Just thought I should let you know that I have new shoes now. No doubt you all will be relieved. They are Demon Pods, size 45. I bought them at a store called Dolci's in Manchester. Shelley's just didn't have what I was looking for.
The trip to Manchester was relatively uneventful. If you are planning to travel by train in this country, you should avoid travelling in rush hour. When I came here I caught a rush hour train. One way from Manchester was 11 pounds. When we went to buy shoes, it was post-rushhour and the price was 8 pounds 60 for a return ticket. The exchange rate is about $2.50 to the pound, by the way. And the best exchange rate can be had just by using your interac card once you get here. My, what a global village we live in.
Vicki and I bought our tickets and had some time to kill so we wandered up to the castle. The castle is owned by the queen and is a working court and prison. Accordingly, as soon as we stepped inside, we were set upon by a security guard who guided us back out the door and told us that tours did not start until March 16th (the day I leave). We did managed to get a glimpse of the Queen Mom giving a caning to some hapless inmate before we were kicked out though. That was pretty cool.
The train trip was pretty uneventful...
Side note: Vicki is now squeezing smushed up garlic out of a toothpaste tube. There are some definite food oddities in this country. The garlic toothpaste thing is a clever one though.
Fashion update:
First of all, I've gotten used to the makeup and skirts now and I think, overall, it's a pretty good thing. Last night (Saturday night) we were in a trendy bar. People tend to dress up a bit more when they go out over here than they do back home. Anyway, I got quite drunk and at some point in the evening I acclimatized and decided that I approved of the concept of short skirts and makeup. I managed to keep this thought to myself, however, as I was out with Vicki and her Woman's Studies colleagues.
More specifically on the fashion front, the shoes here are light years ahead of anything at Gravity Pope. The drabbest grandmother over here has cooler shoes than any of you plebian colonials. Vicki and I were headed to a store called Shelley's Shoes in Manchester. The guys shoes were pretty cool. In particular there were some pretty radical hiking boot things with ski-boot clasps. And there were platforms and pointy shoes and buckles up the wazoo and weird spice girl running shoe things but with a masculine touch and an entire wall of Vans and another wall of Cats and a separate room of Doc Marten's. They haven't quite caught onto the safety shoe thing yet. The Cats were the only things with steel toes in the place. Perhaps that trend has come and gone over here. Shelley's was the third shoe store we hit, though, and I just didn't see anything that had a better combination of price, function, and style than my Demon Pods.
The Men's shoe floor though was conventionality squared compared to the women's. The women's floor was like a candy store for feet. Thigh-high, metallic purple, open-toe boots; tottering, solid-wood platform sandals; leopard-skin knee-highs; camouflage thigh-highs; platform, slingback running shoes of all colors and patterns; 6 inch stilettos with straps up to your crotch; and more conventional but still very stylish shoes like your typical block-heeled, square-toed, green alligator pumps.
At the next shoe store we went to I asked one of the sales clerks where we should go for lunch and she recommended a very colorful tapas bar which I can't remember the name of. Vicki thinks it may have been "La Tasca". We had about six different tapas and about a litre of the best sangria I have ever had. I brushed up on my Spanish with the waiter and waved my arms a lot and shouted. I remember being quite fluent at the time but I can't seem to recall any of it now, except "Muy Bueno" and "Donde Esta La Playa" and "More Sangria Please". You may doubt that this is true, but (and Vicki will back me up on this) I was convincing enough that the waiter thought we were from South America. I would guess that he had a very poor opinion of the purity of South American Spanish.
Emboldened by our cultural adventure, we strode forth and threw 50 pounds at the clerk in Dolci's for my Demon Pods and headed off to do battle with a evil dj in a coffee shop in Manchester's banking center.
Food Note:
Ohmigawd, but the coffee sucks in this country. We should send them the Tsuga Red-Carpet coffee machine as humanitarian relief.
It was a pretty subtle battle with the evil dj, actually. We were just sitting there, enjoying a cup of horrible coffee, when he attacked us by playing "Green Onions" at tympana-destroying volume and shouting about some weird quiz thing that was due to start at any minute. We fought back by using all the psychic power at our disposal to cause his brain to explode. Sadly, we lost.
Our next adventure was with the privatized rail service in Britain. I don't really feel like telling you about it, though, and I can sense you're getting bored, so I will just say this. The British are a polite people, but deeply fucked up. Suffice it to say, the conductor made an announcement about the front two cars going off someplace different than the rest of the train without mentioning that they had, in fact, just added these two new cars to the front of the train. Since everyone in what had been the front two cars of the train before the new cars were added now thought they were in the wrong car, we all leapt up and started heading to the back of the train. Everything became extremely jammed up and confused and it didn't get straightened out for about four stops (about half an hour). Also, somehow, all this confusion doubled the length of our trip. Vicki and I weren't too concerned because we figured that the worst that could happen is that the train would go off a cliff into the sea and we all would die, but at least we were together and wouldn't it be romantic (just like the Titanic, sort of).
The next day was the drinking in the trendy bar with the Women's Studies Gals day which turned into the drinking in the trendy bar with the Woman's Studies Gals and drinking in the cool pub by the canal with the Women's Studies Gals and drinking in the 18th century row house belonging to a Women's Studies Gal with Women's Studies Gals day.
Today was the sleep in until noon, then walk around the nearby villages day.
Tomorrow I'm off to London to meet my mother at the Repton Hotel. We are planning to hang out in London for a few days, then rent a car and spirit Vicki off for a weekend in Scotland. Deb bought a book on Scotland for me to read on the plane which I haven't got round to finishing yet. It is called "Outlander" and is billed as, "Great fun... marvelous and fantastic adventures, romance, sex.. perfect escape reading!" The description on the back reads "Claire Randall is leading a double life. She has a husband in one century, and a lover in another..." We're hoping to visit some of the places mentioned in the book and get some locals to sign it. I actually met a couple of Scots the other day but I didn't have the book with me.
I met them in a pub called Paddy Mulligan's. I know what you're thinking. Paddy Mulligan doesn't sound very Scottish. That's because it is an Irish Pub. The denizens of which just happened to be Scottish, including one very annoying guy in a red footballer shirt who barged into our little group uninvited.
"Ya canna play darts, mate," he told us when we sat down. "Th battrees awl gan." Then he laughed. Even the Scots with us had to ask him to repeat this witticism a couple of times before they could translate. This was a joke, you see. If we had hoped to play darts, we were destined to be disappointed as the batteries had run out. The joke was that dart boards, you see, don't really need batteries.
Later on, when one of our group went on an excursion to the bathroom, he sat down in her chair and started ranting to us about football and Glasgow and how Glaswegians were the scum of the Earth and how he'd rather be English than be a Glaswegian. And the whole city was full of English anyway.
In fact, it became clear over the course of the evening that the only people in Scotland that weren't English lived in Aberdeen. It sounded like there about six of them and they were all mates of the guy with the red football shirt. I think the other Scotsmen at our table were extremely relieved when he left our table to go rant about Scottish purity to an unsuspecting couple sitting by the pool table.
But, I must pack for my epic journey to the city which made Henry James exclaim, "All history appeared to live again, and the continuity of things to vibrate through my mind".
Ta, Chris
"Ya canna play darts, mate. The battrees awl gan."
-- Scottish Joke