DAVE BARRY
Recently my family and I spent a week in London, which is a popular
foreign place to visit because they have learned to speak some English
over there. Although frankly they have a long way to go. Often, when
they get to the crucial part of a sentence, they’ll realize that they
don’t know the correct words, so they’ll just make some silly ones up. I
had a lot of conversations that sounded like this:
ME: Excuse me. Could you tell us how to get to Buckingham Palace?
BRITISH PERSON: Right. You go down this street here, then you nip up
the weckershams.
ME: We should nip up the weckershams?
BRITISH PERSON: Right. Then you take your first left, then you just
pop ‘round the gorn-and-scumbles, and, Jack’s a doughnut, there you are!
ME: Jack’s a DOUGHNUT?
BRITISH PERSON: Right.
Also they have a lot of trouble with pronunciation, because they
can’t move their jaw muscles, because of malnutrition caused by wisely
refusing to eat English food, much of which was designed and
manufactured in medieval times during the reign of King Walter the
Mildly Disturbed. Remember when you were in junior high school, and
sometimes the cafeteria workers would open up a large Army-surplus food
can left over from the Spanish-American War and serve you a scary-
looking dish with a name like Tuna Bean Prune Cabbage Omelet Casserole Surprise''? Well, they still have a LOT of food like that over in England, on permanent display in bars, calledpubs,’’ where people
drink for hours but nobody ever eats. We saw individual servings of pub
food that we recognized from our last visit, in 1978. Some dishes – no
effort is made to conceal this fact – contain KIDNEYS. We also saw one
dish with a sign next to it that said – I swear I am not making this up
-
–
Spotted Dick.'' The English are very good at thinking up silly names. Here are some actual stations on the London underground: Marylebone, Tooting Broadway, Piccadilly Circus, Cockfosters, Frognal, Goodge Street, Mudchute, Barking and East Ham. Londoners are apologetic about their underground, which they believe has become filthy and noisy and dangerous, but which is in fact far more civilized than the average American wedding reception. At the height of rush hour, people on the London underground actually sayexcuse me.’’ Imagine what would happen if you tried an
insane stunt like that on the New York City subway. The other passengers
would take it as a sign of weakness, and there’d be a fight over who got
to keep your ears as a trophy.
Our primary cultural activity in London was changing money. We had to
do this a lot because the dollar is very weak. Europeans use the dollar
primarily to apply shoe polish. So every day we’d go to one of the
money-changing places that are all over London, and we’d exchange some
dollars for British money, which consists of thepound'' and a wide variety of mutant coins whose sizes and shapes are unrelated to their values, and then we'd look for something to eat that had been invented in this century, such as pizza, and we'd buy three slices for what we later realized was $247.50, and then we'd change some money again. Meanwhile, the Japanese tourists were exchanging THEIR money for items such as Westminster Abbey. In the interest of broadening our 10-year-old son's cultural awareness, we visited some important historic sites, including the Tower of London, the Dungeon, and Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum, all of which are devoted to explaining in clinical detail how various historic members of royalty were whacked into small historic pieces. English history consists largely of royal people getting their heads chopped off, which is why members of the royal family now wear protective steel neck inserts, which is why they walk the way they do. Needless to say this brand of history was a hit with our son. He especially enjoyed the guidedJack the Ripper’’ tour that we took one
dark night with a very intense guide.Right on this spot is where they found the victim's intestines,'' she'd say.And right here is where
they found the liver, which is now part of the food display of that pub
over there.’’
Another cultural activity we frequently engaged in was looking the
wrong way before attempting to cross streets. The problem is that in
America, people drive on the RIGHT side of the street, whereas in
London, they drive on BOTH sides of the street, using hard-to-see cars
about the size of toaster ovens. The best way to handle this, as a
tourist, is to remain on one side of the street for your entire visit,
and see the other side on another trip.
But I definitely recommend London for anybody who enjoys culture and
could stand to lose a few pounds. I learned many things that will be of
great value to me, not just personally, but also professionally, and I’m
not saying that just to be polite to the English. I’m saying it because
of Internal Revenue Service regulations.© 1990 THE MIAMI HERALD
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