London calling day four

In my ongoing tribute to Ricardo and wife being in London, I'm reprising the emails I sent home during my trip to both London and Paris. This is entry #3:

Sunday July 2, 2000

Subject: Time traveling

Hello again! Day four of my trip abroad led to more interesting discoveries. First though, some more musings on London that I failed to mention in my past emails.

Tube talk

-Yes, there's more info on the Tube. To leave the Tube, follow the "Way Out" signs. These will not lead you to the Beatles like band from The Flinstones (does anyone get that reference?), rather it eventually leads you out of the station. What do Londoners have against articles like "the" as in "the way out"?

I don't know and no one seemed interested in telling me. I saw plenty more screwed up signs today though.

-The train lines are color-coded and have their end-destinations as the name of the line, which is very similar to the trains in Chicago only there are a lot more of them.

Bats in the belfry

-So today I get up because I hear a cock crowing. Now...that doesn't seem unreasonable since Tom and Sue live on a farm as I've mentioned right? Fine, only Tom and Sue categorically deny that there's a rooster on the farm and that they have never heard one. Which means one of three things: 1) there is a rooster and Tom and Sue are deaf. 2) there is no rooster and I was really whacked out because of the Boddington's I had last night and imagined the whole thing. 3) somebody is making rooster noises at 7:30 in the morning outside my window. I don't know about you, but I sure hope it's 1 or 2.

-After making scrambled eggs for breakfast, with Leicester cheese no less, I was sitting at the kitchen table while Sue ate breakfast and fed Rachel. Sure, I could have helped out there, but I'd probably do something wrong and Rachel would end up crying and Tom and Sue would end up hating me. Anyway, this was no ordinary breakfast. First, Sue, who was raised on a farm mind you, doesn't eat eggs or drink milk. Ok, it's because the farmers do SOMETHING to those animals and she knows it right? Nope, at least she's not spilling if that's true. So she doesn't want my eggs, which is fine--more for me--but she does want cereal. Yep, cereal, no milk. My mouth was agape the whole meal.

So I'm staring out the window because I can't watch the heresy going on at the table and I see the couple next door pulling out a ladder to, how it appears at least, to change a light bulb outside the barn. These folks are 70+ so I throw on my tennis shoes so I can go do it for them. Well, before I get my shoes on, the lady is climbing the stairs and opens this birdhouse like door (it looks like one of those doors that may have been used for hay or something at one time, but now there's a whole cut out like a bird house). So she's back down by the time I get ready and apparently they're pretty active, so no harm no foul.

Well it turns out she was putting a baby BAT back up there because they think that's their nesting area and they found the baby in the garden (probably because they've been up for 5 hours doing stuff even though it was only 8:30--old people get that way you know). That's not the only bat story I have oddly enough. Last night, after I sent my email out, we were watching movies (Mask of Zorro with Catherine Zeta Jones (sp?) and Something About Mary---guess who picked the movies?) and during Zorro I kept seeing something moving by the window. At first I blamed the Boddington's, but then I realized that it was in fact bats. Tom has one big room with a 12' wall or so that's 18' high and almost all glass, this is the wall the sheep stare at me through by the way. They're doing it right now, but I won't look at them. I won't give them the satisfaction. Anyway, the bats were swooping by every couple of seconds eating insects. It was really cool to see.