Dari and G Man in North America

I've seriously done more in that week in London than in three months in cold, crappy Calgary! This place is totally dick-riculous and always vibin' and stuff! It's awesome, although I doubt I can live here. But it was totally awesome - shot to my bro for entertaining me!

Circus and Squares
I arrived at 10h30 at Heathrow with surprisingly very little hassle - usually I get the full security pat down and cavity search for uncut diamonds, perlemoen, mandrax and 12 year old sex slaves hiding in my hand luggage... this time when they interrogated me at customs, they actually believed I was there for holiday, and not some dodgy smuggling deal!

We went straight into town for lunch in Chinatown, and then randomised our way through Trafalgar Square, Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus.



Christmas at the in-laws
People always ask what we eat at a Chinese Christmas. Well, see for yourself - three different roasts, tons of side dishes - 12 courses at least! And back home it's even more!! And then afterwards we played mahjong into the wee hours...



The Palace
Buckingham Palace is hardly anything to write home about. It's a big stone building with gawdy gold statues that The Donald himself would be proud of. And apparently the queen doesn't even stay there? Actually, highlight of the day was hitting the Nandosh for lunch! Yoh, I miss Nando's!





The river and everything alongside it
We took a walk through to Westminster Abbey and Houses of Parliament which are all close to the Thames River, and then we mosey'd onto the London Eye. Queues to the Eye are insanely long and winding, so I decided to postpone that ride til Feb... And I finally polished off a plate of one of England's national dishes - no man not curry and rice... bangers and mash you silly sod!





Update:
Sushi'd out
We went for all you can eat sushi. 'Nuff said. Just pick your plate of the conveyer belt and deshtroy as many plates as is humanly possible. It was SO great - 33 plates of sushi and two bowls of noodles! I was a lil sick, but not nearly as sick as Judge was after the infamous "two platters of salmon sushi" night. Good times...



Old Year's Day
New Years was pretty chilled - dinner at the in-laws, playing with sparklers (haven't done that since forever!) and then karaoke in Soho which was actually quite hilarious. What's up with Asians and karaoke? Seriously I don't get it?!

And I saw probably the greatest fireworks show I ever did see - they set up 10 minutes of crazy explosions on the London Eye and boats on the Thames, which was pretty awesome!

The walk back to the car was crazy mad too! Firstly, we parked 30 minutes from the restaurant, and secondly, I got to witness some good ol' fashioned British thuggery and hooliganism - such liberal use of the bad words, near rioting and abuse of passers-by! Unfortunately there was no looting and or stone throwing - I would've loved that cos God knows I can throw far and accurately!





And then after four hours of sleep, I was up, packed and off to the airport for my flight back to Calgary. And so with that, ended my whirlwind tour of London! There was a lot I never got around to, but I'll be back in Feb so hopefully I get to see some more of you monkeys out there! And after 9 hours of flying we touched down, only to have a startling reminder that I live in Calgary - our baggage was delayed cos the cargo doors at the airport were frozen! Well, imagine that?!

Check the highly condensed gallery of the billion photos taken:
Circus and Squares
Christmas
Buck Palace
The River
Sushi
New Years

Interlude - Things I won't miss about London
- Fast and reckless bus drivers. And taxi drivers. Actually English drivers in general.
- Busy London streets filled with thousands of rude, non-English speaking Europeans.
- A real shower.
- Toilets that don't flush! (You have to crank the handle a couple times to build up some voema to get a half decent flush - good thing I didn't need a power dump at the in-laws after the three roast Christmas dinner - coulda been mighty embarrassing!).
- The tube.
- Cold rainy-ness.

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Another three Saffers arrived in Cal last week - Herman's mate Gerhard arrived for holiday bearing Rooibos, biltong and Province jerseys. And Craig and Andre arrived from our Jozi office for a work stint to the end of March some time.

Anyway, we hit Melrose on 17th Ave for small biggie, rep'ing SA all the way... Gerhard (WP), Dari (Jozi), Craig (Boks) and Herman (WP)... and Andre taking the photo (dof oke didn't bring any jerseys or Saffer gear! I offered my Amakhosi top but what the chances?!


Friday, December 22, 2006

And then we hit the Maid, our favourite "French" restaurant to treat Gerhard to his first gentleman's club. Good times...



Saturday, December 23, 2006

And then just before my flight to London town, I took the guys down to Chinatown - dim sum!


Squiz the gallery here (NSFW, rated R - not suitable for sensitive viewers, viewer discretion is advised)!

I got my first Christmas prezzy today - the "Internationals" had a Secret Santa Christmas lunch.

So here's the deal:
- Buy a gift for $20 (strictly no over spending!).
- Pick a number.
- One by one, choose a mystery gift off the table, depending on your number.
OR
- "steal" a gift from someone who has already chosen and opened a gift before you (pretty dof rules, dunno whose idea that was, I can only imagine it was one of those Swiss okes').
- If your gift gets "stolen", you get to pick another off the table, or "steal" someone elses again...
- Being the dodgy Saffers - three of us now - we stole other peoples' gifts. Much to everyone else's shock, shock, horror.
- BUT RULES IS RULES!!!

Craig (I'll introduce you once we get a photo) was the first to steal someone's Calgary mug, Herman stole a bottle of wine and I stole this hat!

It's like some tsotsi's hat off the streets of Jozi - seh-ri-us loxion cul-cha!



Quite embarrassingly, my chocolate and sweet basket was chosen second last, outta 25 gifts or so... pretty funny if you ask me!

Three months???? Get the fuck outta here - I haven't been here three months? Have I?

But that's what the moons say, and who am I to questions the moons?

Well not much has happened since I last wrote the big Two Month mail. For those not good at maths, that was one month ago!


Work-wise
I've done some awesome work, when I've worked. But I've also been lazy and openly criticized the culture of working long nights and weekends - that made me SO unpopular with the partner it's just not funny! Although I find myself in the office most Sunday mornings, to make up for the time I fucked around after the big Friday lunches - but that's fine, its gives me an opportunity to use and abuse the office telephone to make random calls back home, right? But unlike most you you with play-play jobs, I still have to work this coming week! Aaargh!

Sociableness
So there's still fokol to do in Cal - I keep myself busy by surfing the net for Chump-worthy material, watching thousands of Youtube clips, shopping at the Saturday Sears sales and relaying the randomness that is my life! Oh, and running from cougars and former strippers...

Happy holidays
I'm not gonna wish you Merry Christmas cos it discriminates against us non-Christians and heathens. My people have suffered enough... Everyone's already put up their "holiday lights" and "holiday trees" which makes the place look quite festive. But the Christmas carols in the malls and offices... killing me! Over and over the same songs!!! It's about time someone wrote wrote new carols!!!

Anyway, in case you haven't heard, I'm jetting to London, Inga-land (and not London, Ontario like all these Canadians think?) for Christmas and New Year! For those of you that are there, you better prep the sleeper couch, whip out the two ply, stock up on peanut butter (Black Cat, preferably) and prepare an entertainment itinerary to keep me outta trouble! Apparently I need to visit Soho... So, ho, how much?

So lemme know what all ya'll are up to? I'm out!

PS. I found a place that sells pies. Hmmmm, pies... but not so nice... I think they dropped a bag of frozen veg in there...

So after a great evening of Goo Goo Dolls, we had 2 visitors from out of town again staying with us for the weekend, so we went sightseeing again. This time it was a great day so we hit the parks - first Boston Common and the Public Gardens (a block away from our place), then we went walking through the "rich" suburb called Beacon Hill:

The ice rink in the Boston Common and Boston Common:



Beacon Hill:



After Beacon Hill we decided to cut across the highway to the Charles River. This proved quite difficult as we got stuck somehow between the two lines of traffic and we just kept walking down the island in between until it ran out. At that stage we were both too stubborn and pissed off to walk back so we sat and waited for a gap in the traffic... 25 minutes later we sprinted across in the only gap probably that
entire day!!



But it was worth it as the river is very cool, its the same river where the Harvard boat race takes place and both Harvard and MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) are both on the River.





We then paid a visit to Fenway Park - Home of the Boston Red Sox. We went for a tour of the stadium which was brilliant - we are just in between the seasons and won't be here for a game, which is so dissapointing.

Here is a point by point recall of the tour from our blogs one and only Robbie:

The Curse of the Bambino is lifted!!



So on Saturday Greg and I went to Fenway Park, the famous baseball stadium where the Boston Red Sox play their home games.

We went on a tour of the Stadium, and found ourselves enjoying the history the Stadium had to offer, including the most famous sale in Baseball history in 1918. The Red Sox won three world series in the past (1916, 1917, 1918), with support provided by well known Babe Ruth. Babe Ruth was then sold off to the NY Yankees in 1919, and never won a world series for 80+ years!! This was later better known as the Curse of the Bambino (Curse of Babe Ruth). Their luck later changed, and finally won world series in 2004.

There was a lot more history involved, like the seat in the right field bleachers is painted red to mark the spot where the longest measurable home run ever hit inside Fenway Park landed. Ted Williams (famous left handed baseball player for Red Sox) hit the home run on June 9, 1946 The blast was measured at 502 feet. Legend says that the ball crashed through the straw hat of the man sitting in the seat- A Yankees fan. To this day the man that was hit has passed on, but his family still gets to sit in the seat where he was hit!! (check the pic in the galleryfor a better view)



and the retired numbers of well known baseball players who have retired from the game, and with them, their numbers also retiring.
Retired Red Sox uniform numbers hung in right field in numerical order: Bobby Doerr (1) in 1988, Joe Cronin (4) in 1984, Carl Yastrzemski (8) in 1989, Ted Williams (9) in 1984 and Carlton Fisk (27) in 2000.



The stadium is also unique, in that it offers the longest and shortest home run distances to hit in baseball, the shortest home run being 302 yards… and the longest home run boundary (420 yards).

For those who like to drop it like its hot, the stadium was also recently reconstructed to accommodate a VIP area….



This seating area was renamed the club seats the ".406 Club" (in honor of Ted Williams' batting average in 1941), six days after his death. (Williams is the last player to hit .400 or better in the major leagues.)
During the fall and winter of 2005-2006, as part of the continuing expansion efforts at Fenway Park, the existing .406 club was rebuilt.
The average price per game to sit in one of these blue pimped out seats will set you back an average of $ 275 per game (2006: $ 286 per seat).

The stadium is most famous for the left field wall called the "Green Monster". This wall is 37-foot high and 240 feet long, has a 22-foot deep foundation, and was constructed from 30,000 pounds of Toncan iron. Previously, a 23-½-foot tall screen protected cars and pedestrians on Lansdowne Street. However, the screen was replaced after the 2002 season with more seating atop the Green Monster (in an attempt to fit as many seats as possible in Fenway).In 1947, advertisements covering the left field wall were painted over using green paint, which gave rise to the "Green Monster" name.



Check out the gallery for more pics...

Friday, December 8, 2006

For the first time in a long time I felt like going out. We had VIP comps to the notorious Cowboys - pretty much Calgary's version of Drop Zone or Odds... stay well away (but you have to see it for yourself).

Handle bar 'staches. Pointy snake skin boots. Big belt buckles. Cowboy hats. I stood out like a sore thumb! But I'll admit, the waitresses and barladies are crazy HJOT - far better looking than Manhattan's... uh huh! How's this for club policy - work there six months, and they buy you new boobs! Anyway, we chose a real crap night to go, some two pence country singer was playing live. Sorry for this, but no pics from inside the club - as much as I wanted pics of the barladies and a real-life cowboy, I was way too scared!




So we ditched that place and made our way to our local pub in Kensington - The Yardhouse. But along the way we ignored all warning signs and stopped to play on the semi-frozen Bow River. Quite funny, we almost made news headlines when Herman almost fell through the ice! One leg went knee-deep through the ice into the frozen water! I've never shat myself that much. But he survived to tell the story, and being the trooper he is, he still insisted we hit The Yard'! That's m'boy!

Get this: It's been a warm zero degrees out - and we were just wearing light sweat tops, no gloves, scarves or beanies! How hard to the core are we?!



We met this dodgy, drunk mofo that introduced us to these chicks. The chick on the left falls into the Cougar category - a cougar is Canadian slang for ladies who are 30-something and single, and looking for nothing but young, virile men and a night of sordid, all night long marathon sex. The chick on the right? A 25 year old, former stripper... 'nuff said?



Just to state things explicitly: we're not that dodgy, okay? We're officially poes-teazers... basically the opposite of cock-teazers - for once, the guys teazed the girls. We left all together, flagged a cab, and then shoved them in and hauled ass in the other direction! Way too fucken funny!

See the rest of Friday night's gallery.

Saturday, December 9, 2006

We went bus-trippin'... pretty random, eh? Still a warm zero degrees - loving this weather.



Saturday night was the office year end functionon the observation deck of the Calgary Tower - 38 storeys, 520-something feet above ground. I suppose it was an alright evening, very respectable - nothing like the crazy office parties back home. That's pretty much cos drinks are only free from 7-8pm - half the people haven't even arrived by then - pretty cheap if you ask me! There was a belter or two, not gonna lie.


The Tower from the ground. And the ground from the Tower - on the glass floor - 525 feet (175 m about?).



But we left at midnight to chill at this stylish lounge on 8th Ave. And then we braved the cold walk home at 02h30 with Gordon the Scotsman, singing "Flower of Scotland", as he froze his bits off in the ten-below zero temps. He made us promise that if some Calgarian thugs came to fuck him up cos he was wearing a skirt, that we'd be honourable men and jump in to help. You should see how much abuse he took! We topped off a fun night with the inevitable 2.30am pizza and fried chiggen being stuffed in our faces...



Check the year end function gallery.

So after getting home at 1am on Sat night I get woken up at 4:50am buy the sound of a waterfall of water in the kitchen???
A opened my bedroom door and there was a fountain coming from my ceiling - it was beautiful.



There was a burst water pipe on the 20th floor and cause there is nobody staying there yet, nobody turned it off! So the water came through all the way from the 20th to me at the 10th (and all the floors between) and it eventually stopped on the 9th.
So I spent the next 3 hours emptying buckets of water into the sink and mopping up the mess.

When it finally slowed down I created the "towel supported bucket 2 bucket system". This patent pending invention gave me at least another 30 minutes of sleep between emptying.



It finally stopped at about 10am and now my apartment smells like a hamsters cage cause my wooden floor got very wet. When the maintenance crew came in to help the guy too the lid of the light out and all the water that had built up inside poured over him and he ended up sopping wet - it was hilarious! But the engineers and everyone were in the whole day and it looks like things will be back to normal soon.