Back at Abbey Road. I saw my cousin again at the British Library, and visited the Science Museum, where they had a working Babbage Difference Engine, made in 1991 using nineteenth-century technology. Nifty, that, as were displays on topology and fairly esoteric stuff that I don't normally associate with museums. An exhibit on arithmetic teaching devices through the ages included a 1979 "Little Professor", which was an 11th-birthday present for me. It probably cost $40 at the time, and was both larger than and a thousandth as powerful as my iPod. I got suckered into paying eight pounds for the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" exhibit, forgetting that I didn't really like the movie that much. Life-sized Vogons reciting poetry and Sam Rockwell's wardrobe if you're into that sort of thing; the occasional plaque making a half-hearted attempt to connect movie events with real-life scientific issues.

Otherwise, did lots of neighborhood exploring and walking; my blisters have blisters, and one of my toes has turned an interesting color. Notes:

• The Sherlock Holmes statue on Baker Street has the engraved possessive "its" misspelled with an apostrophe.
• Cirocco wanted postcards, and I've been appalled at the low quality of what's out there. Picadilly Circus has sophisticated LCD advertising that's reminiscent of "Blade Runner," and all the postcards are of the decade-old neon.
• I've been entertained by the restaurants proclaiming to be American. The "Old Orleans" offers fajitas and quesadillas, but not gumbo. Another more upscale place was advertising "Boston roast salmon." I suppose Australians feel the same way when seeing an Outback Steakhouse; I didn't check the Australian-themed restaurant for whether it had similar misplaced menu items.
• My father asked for Horlicks malted powder, so I went to the O2 center on Finchley, where there's a giant supermarket. The mall is mostly restaurants, so the Sainsbury grocery and the multiplex are clearly the anchors of the shopping complex—and I discovered that my dawdling at the bookstore meant that I couldn't get into the grocery at 5:10 because it closed at 5!? Who closes a grocery at 5? The British do, and that's why they've lost their empire, I tell you. I found it at a smaller grocery that kept more reasonable hours, plus I purchased him the competing brands of Milo and Malteser in case they more closely approximated his platonic ideal of a malt mix. (Horlicks is actually available in an Indian grocery in Herndon, and probably also at the British shops in Clarendon by me and Santa Monica by my brother, so this was a bit of a fool's errand, but I had wanted to see a full-scale British supermarket.)
• I had thought all the NY Yankees baseball caps I saw were being worn by Americans, but I've heard enough British accents to know that it's just a trendy thing to wear here.
• No really exceptional meals. I tried the Yo! Sushi chain, because the idea of chain sushi served on moving conveyer belts appealed to me. It was better than American supermarket sushi, but not that special, and it occurred to me too late that 4 pm was a bad time to be eating conveyer belt sushi. Plus they charged a pound for tap water, the bastages. They offered a duck hand-roll, but the meat was dry and disappointing. Pappadum Cafe was an Indian buffet north of Russell Square that was hit-and-miss. American buffets are "All You Can Eat," while the British ones are the more polite "All You Care To Eat." I did have the 3-pound curry from a hole-in-the-wall in Waterloo so that I could say I've had that experience.
• There is a Lee Ho Fook in Soho, and it does serve beef chow mein, but I foolishly failed to pick up a menu.
• Eric and I stepped into a betting parlour to see if we could wager money on Paris getting the 2012 Olympics, but the attendant had no idea what we were talking about. We did see people betting on fictional CG animated horse races, which is an impressive level of addiction. I'm surprised they didn't have a guy there taking bets on "What number am I thinking?"
• When I returned to St. John's Wood Saturday, there was a huge crowd for a cricket match. A correspondent recommended the cricket experience to me, but I couldn't bring myself to do it, perhaps from too much exposure to the Monty Python version of cricket. I do want to thank all those who wrote in with suggestions, and am sorry that I didn't find the time to take up most of them.

Light on the tourism the last couple of days. The original plan was to go off to Paris or some other European city when Eric returned to New York, but I liked London so much I decided to stick around. London hasn't really returned the favor.

I had a two-night gap where I needed a new hotel, so I made the mistake of using Orbitz.com to find one. Aha! A three-star hotel with a private toilet, £45/night, albeit on the other side of town. The £30/person double Eric and I stayed in was perfectly fine, so how could the £45 single be worse? I decided that taking a bus would be easier than lugging luggage through the Tube; perhaps it was, but it was an hour-long journey. The hotel got its payment in cash in advance, at which point I discovered that this was not a three-star hotel. You know, I can deal with a tv without a remote control. It's alright that I have no dresser. I'm not thrilled with threadbare carpet or walls, or the mildewed wall near the in-room sink, but I'll deal. That there's a huge crack in the ceiling that implies that Clouseau and Cato are going to come crashing through any minute, ok, it hasn't fallen in yet, and probably won't for the seven hours a night I'm sleeping there. The lack of a private toilet, when I gave up staying at £20 hotels with shared toilets, however, bothers me, especially when there's no light and no toilet paper, and there are weird bugs on the floor. (There's an art to finding pleasant and well-maintained public toilets, however, and I'm sufficiently well-versed in this that the only real loss is the cash.) I e-mail Orbitz, which refuses to handle the matter over e-mail, and asks me to call a 1-800 number not accessible from Europe. Thirty-six hours later, no resolution. [Update, May 29: still no word from Orbitz.] Guess which Internet travel service I'll probably never use again. I got home last night to discover that I'm not just a block away from the underground, but my window is just above the tracks, though the Tube stops running at 1.

Kevin and I are at a poker tournament now. Or, rather, Kevin is; I lost with KK again by failing to raise pre-flop and letting K2s catch up. This is Kevin's first day of tournaments, and he's taking to it quite quickly; it'll be interesting to see if he places in the money.

But between the poker loss and a very very bad shoe in a casino today, I've lost the blackjack and poker profits, probably down a total of five or ten pounds overall.

In Las Vegas, the dealer checks for blackjack before there's any action. In Europe, players act before the dealer checks for blackjack. This actually makes a difference: I split 8s versus an ace, which one is supposed to do in America, where, if one is given the option, it means that there is no chance of blackjack. In Europe, however, that means putting money on the table that may be dead if the dealer paints the ace. I remembered this mathematical principle too late, and felt cursed the rest of the way, quitting when I was even for the trip.

The highlight of the tourism was going to see Christopher Hitchens speak at the University College. More on this another day, as my time is expiring on this pound's worth of Internet.

We started the day at Leadenhall Market, the inspiration for Diagon Alley in the Harry Potter series. Architecturally interesting, but the shops didn't appeal. I picked up a UK-only sci-fi book for a friend at a nearby Waterstone's and we headed west to Bond Street for a jaunt to the Wallace Collection. Wallace, was the illegitimate heir of a line of wealthy Brits who liked collecting 18th-century French art. It's a beautiful house, and a wonderful armour and arms collection (though it felt redundant with the one I saw in the Tower of London). But the art seemed mostly second-rate, aside from a Rembrandt and some Rubens and Van Dyks, and extravagant Louis XVI-era ceramic inkwells and toiletry sets for wig-powdering bring out my inner Jacobin. ("Don't tell AEI that," said Eric.) The free tour was banal and gossipy; I abandoned it a half-hour before Eric.

The afternoon was given to a matinee of "The Philadelphia Story," at the Old Vic. It's a beautiful theatre, and a great play, but Kevin Spacey isn't Cary Grant, and Elizabeth Jennifer Ehle isn't Katharine Hepburn, and the spectre of the two earlier greats overshadowed the performance. Plus, the awkwardness of seeing British actors inconsistently attempt American accents.

We rushed across town to Gutshot for a successful poker tournament, and, after determining that Ruth and Kevin had already eaten, went back to Cafe Spice Nemaste for another Indian feast. Appetizers: an interesting prawn-and-crab samosa with a marvelous chili sauce; a good, if overpriced, bhelpoori; and a good tandoori beef dish with pepper spicing. We ordered the mixed grill again for the main course, which was exquisite again, and a chicken dish called "frango." I associate Frango with Marshall Fields chocolate mints, but this was a Goan peppery dish; again, the chicken was cooked perfectly, and the sauce was good, if not up to the quality of the tandoori. Dessert was bebinca, a pastry the menu claimed took six hours to make, but somehow came out tasting like kosher-for-Pesach sponge cake. With luck, I'll make it to CSN a third time Friday.

On the way back, we caught the closing moments of the European League finals from the window of a pub; if I had known it would be a six-goal game, I might have insisted we watch the whole thing, but we caught the drama of the penalty shootout and Liverpool victory from 3-nil down.

I finally had fish-and-chips Tuesday night at Seashell (Marlyebone) with Eric and a Stanford B-School friend of his. Okay, it was a fancy sit-down place, and I had plaice (flounder?) instead of cod, but it was good, if wildly overpriced, stuff, and it was a little unappetizing to get halfway through my beer to discover plastic-wrapper detritus stuck to the inside of my stein.

Another hot-water datapoint: a television commercial featuring an older British housewife talking about her need for a "cuppa" during the day, and showing off her "space-age kettle." She then proceeds to set the temperature of her water to 85 Celsius, or 185 degrees Fahrenheit.

How could I forget to mention that I went to the Globe Theatre Sunday to see "The Tempest"? The Globe is a reconstruction of the Shakespearean-era original; Eric and I got £5 standing-room tickets, and were fortunate to arrive early enough to get a position leaning against the front of the stage. A fascinating space, and one really got a sense of what it must've been like to see Shakespeare in the original; the slapstick, for example, could play as slapstick. The production took the interesting tack of using just three (male) actors to play all the roles, and then combined these acrobatics with modern dance from three women wearing leather jackets and jeans. The dancers' roles varied from symbolizing scene changes, to performing costume changes for the actors, to performing a symbolic props. A remarkable feat all around, performed without an intermission. The direction took advantage of the space, actors interacting with the crowd in front of them.

Last night, I confirmed that British pizza tastes about as one would expect British pizza to taste.

Today: a trip to the Royal Court of Justice, an impressive edifice with miles of corridors. In Courtroom 6, we took in a half-hour of procedural wrangling in the criminal appeal R. v. Khan. Could the defense attorney call as a witness a juror who, at one point, claimed that he had been intimidated by the victim's family, then recanted? The procedural answer is simple in America: a collateral attack through seeking a writ of habeas corpus. It wasn't clear to me whether the difficulty in Britain was a function of a failing of the rules or of the defense attorney. We left after he clumsily cited to a case for an obvious point that wasn't of much help to his argument. But: wigs, "M'lord," and a defendant in an actual dock.

We then visited the John Soane Museum. Soane was an architect who married wealthy, collected accordingly, and then converted his house into a museum for the collection. Other than the Hogarth paintings (which reminded one of a centuries-old version of one of the early issues of Mad magazine), not much special about the collection, though it was charming to see an 18th century museum preserved as such, organized more like the wall of a Bennigan's than a modern-day museum.

I commend the London Walks tours to visitors; the ninety-minute stroll through Westminster was entertaining and educational.

Other rushed observations, as I have an 8:30 dinner I need to get to:

• I don't think I made it clear how good Cafe Spice Namaste was. The tandoori dishes included duck and venison, and the duck might even outshine my favorite Thai duck in the DC area. The lamb curry was a bit disappointing, but only in the sense that it was nowhere near as special as the rest of the meal.
• There's an ice cream dish here called a "99 Flake." Noone sells it for .99 though.
• Things you won't see in America: slot machines (called "fruit machines" here) next to bumper cars (which, of course, have the steering wheel on the right) in a shop called Funland. Another thing you won't see in America: a Simpsons slot machine. I lost 50 pence in it before deciding not to make further investments to learn whether the actors gave their voices to the venture. It might well not be an officially endorsed product.
• After a frightening stretch where I was down 300 pounds and needed to borrow money to split a third ace, I won another 95 pounds playing blackjack. I had fun adding and taking away bets so that the superstitious Asian players at the table would be upset because I "made a box" with only five bets on the table instead of the auspicious six.

Even at a pound an hour (thank you, 61 Charing Cross Road), I can't spend too much time blogging, but I did want to check in. Eric arrived Saturday, and we've been sharing a 60-pound room in King's Cross. There's been a lot of walking. Tourism has included another stint at the British Museum; the Caravaggio exhibit at the National Gallery; the Tate Modern; a discovery that the Saatchi Gallery (beautiful space, ugly paintings) is more expensive than St. Paul's; the Somerset House and Courtauld Gallery; Fleet Street; Samuel Johnson's House and associated tourist traps; the Millennium Bridge; and probably more that I'm forgetting. The Courtauld Gallery was a real highlight; I don't understand why it isn't featured more prominently in the guidebooks. I might have missed it entirely if not for Eric.

Food: I've decided that the safest bet for ethnic food in London is Ethiopian/Eritrean/East-African restaurants, because there's a sufficient population to support the dining, but no incentive to make the food blander, because Brits would be frightened of even bland African food. Addis in King's Cross is competent Ethiopian food; Zigni in Islington is an Eritrean buffet that looks indistinguishable from an Ethiopian buffet. The Saturday-afternoon Borough Market was a wonderful experience: scallops fresh from the shell, ostrich steak-and-onion sandwiches, chorizo sandwiches, lots of samples. After too many pasties, I discovered that the Eat sandwich shop sells a nice chorizo-and-red-and-yellow-pepper baguette that looks to be a better lunchtime option.

The best meal so far in London was today's lunch at Cafe Spice Namaste' (east of Tower Hill). It's much like Heritage India in DC, only higher quality. It was the best tandoori I ever had, if also by far the most expensive. Dessert was a black-pepper ice cream, which worked nicely conceptually, though the ice cream wasn't up to, say, Ben & Jerry standards. Still, I don't understand why more restaurants don't try to mix the spicy and the sweet in a dessert.

Elsewhere, I picked up 110 pounds at blackjack at another dismal casino outside the British Museum, and dropped 15 pounds in a Monday evening poker tournament in Clerkenhall (losing hand was KK v ATo; I raised pre-flop to 2xBB; button raises all-in, I call; sometimes, aces spike on the river).

It's raining fairly heavily right now, which means public transportation instead of walking, which means waiting until 930 to buy my day pass to avoid the rush-hour surcharge. So: time for blogging.

Tourism catalog: Natural History Museum, Brompton Oratory, Harrod's, south end of Hyde Park, British Library (and my second cousin Henry), Oxford Street, Piccadilly Circus, British Museum, Walks.com tour of The City (including the Monument; an inn that figured in the Pickwick Papers; tales of the 1665 Plague, the 1666 Fire, and the Blitz; remains of the Mithra Temple; the Lord Mayor, complete in sash; the Guildhall), duck into St. Paul's as far as one could go without paying 8 pounds, architectural exploration of The City (1 Poultry, the Royal Exchange, the Bank of England building, the Gherkin, the Lloyd's Building, a Sephardic synagogue that was closed for Thursday), and the Tower of London.

Miscellaneous observations:

• Brits are sufficiently mature that evolution is not controversial here. The Natural History Museum is unapologetic about the ape-man link, Darwin is on the ten-pound bill, and Microsoft is running an ad campaign based on a not very funny joke about evolution.
• The Dodi and Di memorial in the Harrod's basement is perhaps the tackiest thing I've seen in my life.
• I don't know if the Egyptian theme in Harrod's dates from Art Deco days or from the current owner, but its supposed glamour reminded me of nothing more than the Luxor—a fine example (albeit a non-actionable one) of trade dress dilution if ever there was one.
• Harrod's started as a grocer. It's as if there were a Sutton Place Gourmet on the ground floor of a Neiman Marcus, except a Sutton Place gourmet with a lot of Indian entrees sold by the hectagram. I splurged on a fourteen-pound macaroni and cheese at the upscale food court there for the experience of doing so, but won't do that again.
• Pasties aren't all that. And while there's Indian food everywhere (including "Tandoori-flavored Doritos"), it's shockingly bland. I asked for medium spicy at one restaurant, and quickly learned that it was the equivalent of the American extra-mild; the mild saag paneer Ruth ordered had no picante heat at all.
• Cadbury's hot chocolate machines have a readout for the current serving temperature. Every machine I've seen so far: 92 degrees Celsius, or about 200 degrees Fahrenheit. I better not hear anyone claim that Stella Liebeck's McDonald's 190-degree coffee was somehow unusual.
• The Evening Standard was kind enough to provide a gigantic headline "NEW BID TO CURB GREEDY LAWYERS" that shall go on the door to my office.
• My team won a hard-fought Trivial Pursuit match when, on the final question, I had an unconscious recollection that Sherlock Holmes's home county was Yorkshire. How did I know that? I'm not sure if I even knew that Yorkshire was a county.
• In the British edition of "Geographic Trivial Pursuit," "Europe" is the hardest category because half the questions involve obscure British celebrity/football/cricket trivia.
• The map-books point out a "Holocaust Memorial Garden" in Hyde Park, but, though there's a nice brook there, there's no sign identifying it one way or the other.
• I won 100 pounds at blackjack in under thirty minutes, but it was a rather dismal casino. Or, perhaps, I just have shorter patience for the fundamental unfairness when the woman next to me, after refusing to hit 15 vs. 8 (after thinking about it for ages) or double ten vs. 7, then sucks up consecutive five-pound blackjacks that she then takes even money on. Plus, no no-smoking tables. Either way, I left quickly. I proceeded to lose five pounds at video poker in the video-game arcade next door.
• I bought a suit for 150 pounds.

Two more datapoints on British escalators: (1) "Walk on the left, stand on the right" isn't just tradition, it's absolutely encouraged by signs. In DC, while people will walk on the left until blocked by tourists, the official policy of Metro is that walking on the (90-ft-a-minute) escalators is forbidden. (2) Private escalators move about as fast as the Underground escalators.

Tourism today: a trip to Green Park, walk past the Victoria Monument and camp out in front of Buckingham for the changing of the guard. Unfortunately, though guidebooks said 11:30, it wasn't until noon. But getting there early was absolutely necessary to get the prime viewing spot I had; I took a lot of photos for tourists who couldn't reach the front, but I didn't bring my own camera. Americans there were thrilled to hear another American voice; a group of U-Louisville students, there on a partially-campus-funded trip for their British History class, called it a "normal" voice, causing me to wince. I knew that the Changing of the Guard is anti-climactic, but I really wasn't impressed: the marching doesn't compare to similar efforts from, say, the Red Army; the soldiers aren't anywhere near as stoic as the stereotype; and all the pomp and circumstance of the tradition is somewhat defeated when the musical ceremony's first song is "When The Saints Go Marching In" followed by a Bee-Gees cover, at which point I decided that two hours of standing by the Buckingham Palace gates were enough.

I walked through the gorgeous St. James Park—friendly ducks, geese, and pelicans (as well as parasitical pigeons). From there, to the War Cabinet Room, which came highly recommended by the WWII buffs at my old law firm. That exhibit was fairly low key, but the new Churchill Museum (included on for the ten-pound admissions fee) was really something. I was entranced for two hours there on the narrow topic of Churchill's life and times, and could easily have spent more had I not felt a need to keep moving in my limited time in London.

The one thing that bothered me was a questionable insertion of political messages into the Museum. There's a gigantic interactive computer display of the ninety years of Churchill's life, with sixteen or more input terminals where one can pull up files, photos, letters, from a calendar interface; it includes important events in history that may not have affected Churchill directly, like the sinking of the Lusitania or the introduction of the first laundromat in Britain in 1949. If someone operating the 1945 screen picks the right date in August, everybody's screen goes white with a flash, and we're interrupted to be told about the death toll from Hiroshima. I somehow suspect that there isn't anything there about the Nanking Massacre, however (though I didn't check the 1937 pages, but, then, my browsing was interrupted three times by Hiroshima, and never by Nanking).

There's a similar blindness in pamphlets handed out about background issues that museum-goers are presumed to be unfamiliar with. The communism and Cold War pamphlets have a lot about Karl Marx's ideals, Western fears of Soviet ambition, and Joseph McCarthy (!) but nothing about the millions of people murdered by Soviet and Chinese and Korean and Cuban communism, one sentence that only hints at these countries' subjugation of their neighbors, and one sentence that only hints at Soviet efforts to subvert Western European democracy, simultaneously minimizing it by identifying a high-ranking spy as a scandal. Criminy, Churchill coined the term "Iron Curtain."

By the time I got out, it was raining. I walked over to Downing Street, which is now fenced off even more than Pennsylvania Avenue is; No. 10 (I hear Blair lives in No. 11 these days) wasn't even visible from the cross-road, and once upon a time the guidebooks described it as the sort of place that wasn't even identifiable except for a single bobby standing watch. I walked to Trafalgar Square (Have I mentioned how impressive the Nelson Column is? The Brits know how to do memorials.), hopped an Underground to Waterloo, wandered the train station for a while (scene: advertisement claiming that six train workers a day are assaulted while doing their jobs, and promising prosecution for such actions; Britain seems more violent than America in some ways; it seems unimaginable that there are 2000 assaults on Amtrak, NY, Chicago, LA, and DC subway workers a year, much less while on the job), decided not to brave the rain to find the Saatchi Gallery, and took a bus to Picadilly Circus, where I explored the Trocadero Mall. Many more football video games available in Britain than in the US, and some of them look particularly high quality, not that I'm going to spend thirty pounds (plus, perhaps, five pounds VAT) to find out.

Food: Marks & Spencer operates a chain of mini-yuppie-groceries with impressive selections of prepared foods, a much higher quality and variety of prepared entrees than in the US. I was tempted to purchase chicken tikka masala in the sort of a microwavable bowl I normally associate with Chef Boyardee, but settled for a brunch of an excellent baked cheese roll. (Mild culture shock observation: checkout girl concluding transaction with "Here you go" rather than "Have a nice day.") Dinner was at McDonald's: after stopping in to see what they call a quarter-pounder, how could I pass up the 99-pence curry chicken sandwich? It tasted precisely like one would expect a 99-pence curry chicken sandwich from McDonald's: a McChicken sandwich with a very mild curry sauce instead of mayonnaise. I presume that experience with the IRA is why one can't find a trash can in the Waterloo McDonald's, which just shows that US hasn't quite yet experienced terrorism to its fullest extent.

Speaking of which, I listened to the entirety of the 11 September 1940 radio broadcast of Churchill. The Blitz had killed thousands of British civillians; an invasion seemed imminent. We think of Churchill as a great orator because of some incredibly memorable turns of phrase at a critical juncture in history, but, over the course of a full speech in a trying circumstance, I think Bush compares surprisingly favorably. There was an interesting exhibit showing how Churchill was the subject of some fairly intense criticism, with the sort of insults regularly lodged at Bush: arrogant, liar, extremist. (And Churchill was a poor student with a famous father, too, though he made a national name for himself in his twenties.) Let's hope for the sake of Western democracy that history judges Bush to be more like Churchill than like Alcibiades.

Here I am in London, with my friend Ruth and her boyfriend Kevin, sitting at a window overlooking the Abbey Road zebra crossing. (No, they didn't see The Amazing Race contestants come through.)

Lots to talk about; I couldn't stop the wonderment the whole time, ride from the ride from the airport, where my instinct was to get into the wrong side of the Mini Mayfair. My first bobby! My first encounter with British ATMs! My first experience getting mysterious change! My first tube ride! My first "mind the gap" announcement! My first double-decker bus! My first time almost getting creamed because I looked left instead of right for cars while crossing the street! My first holding up a supermarket line because I couldn't figure out which coin was a 50p! My first dirty look because I went up a stairway on the right instead of the left!

The trip to Heathrow was somewhat more problematic. I had been booked on a one-stop flight through Kennedy, except American Airlines couldn't get me to Kennedy because of mechanical problems with the flight. Their solution was to fly me through LaGuardia, whereupon I would retrieve my luggage and take a cab to Kennedy. "You can catch the 9:30 instead of the 8." "No, I can't. Put me on the next flight." (Sure enough, I didn't get to Kennedy until 9:20.) "How am I going to get to Kennedy?" "We'll give you a voucher. Here, take all this paperwork and run to the USAir counter, because the flight leaves in half an hour." I had already waited an hour in line because American went long stretches without having a single attendant behind the counter; the line grew to 45 people from the 5 or 6 when I got there. USAir is having trouble processing all the refugees, but they send me to security with fifteen minutes to spare—whereupon I, along with six other refugees, were singled out for special scrutiny for buying a last minute ticket out of Reagan National. After the strip search, I made it onto the flight with two or three minutes to spare, whereupon I discovered that American hadn't given me a voucher after all. Not that it mattered: Yellow Cabs in New York don't take American vouchers. A European and I went to the JFK manager to get reimbursement. "I can't reimburse you. You chose to fly to LaGuardia, so it's your responsibility to get yourself to Kennedy." "I didn't choose; that's what your people told me to do." "This is a USAir flight." "You booked me on a USAir flight!" "I didn't book you anywhere. You have to call customer service." Ok, I'll call customer service, and send them a $33 cab bill, but I'm not flying American any time soon if I can help it.

All the government signs in London are in Gill Sans (which, if your computer is set up correctly, is the same typeface used in this blog), and private advertisers choose the same typeface, perhaps to give themselves a certain authenticity. I like the typeface, so it's a happy feeling. All these other symbols of a society that's just a little bit different from ours: signs that say "WAY OUT" instead of "EXIT"; "TO LET" instead of "FOR LEASE"; gambling shops that are almost as common as Starbucks; television advertising involving an unhooked bra.

Prices are unreal; the raw numbers are about the same, sometimes a little higher, but a pound is worth $1.87 these days, so everything is really twice as expensive. Ruth recommends a particular brand of ice cream in the Tesco Express (I always go to a supermarket in a new town to explore the zeitgeist), but I can't bring myself to spend $8 on a pint. Hey, gas is 2.40, doesn't seem that much higher—except that's pounds, not dollars, and liters, not gallons. Combined with the five pound congestion charge (soon to be eight) and it's amazing that you see any cars at all.

Nice examples of how the compensation culture is different in the UK than the US; not only will they sell you a Mini Mayfair, which is even smaller than the small Mini Cooper, but you can drive around the city in something called a "SmartCar," an even teenier two-seater akin to the one Sam Lowry drove in Brazil. The Ford Pinto cases show that you could never sell something like that in the US without being socked with punitive damages. Also, the escalators in the Underground move easily twice as fast as the ones in the DC Metro. I doubt that London has a worse safety record; people are just more careful, because they know they can't blame someone else if they hurt themselves. I wouldn't trade the American way for the British way, but we could learn a thing or two.

Scenes: a Bangladeshi street-fair on Brick Lane; a wan political rally at Trafalgar Square; a bus ride up Oxford Street; a reasonable and excellent Ethiopian restaurant, Abyssinia in Cricklewood. A mediocre and un-magnetic breakdancer drawing a crowd of 300-500 or so outside Covent Garden; the US could clearly export some of its lesser street performers and make both countries better off. Doing a start from seeing my ex-wife twenty feet away in the Covent Garden crowd for the first time in five years, until I realize that it's just a spitting image of her who's four inches taller. More interesting tourism starts tomorrow.

I'm off to Europe for the rest of May. Can't promise that I'll be live-blogging the trip, so this site will probably be fairly barren for a few weeks.

Since I've already been asking complete strangers, I'll ask readers in anticipation of the dozen or so hits I'll get tomorrow from Evan and in anticipation of my trip: what are the must-see/must-do/must-eat experiences in London and Paris?