that the Hotel is beyond rubbish, our first night we accomplished the hilarious. Somehow we strolled into a gay bar and ate dinner there. After getting to the what i am now calling the research facility, we took off for a walk and went to the first pub-looking thing we found. It is called Three Kings. It is a gay bar. We didn't know it was a gay bar. I mean, back in Los Angeles you go a gay bar and people are CLEARLY GAY. There is no football on tv, beer on draft or pub food. It's all about fashion, fruity martini's and dirty sex. Somehow this somewhat normal bar was a gay bar. But none of the men looked gay. or sounded gay. In some way this sort of depresses me because I love the gays and my dad gets uncomfortable WHICH IS AWESOME because he ends up babbling and embarrassing my mom. The poor waitress tried to warn us by saying this "isn't a normal restaurant" and my dad was like, "yeah, it's a pub!" and she she was like, "yeaaaaaaahhh... kind of like a pub..." I think we should have gotten the hint but I guess jetlag got the best of us. Dom got a couple of winkies and his good looks and charm should have gotten us free food and it didn't. For my first dinner in London I was disappointed because I ordered fish & chips and it was mush and crap and the peas were over cooked but I did discover this shit called HP sauce and it sort of makes my life. I will need to bring some home. After the gay "pub" we tooled around in the subway system where my dad decided to lead us to every single wrong station possible. It is there
that my mom almost had a mental breakdown and started crying and calling my dad a stupid man. I guess she is right that he is stupid but in some way I am happy she was the first to cry. I TOTALLY thought it would be me.After fighting the subway systems we had this brilliant idea to take a double decker to Picadilly and Dom and I slept through the whole ride. What's interesting is that my dad normally sleeps like 20 hours in a day but being the Jew that he is, he figures if he's paying for it he will absorb as much of it as possible which means zero sleep for the weary. My dad does well in zombie-land I guess. I also discovered that the man does not stop drinking and wakes up at random hours to drink a tall can of carlsberg beer he keeps next to his bed.
Anyway, I think this blog is long enough. I will post about 2/27 when I wake up since it's 3 something am and i'm taking a break from sleeping.
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