Kat Dancing

Right.

Hell of a week. Update later if I get time. Suffice to say, both of my friends are now gone, and I am wandering around London wondering what to do. I am boycotting 'Attack of the Clones' in righteous annoyance, but my resolve is definately weakening....

Went up on the London Eye this morning. It was moderately cool, though overpriced at £10.50. The view is fantastic, but anything that looks like a giant Ferris wheel, and is advertised as a giant Ferris wheel, and spins around like a giant Ferris wheel, should, in my opinion, go slightly faster. But we crawled up and crawled down and took photos like good tourists, so there we are. I even bought the corny souvenir photo of myself in the capsule that they take as you're going down. My friend from Indiana said I looked very wistful. I don't know. Maybe I was hoping the bloody thing would take off.

The Eye *does* have one of the most interesting queue systems I've ever seen. First you queue up to buy your tickets. Then you jon another queue, which nobody can find, which doesn't actually seem to go anywhere or do anything, except a guy marks your ticket with a blue marker. Unless he's done that you aren't allowed to join the *queue* queue, which is to say, the one leading up to the Eye. My friend figured she could make a killing with a blue marker.

We rode around on the Underground (which is a cool thing) for a long time, and then we ended up in Heathrow, which is not a cool thing at all. It is an airport. They are a little more sane over here than in the States, but airports are still badly-air-conditioned-hell. To make things worse my friend had broken the zipper on her suitcase and I had to go hunting about for some duct tape. Ah, duct tape. Wonderful stuff. Sadly, like everything you actually need or want, they don't sell it in airports (it has been pushed out by the massage-soap and silk-scarf-sellers) and we had to settle for one of those silly luggage straps, which doesn't work half so well. It was a locking one, which I didn't realize, and I threw out the keys thinking they were trash (they *looked* like trash; little plastic tag things, they certainly didn't look like *keys*) and then we had to comb the airport finding where I'd dropped them when we figured it out. All very exciting. Security, at least, was low, and non gun-toting: the British have had the Irish bombing the shit out of them for about a century now, and so they don't really understand why we Americans are making such a fuss. This is a relief. Last time I was in an American airport there was some guy looking thoroughly smug carting a *massive* automatic weapon around. I think it was an M16 or something.

'Er,' I said. 'What's he going to do with that?'

'I've got no fucking idea,' said my father, who'd been in the Navy. 'Those things are about as accurate as a sprinkler system. If he starts firing that thing in here it'll be a fucking bloodbath *and* pure chance if he actually hits what he's shooting at.'

'Ah,' I said. 'Gee. I feel *so* much more secure now that my country's on the alert....'

There was a security guard checking bags on the Eye too. He looked in my bag, very grim, and then in my friend's purse, then asked her if she had any money.

'Uh, yes,' she said. He switched from horribly grim to puppish.

'Would you give me some?'

I love Brits.