happyImagine, if you will, that you have to meet up with somebody who you don't know and can't contact. A specific time is agreed, but the two of you must guess the same location in order to meet, which can be anywhere in the world. Where do you guess?
Imagine that you have to meet up with somebody who you don't know and can't contact. A specific time is agreed, but the two of you must guess the same location in order to meet, which can be anywhere in London. Where do you guess?
Imagine that you have to meet up with a LiveJournal user who you don't know and can't contact. A specific time is agreed, but the two of you must guess the same location in order to meet, which can be anywhere in London. Where do you guess?
Last month, the Times featured an article about Experimental Travel - ways to deliberately introduce arbitrary artificiality into a holiday in the hope that it will make the trip more interesting. On reflection, the subject crops up from time to time elsewhere, the Indy wrote about it in February because Lonely Planet had written a book about it and CNN got there first in 2003. Of course, if you like reading the master rather than the pupils, here's the original site - sadly, the English translation isn't comprehensive.
The one that caught my attention - and CNN's - is "erotourism" - "where a couple heads to the same town but travels there separately. The challenge is to find one another abroad. He and his wife of 30 years have engaged in the erotic pursuit in five cities and have managed to hook up every time." One might have thought that, upon re-encounter, the couple might claim not to recognise each other and, instead, happen to pick each other up for a holiday fling. Perhaps this could be a way to recapture the initial excitement of falling in love, with its courtship rituals and attendant taboos to be broken? Perhaps this could be a safe, sane and consensual (hooray!) way of playing at cheating upon each other without getting hurt? In any case, I am fully prepared to believe his claimed 5/5 success rate. I suspect it probably gets easier the more you think and talk about it in advance, too.
(This, of course, raises the question "Is there a game show to be made from this?" - a question to which the answer is, as usual, "It could be a round of a show".)
On Thursday and Friday I went to London, at least in part to see
wmk06 on her tour of London and Amsterdam. You can guess the rest of the story, can't you?The trip down was uneventful, other than the coach I wanted to take being completely booked out in advance, forcing me to rise at 6:30am to get the 8:10am coach. Upon arrival, I holed myself up at the food court above Victoria station and solved puzzles for a couple of hours.
beingjdc phoned when his workday finished - the first call I had received on a real live mobile phone of my own, eek! - and we managed to meet up without incident. This mobile phone ownership lark has its advantages. We met up, went to a pub, took a tube to Angel, went to another pub and went to the "Masala Zone" Indian restaurant in Islington.It was slightly less good than when I went with Meg: the service was much less fast and my strawberry-and-vanilla lassi was disappointing. (John's watermelon juice would have been lovely if it had been properly chilled.) Nevertheless, the main course was fine and the dessert was pretty good. Meg had a fantastic mango sorbet when we visited at the start of the year; I couldn't remember what it was, and ordered the mango kulfi (fibrous ice-cream). It was pretty good, but the sorbet would likely have been better. (John had the lemon sorbet - pretty good but not, as Michael Winner would say, historic.) Still firmly my first choice for Indian food in London.
After that, John went off to see
katstevens and company in their band, but I felt that industrial metal ska-punk was not my thing to the point where I took citizenpsmith up on his offer and nipped up to the Finchley Games Club instead. It was my first trip to a games club to play games for far too long (since late 2003, I think) and I was pleased to see that the state of the art had advanced somewhat. I enjoyed learning one new game, Attika (with a k!) - mostly tile placement with a dash of card management. Definitely interesting. Back to meet up with beingjdc to stay overnight in his gaff near Bermondsey for a night's sleep and a quick web check. He has rather a natty bachelor pad.Friday arrived and still no word from
wmk06 about where and when to meet. Dearly hoping she was OK, I reverted to plan B: enjoying (most of) a day in London on my own. A trip to the museum of the Clockmaker's Institute wasn't as much fun as the clocks exhibit at the Britism Museum, though I did enjoy learning of the existence of the Worshipful Company of Playing Card Makers. It filled half an hour reasonably well.Lunch was a pitta bread picked up from Tesco, then to the Apollo West End cinema near Piccadilly Circus to watch What the Bleep Do We Know!? - this is a second viewing after having seen it in Boston some time back, but it's not on general release. As I would have to make a journey just to go and watch the film, I decided to fit it into this particular trip. The movie deserves its own post; it's not very convincing, but it's the most interesting and thought-provoking film I've seen for some time and succeeds on that level. Looks gorgeous, too.
The Apollo West End cinema is tremendously pretty, full of neon changing colour spectrally, red-to-green-to-blue-to-magenta-and-back-t
After this I zoomed off to the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood, recognising that I would be able to give it the most cursory of half-hour rushes, only to discover it was closed on Fridays. Whoops. Ah well, at least I would be able to get back to Victoria in excellent time for my 4:30pm coach. Such excellent time, in fact, that I decided to hit a net café and check mail just once more. Turns out that the easyInternetCafé at Victoria has been replaced by an operation called "global net café", who had incidentally previously been operating as a subsidiary slightly-higher-cost, slightly-fuller-featured Internet café within the previous easy operation. The new owners have possibly one third as many computers as the old one, but at least they have staff present - we can be hopeful that this will go some way towards sorting out the rampant crime (locked to
dezzikitty's Friends) under their previous operation.Checked mail and word from
wmk06, who had finally been able to get onto the Internet for the first time in several days, with profuse apology for not sorting out the meeting earlier. I replied saying that I was about to leave the 'net café and make my way back to the Victoria Coach Station. If, on the wild off-chance, she was within very close walking distance of Victoria, we could meet up very quickly on a "better than nothing" basis.Inevitably, she was only sat three computers down from me in the very same Internet café.
We met! We hugged! We chatted briefly! I gave her a little book present that I bought, a passing amusement connected with her interest in genealogy. We enjoyed the unlikely circumstances inspiring the meeting; I became grateful for the "Bit Of A Wasted Journey" pointer being directed at my needless trip to Bethnal Green as an effective time-waster to make my trip and hers to the same Internet café coincide. What are the chances of that happening, eh? (insignificantly different from 0 a priori, 1 a postiori - Bayesian Ed.)
Now I wouldn't completely compare our coincident meeting with the erotourism mentioned earlier on the grounds that, yes, I mailed her to let her know where I was, which rather takes the skill out of meeting up. Nevertheless, I had never met her before and wouldn't have recognised her based on the picture in her icon, so I'm going to claim most (though not all) of the success. Recognising the person you're looking for is one thing; being together in the same place at the same time is another, and we certainly managed to achieve the second half of the deal.
So off to the coach and off home. The coach journey was terrible, because the air conditioning wasn't working; the driver obtained permission to insert an extra stop so we could buy water and delighted in telling us that the temperature in the coach was 34.6°C, having reached as high as 37°C earlier. For folk living in Farenheit countries, that's perilously close to body temperature. Frankly, I drank lots of water and the fine story to enjoy of the coincident meeting made up for the lousy journey.
Next trip: off to Boston to see
dezzikitty at the start of July! 