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I promised I’d write, and now I am.

But first, a response to my grandfather: I have no idea why the staircase was called heliocolloidal. The entire audio tour was filled with words that seemed to have been picked only because they were the largest in the thesaurus. A perfect example was “The most fantastic and extravagant room in which you have ever been” which was neither fantastic nor extravagant, but very well could have been a less superlative synonym.
It is also possible that the Spanish-accented, British-educated voice said a different word that the 3 of us heard as heliocolloidal… heliocolumnal perhaps?
In the end, the thing was a big concrete spiral staircase… is wet cement colloidal–not quite solution, not quite emulsion?

Anyway, back to what I’m up to at the moment.

I’ve been in the UK now for about 10 days, and it is quite civilized here. I have been able to get access to computers, but I’ve been using the time to do some other things besides update the weblog. (sorry)

I’ve managed to log into the machines back home and fix some problems for FCI. I’ve also helped Andy get stuff sorted out and ready for Russia and his little trip “around the world”. I helped him move out of his London apartment, and buy his air tickets (he’s worse than me when it comes to procrastinating).

I’ve also just gone up and visited Kiyan and Pat from IBM. Kiyan is studying abroad in Leeds and Pat in Glasgow. They both seem to be having a great time, and are both planning trips to tour areas of Europe. — Me, I’ve got Russia to see.

I’ve managed to get quite a bunch of pictures from the UK (mostly in London) and on the train in Russia, I plan to do some major work on my Travelogue where I will write up a proper story about where I’ve been, what I’ve seen, and how I survived. It will be complete with pictures so you can all see the things I did.

Here are some quick observations about England:

• The Queen’s guards don’t wear Red in the winter apparently. Their coats were a dark grey when I went, and there weren’t nearly as many as you’d expect… they were also exceedingly far away. Fortunately, they still wore the fuzzy hats.
• The British drive on the left, walk to the left on sidewalks, have the up escalator on the left hand side, but still stand right/walk left when actually using the escalator… very strange.
• If you are ever tempted to believe that the British are pretentious in their language, just remember that their official term for what we call “articulated busses” is, “Bendy Busses”.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 28th, 2005 at 11:56 am and is filed under Around The World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.