every day, someone will walk over to my desk and ask if i want to go to tesco to pick up lunch supplies, and when they say ‘tesco’, they never sound particularly happy about having to walk across the office park.

it’s always the same boring play-the-same-first-level-of-mario-brothers adventure at tesco: buy fruit/nuts, attempt to use credit card that doesn’t have a ‘chip’ in it. no chip means i can’t merely insert my card, i have to swipe, and with swiping comes needing to sign the receipt. this isn’t a big deal except that no one ever has anything for me to sign with, so i’m stuck making painful smalltalk with the cashier until someone comes over with a pen.

the other day when cashier 2 came over to cashier 1 with a pen, i thanked her. she immediately turned to cashier 1 and said, ‘och, ee as en accen un im, don-ee?’

yeah lady, you sound like groundskeeper willie and i have the accent. i will not be missing tesco.

water in the toilet. no, really.

i’m really into mellow yellow (i’m a giant hippie, i know). turns out that mellow yellow only really works if there’s water in the toilet, otherwise it’s just a big pot of piss that smells like an outhouse (apparently my hippieness has a limit). because of the lack of water, we have to flush more often.

so while i admire the uk’s water conservation initiatives, this one seems kind of misguided. as does the washing machine that takes 1.5 hours just to wash. drying takes three weeks.

my baby brother, who just emailed me this gem:

i went to see a friend’s band play at the hollywood house of blues last night. super-weird night. i was in the bathroom next to dee snider when “we’re not gonna take it” came on. pretty awesome.

i have no idea how he kept a straight face, i suspect that he didn’t.

the other day, i went to the edinburgh hippie food grocery store to pick up some produce and snacks. while perusing the dried fruit aisle, i saw that they were selling dates grown in iran(!), which of course i bought and devoured. this will probably come of no surprise to you good brothers and sisters, but the forbidden fruit really is sweeter.

given my history with completely humorless customs agents, i will be unable to bring any of these fine iranian dates back to the united states. i apologize in advance.

mia ’squeamish’ steinberg actually watched the bbc airing of passion of the christ last night. i opted to go to sleep. i think i made the right choice. mia startles/gets grossed out pretty easily, which is why watching that seems so out of character.

she came to bed around 1pm and woke me up around 1:30 to ask me if i heard ‘that’. i told her that she was freaked out by the snuff film she just watched, but then i heard ‘that’ too.

‘that’ was someone screaming/bellowing at irregular intervals. it didn’t sound like sex, and it was coming from somewhere outside. mia asked me if i thought he was being stabbed. i told her that if he was being stabbed that he would probably be screaming at a higher pitch and that it sounded like he was being bludgeoned. (being in the uk has turned me into miss marple, apparently.)

she asked me to check if i could see anything, so i got myself out of bed and went to the window. nothing doing, i told her. i then added that there were two choices: go outside and give a look-see or go back to bed. she told me not to go outside. i went back to bed.

i didn’t remember that this happened until about noon today and i’m not sure how to find out if someone was beaten to death or not.

it is late march in edinburgh and somehow it’s still snowing, which isn’t great for cycling but did allow me to find something out that i otherwise wouldn’t have known: the only thing than worse than cycling on dry cobblestones is cycling on snowy cobblestones. i am full of silver linings.

skip it.

edinburghers (edinburghians? edinburrowers?) aren’t known to be the friendliest people in scotland and it’s rare that one will make eye contact on the footway, let alone say hello. i don’t think this is bad, it just is what it is.

so this morning when an edinburghian(?) motorist pulled up alongside me as i was riding my bike to work and started talking, i was kind of surprised. i think he said something like, ‘hey, fuckstick! you went through a red light back there!’ but i can’t be 100% sure because i was listening to my ipod.

i guess you can’t make a left on red in the uk. good to know for next time.

not sure whether it was the fursty ferret beer, or the vegan haggis that mia ‘adventure’ steinberg found in the co-op (i think i’m maybe done with vegan haggis), but i finally had my first dream about the royal family last night.

in summary:
i was invited to meet the royal family at some sort of huge gala, and decided it would be an awesome idea to take some ecstasy and act like a fucking lunatic. hilarity ensued; security called; alarm went off.

steinberg has arrived. steinberg is now pronounced stein-bur-ah. unclear whether she likes this or not. it’s funny to see mia go through what i went through last week: the not-looking-right when you step off a curb; the inability to not peer in curtainless windows; the constant this-place-is-so-old line of talk.

i was telling my coworkers this morning that i have to remind mia to look right when she crosses the street, and it took me about a week to do regularly, so i wonder how long it’s going to take her. i then said that i should do some science and not remind her so that i can compare results.

they said: signs? what kind of signs?

me: huh? oh. not signs, science!

it turns out that i’m not the only one who’s having trouble with accents around here.

i always knew that i liked those soma new xpress tires, but i didn’t realize just how awesome they were until i got to a place that has incredibly poor pavement and cobblestones.

also, i’m realizing now that there are many downsides to cobblestones:
- slow going
- once there’s broken glass between cobblestones, it stays there forever
- jarring
- whenever you do road work, you have to pick ‘em up and put ‘em back, which seems much harder than digging and repaving

bikes here are like any other vehicles, though they have these pretty awesome marked places for you to wait when you’re at a light that are in front of cars. good job, uk.

the downside to being any other vehicle is that you’re pretty much not treated like bad things could happen if you got hit. for instance, i was coming off the bike path this afternoon and crossing a street when someone turned in front of me. instead of getting furious, i realized that it’s just what’s done here. it’s kind of an elaborate (if seemingly sketchy) dance between bikes and cars and i kind of love it. in the states, i would have confronted. here, i just sort of shrugged it off and realized that riding on the sidewalk and then crossing the street onto the road in front of his car was maybe not the smartest thing to do. though really, he should have signaled (he signals, i don’t go). so yeah, 50/50. we smiled and moved on.

i ride past this place every day. tony blair went to school here. it’s fancy.

mia is here now. going. bye.

1. water pressure — there is no water pressure. some americans really love high-pressure shower violence when they come home from their runs/rides. i am one of those americans.

2. eco-laundry space saving washer/dryers — i thought i was going to love this little washing machine contraption; it’s one unit; it fits under the kitchen counter; everyone has one; it. takes. forever. the obvious downside is that you can’t wash one load while the other load is drying. you might be asking yourself why i have so much laundry. i don’t, in american terms. but euro eco-laundry contraption (which is both handsome and high-tech) only takes 10lbs of laundry to wash at a time and then 5lbs of laundry to dry. at home, some americans do one load of laundry every two weeks and it takes an hour and a half. i’ll be doing two loads of laundry today and it will take four hours. i can imagine that some americans wouldn’t like this. me? i don’t care — my knee is busted and i have work to do.

3. the hours — things are closed on sundays, which i think is incredibly civilized (if somewhat christian), but i can see some americans getting crabby about the inconvenience.

4. the prices — i can imagine that some americans would have some form of sticker-shock when they see that everything costs double here. me? i’m keeping my receipts and expensing all my food to amzn. organic fruits and veggies are about the same price here as they are in the co-op (which is kind of expensive). i hope that accounts payable understands the weak dollar and accepts my expense report. i am cautiously optimistic.

after years of running i finally have my first knee problem, which has been painful and frustrating in equal parts. it doesn’t bother me when i ride or walk, but when i run it becomes completely debilitating after maybe two miles. it’s been like that for about a month. i suppose i’ll have to find a sports doc when i get home.

running in a new city is one of my favorite things, as i feel like i can cover a ton of ground really quickly. with the residual knee stiffness from last weekend finally subsiding, i went to run around holyrood park. the good news is that holyrood park and arthur’s seat are gorgeous, the bad news is that my knee started acting up and almost locked up when i stopped to ask directions.

it probably didn’t help that there was a cross-country team of 13-year-olds who i decided to race up the hill. but don’t you worry, i brought one home for the usa and for old people with knee problems everywhere.

i’m paying for it now — laid up on the couch, ice on my knee, watching the football report on bbc2. no running until i get home. all cycling all the time.

my first week of work in scotland has drawn to a close. i was able to ride into the office four days this week, most of it not in the rain, for a total of 80 miles. it has worked out well. i ride in with a dude named jeremy who lives about two blocks from my flat.

a fair part of our ride is on a bike path that runs through the housing estates, which are, in case you don’t know, what they call the projects. only they look maybe 20x nicer than any housing projects i’ve ever seen.

every day as we ride the path, there’s a family that walks toward us three-across. they don’t leave us much room, so jeremy and i ride two-up so as not to run them down. every day they yell at us to slow down (we’re not traveling quickly). today when they yelled at us, jeremy called the woman a fucking idiot. (it’s true, she is a fucking idiot. though the only proof i have of this is that she uses her 8-year-old as a traffic-calming device.) the fucking idiot was not pleased at being called out.

then jeremy did something that i probably wouldn’t have done — he went back to a) apologize and b) have a reasonable discourse about proper use of a shared bike/pedestrian path. i thought he was gonna get himself punched. nope, just a lot of yelling, culminating with the fucking idiot taking out a copy of highway code from her bag and waving it at jeremy.

during lunch, when jeremy recounted this story, i learned a new word: knack (more specifically: fucking knack) — [from urban-dictionary.com] rough young people living in cities and towns in certain ares of Ireland wearing burberry hats tracksuit pant/short jeans and celtic jerseys with a few bulldog tattoos.

turns out they’re not only limited to ireland.

later that afternoon on the ride home, a different set of fucking knacks threw a plastic bottle at me from a car window, giving me opportunity to use the latest addition to my vocabulary.

jeremy has jury service on monday, leaving me to deal with the fucking knacks on my own. thanks, dude.

i maybe don’t. when i found out that the lads from work were headed down to the cinema tonight to see rambo tonight at half eight, i didn’t hesitate to accept their offer. i wanted some violence and some american english. or i thought i did. i wanted violence, but then i always want violence. it turns out that i didn’t want sylvester stallone’s american.

i was in a small panic that i was losing my taste for american and that i’m getting used to scottish now but when we went down to the pub for a pint and i realized that i couldn’t understand anything that the patrons in there were saying, i breathed a sigh of relief. it’s just sylvester stallone. it’s not american in general, which i probably should have suspected.

rambo holds up a second time, btw.