I am once again sitting in my hotel room and writing on the interblogs while I wait for (e:dragonlady7) to get back from practice with the London Rollergirls. I've just been on a very, very long walk on my own so I'm enjoying some tea and Jaffa cakes while my feet go on strike for a little bit.

[Regent's Park, by the way, is enormous. It is so large that if Regent's Park were a meatball, Queen Mary's Garden would be a complete hard-boiled-egg park inside of it, an entire snack in its own right but in this case used merely as a filling. ]

London is a very expensive place, so we are staying at a sort-of discount hotel. It's nothing as terrible as the Blue Dolphin - the room is clean, the proprietors are friendly, and we have our own bathroom. They're not charging L150/night largely due to our location [a half-mile from the tube], the size of our room [large enough to fit a queen-size bed with enough room left over for a teapot], and the fact that our gigantic ground-floor window brings us all the light and traffic noise of midday conveniently throughout the night. Still, it's much better than it could be, and far better than I was expecting.

Our first night we got in at 12:30, stinking like travel, only to discover we'd been shorted some [ok, all] towels. B used her t-shirt; I used the bathmat. The next morning, there was some discussion: does L70 a night even get us towels?

And then there was the slight problem that B broke our bed doing nothing acrobatic I promise. There is a little ledge that runs around the inside of the bed frame, which holds up a piece of plywood, which holds up the mattress [which, for all intents and purposes, is yet another piece of plywood]. The ledge at the foot of the bed broke off, so that if you sat at the foot and put just the right amount of weight in just the right place, the head of the mattress would flip up [I told you it was firm].

Which brings us to the proprietors. They remind me in many ways of a few Upstanding Businessmen I knew in New Jersey - polite enough, but with the kind of thick, indistinguishable accent that says 'please don't fuck with me because you can't even imagine what we're fronting here.' And here we were, complaining about towels that were Mysteriously Missing and the bed we totally busted.

When we brought the manager over to our room, we found that in our absence the maid had given us towels [probably reporting us to the klepto police] and removed the broken bed piece [probably reporting us to the sex maniac police]. Despite thinking we're total dipwads, the manager sent some people in to fix the bed, and everything's all smoothed over.

At least I thought it was. When I came back from my walk I swear I heard him mutter under his breath: 'I hate you.'

next episode: gaydar

- Z

it's a series of tubes.

- Z

I am totally fascinated by the Scajaquada Creek. It empties into the Black Rock Canal at Squaw Island; if you were an insane person with a canoe [and no sense of smell] going upstream along the creek , you'd pass through Black Rock and North Buffalo before reaching the reflecting pool at the Historic Society and Hoyt Lake at Delaware Park. This is all very familiar due to the eponymous expressway and bike path. Were you to go upriver from Hoyt Lake you'd pass under Delaware Ave and into Forest Lawn Cemetery. The creek ends in a culvert at Main St near Delavan, but um, there's nothing on the other side.

That's when it gets fascinating. Between 1921 and 1937 the Scajaquada Creek was buried in an enormous 3.5 mile long tunnel from Main St & Delavan Ave all the way out to Cheektowaga, where it emerges at Pine Ridge Rd near Walden Ave. The city has been built up so densely since then that looking at satellite photos it's extremely difficult to tell where the creek goes. Current government maps don't show the river at all, or show it as a straight line between the two points. There's very little mention of the project or the tunnel anywhere online. For all intents and purposes, there is a 3.5 mile section of the creek that just doesn't exist anymore. If you continued upstream, you'd be outside for less than two miles before you found yourself underneath the Galleria Mall. USGS lists the creek's source as some subdivision in Lancaster, 13 miles east of the Niagara River.

In researching the creek, I dug up a scan of a 1901 USGS map of the Buffalo area and pastede it onto Google Earth, which is fascinating in its own right [18.7M]. [Use Google Earth's opacity slider to time-warp 107 years.]

It's going to be tough to keep myself from urban-spelunking it this summer. Gross.

- Z

ps for those of you who give a shit: the creek goes underneath the Canisius athletic complex, and underneath Florida St. It then turns south underneath a footpath, underneath the Kensington Expressway, and along the path to Fillmore Ave. From there it goes between an industrial complex and a railroad before continuing along the appropriately-named Scajaquada Street. At Bailey Avenue, it no longer follows the street, instead going behind a row of backyards, crossing Genesee St at Kearns Ave. It flows underneath Schiller Park and Villa Maria College before emerging again at Pine Ridge Road.

It is, in fact, a series of tubes. We landed in the UK around 9.15p; it wasn't until about midnight before we finally emerged from the ant farm. Heathrow was probably very conveniently laid-out at one time, with the arrivals and baggage claim on the same side of the airport. However it is also enormous, and Customs ended up on the other side of the airport. So it's a quarter-mile walk through a long tube to Customs, a long stand in a Queue, and then a quarter-mile walk back to your baggage - where it's no longer riding around on the carousel but rather scattered around on the floor.

Then there's another quarter-mile of tubes to get to the Tube-tube. There is one train that goes from Heathrow; its ultimate destination is something called Cockfosters, or Cockfester or Cockgobbler, depending on whether you ask me, (e:dragonlady7), or a sane person [irrespectively]. We think we are hilarious; others on the train not so much.

There are many really drunk people who inhabit the Tube-tube. Some were trying to get a picture with a maintenance man. Another was rushed out of the train and horked all over the wall as we pulled away. I'm told this is a popular hobby. [Binge drinking, that is; not horking.]

There was, I should mention for completeness, another very long tube in the station where we made our transfer.

When we finally emerged in Camden Town, there were over a half-dozen unlicensed cab drivers who were either extremely helpful people or who think "dragging 100lbs of luggage through Camden at midnight" means "rube." There is, for future reference, a difference between foolish [which we are] and stupid [which we are not]. Turns out unlicensed cab drivers are responsible for about ten rapes a month in London? What the Hell kind of weird scam is that?

After we finally found our hotel a couple miles up the road and checked in, we went back to a Tesco Express and housed a couple mediocre sandwiches, some Fanta, and a couple Jaffa cakes. Jaffa cakes are delicious. [You can get them at Premier, where they seem overpriced for what they are. You can reassure yourself that they seem overpriced for what they are over here, too.]

With our long day behind us, we zonked the fuck out. It was 8pm EDT. I woke up at 9am this morning, or 4am EDT.

This morning we decided to call up (e:dragonlady7)'s friend and drop in. We went out for a Full English Breakfast [for dinner, which was actually lunch] at a small diner. There was an egg, which was not cooked 'hard' or 'soft,' but simply 'as long as everything else.' There was a sausage, which was tasty but which didn't have the texture of something that was all meat. There was a Fried Slice - I was hoping for something along the lines of Ham but it turned out to be more like Bread. They made fun of me for ordering it, but it was the come-from-behind winner in the English Dinner-Lunch-Breakfast. There were mushrooms, which were palatable and sort of flavorless in the way that mushrooms are. There were baked beans, which I have to admit were kind of a Dadaist touch to an otherwise normal-looking breakfast meal. There was also a little square of Bubble and Squeak, which was kind of tasteless mashed potatoes with some Green stirred in and fried.

I was not brave enough to order the one with the black pudding, but I was allowed to try a bite of someone else's. Look, people: it is an object that looks like a cookie but is made out of blood. That is a seriously fucked-up thing to do, ok? If I tell you how delicious it was I might as well just give H.P. Lovecraft a little paper hat and a job at Denny's.

I'm getting tired now so I'll finish with one more item: there is no trapeze at Oxford Circus but if there were it would be insane.

And now I'm finishing up a cup of tea I made myself in the dark. It tastes more like soap than anything else so I'm going to block it out of my mind until tomorrow morning.

- Z

So it turns out that we're going to London next week [I guess this wasn't actually likely?] and I've been quietly stressing out about weird things. I'm not worried about the standard things, like whether the luggage handlers are going to shred my favorite angora sweater and route it to darkest Canada. No, I'm weirding out about culture shock.

I had a nightmare this week that I couldn't understand a word anybody said. I would ask people to repeat themselves three or four times until they thought I was making fun of them. I'm actually seriously worried about the language barrier.



But what really concerns me is the food. (e:dragonlady7) tried explaining this to me, we'll see if I got it right. First you've got Breakfast, which is actually breakfast. But then you've got Dinner, which is actually lunch. And then you've got Supper, which is actually dinner. And then you've got Tea, which is actually snacks. Tea [the beverage] is not just served at Tea [the meal], but at every meal and in fact sort of in a constant stream, right into your face.



I think we're going to try to stay at a B&B. The thing is, you wake up in the morning, you don't want to go wandering around the city looking for breakfast. You don't really want to go any further than 'downstairs.' And I know innkeepers aren't exactly gourmet chefs, but I've always considered breakfast as something you can't screw up that badly. But then (e:dragonlady7) makes an offhand comment: 'English full breakfast is kind of weird...' What.


Breakfast, courtesy of Wikipedia

So let's take a look at this thing. First we got some bacon in the middle, perhaps a little undercooked but it's definitely something we can work with. We got some scrambled eggs up front, ok. Some hash brown patties over there. I'm a hash brown fan, and those look pretty well-fried. We're doing good so far. Got half a plum tomato, not sure what that's doing there, but we'll push that off to (e:dragonlady7)'s plate & maybe she won't notice. Got some canned mushrooms. I gotta say, I didn't see that one coming. I'm a mushroom man, I've probably even had some at breakfast maybe buried in a Denver omelette or something. But just on their own like that, I dunno, it's a little much. And over here we got uh, baked beans? Yeah, baked beans. Maybe they go with the mushrooms. I guess we'll try stirring those up a little bit, maybe see if it makes a little more sense that way. No, guess not. And oh my God what the fuck is that? Thank you for going Jack the Ripper all over my breakfast perhaps we will move on to dessert now OK.



I'm going to pass on the obvious jokes to make a serious point here: these two words do not belong together, least of all in the context of dessert. Let's move onto snacks.



This right here is everything that terrifies me about British cuisine. Wish me luck.

- Z