LONDON CALLINGS

Still haven't gotten into a work / home rhythm. Expect posts to be short, incoherent, and oh-so-lacking insight.

In other words, this blog as it's always been, only set in London.

Anyway, let's try to catch up . . .



Diversity, thy name is London.

Just based on the number of different faces I see and accents I hear on the Tube, and how far from the city center I still see/hear them, places like New York got nothing on London in terms of diversity. This was even recently celebrated at a Migrants' Mass at Westminster Cathedral (where I think we had diversity to thank for such a jiggy choir-leader =)

A little observation on the local food, or as they call it here, Thai.

There's a surprisingly large number of high-end Thai restaurants here, seemingly the anchor of every town's High Street (pubs aside). And for whatever reason, during the LLDD-Hyphen-L and I's first several days in London, all of our new acquaintances took us out to dinner to every place except those that served British fare. It wasn't until well into our second week that the LLDD-Hyphen-L and I finally got to tear into some real fish-and-chips.

Even here, the LLDD-Hyphen-L's the one who gets all the cool gigs.

I shoo the LLDD-Hyphen-L to go off to the museums near Trafalgar Square while I'm at work, so of course she comes back as an extra in the latest T-Mobile commercial featuring Pink (the follow up to the uber-cool "Dance" commercial). To make matters worse, I could hear the roars from my office window, and now can't get "Na na na na" out of my head.

Mark my words, right hand-drive will be the death of me.

I'm still thrown off by the whole drive-on-the-other-side-of-the road thing. Sure, the pedestrian lanes help by telling you which way you should look when you cross, but they also make my 30-plus years of Philippine-street instinct want to look the other way even more (like when someone says "Don't think about Juday", so of course now you can't help but think of nothing but Juday). I'll get used to it soon enough, but until then I keep on embarassing the LLDD-Hyphen-L by yelling things like "Hey, there's a dog driving that car!" before realizing "Oh right, that's the passenger seat."

(BTW, for all the cars, the roads here are generally quiet because drivers hardly honk their horns. When they do honk, it's usually long, preceded by a braking/screeching sound, and succeeded by some verbal variant of "wanker")

Bow before your limescale overlords

Very soon after you arrive in London, you will be taught to fear the limescale. It's apparently a build-up of minerals in the water that, if left unchecked, will break down washing machines, dishwashers, faucets, toilets etc. It's such a concern that a whole industry of cleaners, chemicals and filters is devoted to raising the limescale bogeyman and countering its effects. At the same time, they say water from the tap is safe to drink. I'm sure it is, but I'm just wondering, if limescale can bring major appliances to a literal grinding halt, what effect does it have on my skin, my teeth, my stomach or - gasp - my hair?

(actually, I can tell you right now from personal experience: shampoos from the Philippines don't lather in London; and I've been told that the shower water supposedly causes falling hair, which is just as well, because some places here charge £30 for a haircut)

Loo Fung Supermarket will cure your homesickness real good.

Longganisa, Chippy and Datu Puti, oh my! Longganisa, Chippy and Datu Puti, oh my!

Cocktail party where you don't know anyone there -- This is what we trained for, people!

I attend my first social/networking event at a trendy-looking bar called "Hush". (so named, I assume, because it's hidden from the main street as well as anything in La Pigna.) I only recognize a few other people from work, and even then we've always been taught not to "clump". Fortunately, bringing up Manny Pacquiao seems to be as good an icebreaker here as anywhere else.

Speaking of that other Manny . . .

There was some coverage of the Pacquiao-Hatton fight, but it was still buried beneath all the Champions League stories. I was hoping a nearby pub would show the fight, but none seemed to carry it. We did get an invitation to a viewing party, but were advised against attending because it was too far, it'd be too early in the morning, and too many beers would have been served by then (we later heard that fights broke out at the place). Fortunately, Manny took care of bidness in quick, suitable-for-youtube fashion, and that was that. The British media and public, in turn, seemed generally forgiving of Hatton. In fact, the presence of his fiance and a boatload of other bikinied admirers around him right after the fight suggests maybe we should all be as lucky as Ricky and be on the receiving end of a Pacquiao left.

Nah.

The scourge of every big city, I suppose

I still feel safe in London, but not since Geneva have I heard so many locals bring up personal accounts of crime. And the nicknames given to some of the criminals - "Hammer Gang", "Hugger Muggers" - would easily translate back home.

Britain, you should be feeling an uptick in your economy soon; the LLDD-Hyphen-L says "You're welcome"

Yes, London can be expensive, so the LLDD-Hyphen-L beseeches y'all to remember these names: Tesco, Primark, Asda and, above all, Argo's and its telephone directory-sized catalogue. Makes for great values. And nighttime reading.

I can say "D'oh!" with an accent now.

They tax a lot of things here that we don't back home (like TVs!), so when the LLDD-Hyphen-L and I first went to a supermarket and saw that we had to use £1 just to unchain a shopping cart, I decided enough was enough and staged a mini self-protest. Against the LLDD-Hyphen-L's better judgment, we passed on using the carts and picked up a couple of free shopping baskets instead. The veins on our biceps burst like Wolverine's as we loaded a week's worth of groceries into the baskets and lugged them all around -- it was the principle of not having to pay for use of a shoopping cart, dammit! Then, as we were about to finish, we run into a collegue at the embassy, who sees us and asks "Why aren't you using a cart? You get the £1 back when you return it."

I avoid eye contact with the LLDD-Hyphen-L for the rest of the evening.

Honestly, I thought there'd be less to lamppost maintenance than this

Maybe it's because I've seen the MMDArtists in action, but I didn't think those iconic London lampposts were each touched-up this meticulously. Or that the painters would have groupies.

And finally, I know it's their language, grammar and syntax and everything, but some things can still get lost in translation, so to speak.

Then again, I'm the one who thinks those "Walang Tawiran Nakamamatay" signs need comas after "Tawiran", or else people would think "No Crossing Can Kill" and then get run over, so what do I know?