"Happy Birthday! Or as they say in England, Happy Birthday!"

Last night I celebrated my twenty-first b-day in London. It was slightly odd without the company of my family and friends, but I made due with all nice people studying with me in London. It wasn't the first time I had an overseas birthday. I spent the first five years of my life in Japan. From looking at old photos I know my mom, obachan, and "great"-obachan, three generations of Machida women, would prepare an elaborate sushi dinner. My quirky aunt Yuri (who's a Japanese doppleganger of Phoebe from Friends) would pull pranks with me, usually using felt tip marker to ink crude drawings on my ass. She also entertained me by eating our pet Pomeranian's doggie treats. I don't remember if that all happened on my birthdays, but that memory comes from the same place in my head. Alas, as with most of my early childhood, I don't recollect most other memories. I've got photos and shit, but it isn't the same. Ain't fair.

I'm not big on birthdays primarily because the rest of my single-digit birthdays in the States never measured up to the ones my mom threw for me in Chiba. They were never consistently celebrated. I say this very jocularly: the lack of birthday cake traumatized my youth. See, fat kids love cake but they really love birthday cake and since I rarely had any, I cultivated disdain for the date January 18th. Before I developed my unbridled cynicism, I would wake up peppy as mint on my birthday. As an adult, it's usually a ritual on birthday mornings to stare into the bathroom mirror and acknowledge that I'm one year closer to leaving this mortal coil. So I'm a downer; sue me.

I think my anticipation for turning twenty-one fizzled away in an inverse relationship with the rise in prevalence of my underage drinking. Shit, we were copping handles easily as far back as 2004. Partying has become passe. Alcohol is not kind. It's deceitful. It's gotten me to slip my tongue more than a couple of times. Frankly, I liked being 20 better. It was a nice round number.

Thanks to Pat for the 31 flavors ice cream cake. FYI: The ice cream cake in England skips out on the cake component. It's really just one-third of the ice cream tub decorated with frosting.

Thanks to the bakers of 13 Bedford Place. Those were some really good chocolate chip cookies. Appreciated it.

And finally, thank you to the nation of Great Britain for the early birthday gift of alcohol legality. A death-wish in reality.

Tower of London and Borough Market

On Wednesdays, Angie, our knowledgeable curmudgeon of a guide, reveals historical London to us one tourist trap at a time. We began this week's walk with a visit to the Tower of London.

Exiting the Tower Hill tube station, my eyes met a fantastic view of the fortress. It stood massive, ancient, and ominous. Cloud piercing turrets rise above the castle to remind tourists that 1,000 years ago in England's history, had you been facing the Tower from outside the tube station, you would soon have an arrow through your head or heart.

For a couple of minutes, we stood on a large mound of grass covered prettily with ice and slush. Angie politely interrupted our excitable picture taking and announced, "You ought to know - only 7 people were ever executed in the Tower. The rest of the condemned prisoners met their gory ends at the very spot you stand at right now." Hundreds were hung on the patch of land where we stood. Many were drawn and quartered, only after having been dragged through the city's roads from a carriage, in the process having their bones broken and skulls cracked. Needless to say, being condemned of treason in Medieval England would be a horrendous fate.

Thankfully we don't live in Medieval Times (they bathed... hardly ever and purportedly smelled like dick cheese). The Tower of England no longer poses a threat to layman like you and I, and frankly looks a little ridiculous juxtaposed against the modern London cityscape. I felt like I was entering a real-life Medieval Times (the kitschy amusement park in Buena Park featuring jousting and turkey legs). The ticket attendant, dressed head to toe in Beefeater garb, looked ever bit as miserable as the ride attendants at Magic Mountain or Knott's Berry Farm (where they aren't paid to fasten 'magic of Disney' smiles on their faces).

Inside the walls we heard more of the Tower's infamous history. A lot of bloody, family in-fighting occurred. Shit, my family squabs over frivolous shit all the time, can you imagine what'd happen if there was a royal Crown to contest for? The Thai's would be dead as dust.

The rest of the tour included a lot of jewels and treasures as well as King Henry the VIII's collection of armory and battle gear. A little something for both the girls and boys (and the gays and the sadomasochistic).

On Friday we were introduced to London's greatest treasure (not the Queen, sorry Courtney): Borough Market. Borough Market is a weekend farmer's market in the truest sense of the word. Farmers from outside London come into the city with an assortment of organically grown fruits and vegetables, fresh livestock, nuts and berries, gourmet chocolates, hand pressed apple juice, homemade cheese, (good shit ad nauseum...)

The best thing about this place are the food vendors. I was walking around with my mouth agape, completely enthralled by the amount and quality of delicious meals being served left and right. West Indian curries, roasted pork baguettes topped with chunky apple sauce, catfish and chips, wild boar sammys with bacon, authentic prosciutto baps with fresh mozzarella.

Santa Monica and the Grove Farmer's Markets can bow out and acquiesce to Borough Market, for no other farmer's market can compare. You guys suck dick. Now go in the corner and cry. Shunned!

The market is nestled underneath a highway overpass and some nondescript alleyways. When we arrived at 11AM, the mass of tents and stands were unassuming and quiet. As we learned a couple of hours later, that was merely the quiet before the storm. Because it seemed everyone in the West End made it out for lunchtime. Hoards of Londoners rushed through the market and stood in lengthy lines for a quick bite before they returned to their lives. Businesspeople and schoolchildren, college kids and city punks, English, American, Irish, Spanish and French all united by the promise of good, honest food. And some solace from the frenetic hustle and bustle of the City. Comida. Lunch. Mittag. Dejeuner. At the market it all means the same: sanctuary.

I cannot wait to take Kat here when she comes in late February. Let's hope she'll be nice enough to buy something for you. ('Cuz I sure as hell won't.)

Billy the Kid

I'm streaming the Lakers @ Spurs game online, but they're playing like shit so I'm going write an entry for all three viewers of the blog.

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London is world-renowned for their theatre productions. ("No shit", like you needed me to tell you that.) Some "twat" (a term of endearment over here) named William Shakespeare wrote and produced a bevy of plays here over 4 centuries ago and left an indelible mark on English city culture. Here's my myopic perception of Londoners: They read a shit ton while on the tube, they think frosted tips = cool hair, and they go to plays. I cannot say for certain how many theatre houses dot the city, but I venture to guess that the figure is in the 20s. Today, the canon extends beyond just Shakespeare's works -- a look at the dozens of adverts lining the tube tunnels indicates the diversity of plays being produced every night in London. Right outside the Tottenham Court tube station is a 20-foot sparkling gold statue of Freddy Mercury. Quite possibly the gayest statue in the entire United Kingdom. It was erected to promote "We Will Rock You", a musical featuring Queen's greatest hits. "Avenue Q" is a play featuring politically incorrect, potty-mouthed muppets who, at some time during the show, fuck vigoriously on stage. Hot. Ian MacKellan, every nerdy homosexual's favorite, is starring in the Samuel Beckett play, Waiting for Godot. See, they even have something for the existentialists.

Tonight we saw Billy Elliott @ the Victoria Palace, the first of four theatre productions we're poised to watch over the semester. In quick summation, the story is about a motherless fruit cake from a working class coal mining family who abandons boxing to follow his dream of becoming a ballet dancer. His courageous pursuit is somehow related to the coal miners union's fight against the big bad capitalistic coal company. You know, the conflict just never revealed itself to me. I think the four alcoholic beverages I had before hand may have had something to do with that. Anyway, throw in some oversized dancing dresses, ghostly apparitions, some uncomfortable boy-on-boy smooches, Socialist banter and you've got yourself a halfway-decent musical.

Afterward, we took the tube to Leiceister Square and hit up Zoo. Shit was poppin'. We ran into a mess of USC kids. On the way home, I found out that we have access to the University of London College student union, where drinks are only one quid! As Rob Hoy would say back home, "AWFECKYEA".

Mike and I are going to Amsterdam next weekend. I'm sure a couple more "AWFECKYEAS" will be had 'til then.

King's College Student Union

STRONGBOW FOR 2 QUID @ THE KING'S COLLEGE STUDENT UNION. FUCK. YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!

OH YER, THESE TWO SCHMUCKS WHOM WE HUNG OUT WITH ALL NIGHT WERE HILARIOUS. (IN THE WAY THE BRITISH VERSION OF THE OFFICE IS FUNNY, NAH MEAN?)

The kid on the right looks exactly like the lanky dope from Trainspotting. He also happens to be a Junior Police Officer. WTFAMIRITE?

Terribly foul-mouthed. Fucking great sports. I loved them. They capped our night by serenading us with a rendition of "God Save the Queen" atop the water fountain in the center of Piccadilly Circus.

On to the Next One

The fact that I'm starting this entry at 10PM is a good indication that today was fairly eventful.

Or . . . that I'm a big re-tard that has become a homebody while abroad in a new and exciting country.

Feel free to draw your own conclusions.

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We began the day with a 4-hour coach tour of the whole swath of scenic, touristy photo-hot-spots in London -- a castle and moat (of which I've forgotten the name of, you can't blame me though, right?), the River Thames, Westminster Abbey, Parliament, and Buckingham Palace. It wasn't meant to be all that comprehensive but rather a brief overview of what to look for in our future treks to these sites. As much as I'd like to elaborate on these places, I really can't offer much insight when only given 15-20 minutes at each site to essentially freeze my hot dog into a popsicle while taking contrived photos such as this one:

Me, glum as an L.A. bum, in front of Westminster Abbey.

Our guide for today's tour as well as for the rest of the semester's London excursions is a charmingly pithy granny named Angie. Frankly, she looks and sounds like she's done one too many semesters of catering to inattentive American college students. But I appreciate her candor and wit; little lady has a whole lot of spunk. I'd like to sit down with her and have her give me the real nitty gritty on Londontown, but every time I glance her a caring smile - one that attempts to communicate, "I like what you have to say! I'm listening, Angie!" she, in her perpetual state of malaise, offers only a jaded grin.

Poor Angie at the helm.

I returned from the coach ride to our flat sore from the cold, a cold which penetrates deep into the bones of my body and which nips the tip of my nose and cheeks. Once you open the door to our flat, a huge backdraft of warm air hits you in the face, reminding you to shed your layers of clothes. For lunch, I shared a delectable cardboard-textured Sainsbury's pizza with my roommate Mike B. and drank a paltry glass of British milk. Satiated, I took a brief nap curled up next to the radiator positioned, fortunately for me, right beside my bed. I had a couple of weird R.E.M. dreams about former acquaintances and then we were off again to explore London some more.

The fine ladies from 19 Bedford Pl. accompanied us and suggested we could do some excellent window shopping at Harrod's, the British emporium that claims to sell everything under the sun (for a price, of course). In the 80s, the old-Hollywood actress Ingrid Bergman commissioned Harrod's to plan her funeral. Supposedly the service was as lavish as she was. As I strolled past the ancient Egyptian facades and ornaments, I wondered if this was the store that Michael Jackson had famously asked to purchase the Elephant Man's bones. Then I wondered if I could purchase Michael Jackson's bones. Anyway, I digress.

The mad house is fucked-up ridiculous. It makes Hannah B.'s dearly beloved Nordstrom look like the Crenshaw Swap Meet. It is a 7-story building featuring 9-foot Swarovski crystal chandeliers, an entire room for selling gourmet chocolates, rare gems and rocks, a pool table previously owned by the Beatles, antique furniture, modern furniture, elephants and monkeys, clothing from every reputable designer in the world... A whole lot of dumb shit for people who are stupidly rich... I mean the hyperbole simply sees no end in sight.

Harrod's

£5,000 cupcake

Swavroski Crystal Chandelier

We bought some stupid chocolates and finally left the labyrinth just in time to hit up a pub. When we first arrived in London, we mistakenly assumed that pubs in England operated similar to bars in L.A. In reality, most of them close by 11PM. We checked out this pub called Devonshire Arms in Piccadilly Circus around 6PM and were finally able to have our lips taste English beer since arriving 4 days ago.

I had a pint of London's Pride. Smooth and malty -- honestly nothing special. We sat around and shot the shit, not surprisingly, about a bunch of shit: Pete Carroll demoting himself to the Seahawks, our career prospects, how fucking expensive this city is, and plans for traveling Europe.

Those last two topics are actually one and and the same. It's become a common point of discussion among us kids -- we must live in near abject poverty in order to travel as much as we can in the forthcoming weeks and months. Mike and I, both of us with humble budgets, are taking this point to heart. For dinner I ate rubbery spaghetti noodles topped with Chili slop. Tomorrow, I may have the same. But soon!!!... I will be traveling all across the European continent, making new friends along the way.

Consider that as an American I've been eating bastardized Italian food all my life and now, for the first time, I get an opportunity to gorge on authentic pastas and gelato in Florence. Tonight, a visit to Dublin, Ireland for St. Patty's Day and an Amsterdam trip materialized. Shit, bring on the slop and the precipitous weight-loss. I don't give a damn. It's on!

Settling In

My feet fuckin' ache. Yowza.

For the past two days I've been walking the streets around my London flat in a fresh pair of Redwing boots and my toes feel worse than those of a mid-19th century Chinese foot-bound concubine. Back in the States I was told by my shoe store's Al Bundy that in order to have the leather mold to the contours of my big ugly feet, I've got to cinch up the laces extremely tight and wear thick acrylic socks. There's a Cantonese proverb that speaks to this folly: Embrace your fashion and you reject your health. I hope these boots break in before society rejects me for having horrifically deformed feet.

Here's a short story that corroborates the old cliche about how terrible English food is. The night we arrived, the people from ACCENT (the London institution that runs the study abroad program) took us to a local pub for some finger foods and soft drinks. In retrospect, I would've rather eaten actual fingers than eat what lay on the party platters that night. The g'damn in-flight dinner I had the night before was better. Ugh, thinking about the minced meat pie I half-ate makes me shudder. I hate to sound ungrateful to my hosts, but c'mon, you managed to disappoint a very forgiving and unbiased palette. However, the plate of Fish and Chips I had earlier in the day was superb. We ate at a nice overpriced diner called Munchkin's across the street from the British Museum. The heavily accented Russian waitress had an annoying habit of asking each group of patrons what their nationality was. She smiled sarcastically as we replied that we were Americans. What fucking difference does it make? Does decent service hinge on correctly answering, "Are you English?" But she played nice thereafter so I forgive her. The F&C was nice. The fries were cut thick and the fish was prepared well: crispy on the exterior and flaky inside. Everything was cheery until I had to pay the £9 tab. Which brings to my concluding point: money.

Holy. Fuck. England is expensive. I exchanged $90USD yesterday and today I've got just about 2£. Er? With that money I've purchased the following items: the aforementioned plate of Fish and Chips, a dinky LG mobile phone, some toiletries, groceries for half a week, and booze.

My granny's going to flip her shit when I call her in mid-March begging her to wire another grand or two.

I'm going to soak my feet in warm water sans the salt (it just costs too damn much).

Best,

C

In the life of this man, too, as well as in all things else in the world, daily use and the accepted and common knowledge seemed sometimes to have no other aim than to be arrested now and again for an instant, and broken through, in order to yield the place of honor to the exceptional and miraculous. Now whether these short and occasional hours of happiness balanced and alleviated the lot of the Steppenwolf in such a fashion that in the upshot happiness and suffering held the scales even, or whether perhaps the short but intense happiness of those few hours outweighed all suffering and left a balance over is again a question over which idle persons may meditate to their hearts' content. Even the wolf brooded often over this, and those were his idle and unprofitable days.

In this connection one thing more must be said. There are a good many people of the same kind as Harry. Many artists are of his kind. These persons all have two souls, two beings within them. There is God and the devil in them; the mother's blood and the father's; the capacity for happiness and the capacity for suffering; and in just such a state of enmity and entanglement towards and within each other as were the wolf and man in Harry. And these men, for whom life has no repose, live at times in their rare moments of happiness with such strength and indescribable beauty, the spray of their moment's happiness is flung so high and dazzlingly over the wide sea of suffering, that the light of it, spreading its radiance, touches others too with its enchantment. Thus, like a precious, fleeting foam over the sea of suffering arise all those works of art, in which a single individual lifts himself for an hour so high above his personal destiny that his happiness shines like a star and appears to all who see it as something eternal and as a happiness of their own. All these men, whatever their deeds and works may be, have really no life; that is to say, their lives are not their own and have no form.

They are not heroes, artists or thinkers in the same way that other men are judges, doctors, shoemakers, or schoolmasters. Their life consists of a perpetual tide, unhappy and torn with pain, terrible and meaningless, unless one is ready to see its meaning in just those rare experiences, acts, thoughts and works that shine out above the chaos of such a life. To such men the desperate and horrible thought has come that perhaps the whole of human life is but a bad joke, a violent and ill-fated abortion of the primal mother, a savage and dismal catastrophe of nature. To them, too, however, the other thought has come that man is perhaps not merely a half-rational animal but a child of the gods and destined to immortality.

- Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf