well, in what will be unsurprising to some people, it turns out the reading vs watford match was actually in reading. clearly, i should pay more attention. however, i would say it’s not a total loss as otherwise i never would have gone to watford. good thing i didn’t call in advance for tickets.
to say watford is in london, well greater london, is a bit like saying cullman is in birmingham. i’m not sure how far exactly it is, but it must have been at least a 45 minute tube ride (it’s last stop on the metropolitan line). the stadium, vicarage road, is a about 1 1/4 miles from the tube stop, not optimal. same goes for the town centre. after walking to the stadium with about 2 hours ’til game time, i noticed it seemed a bit inactive. you would think that there would be some kind of activity if a game was going to be occuring shortly, regardless the size of the town. undeterred, i walked down the street and had lunch. can you really pass up somewhere named the “football cafe”?
of course you can’t. at least i can’t. is that a diner or is it dinner? english was not their first language. decent cheeseburger, fresh cooked, grilled onions, decent fries. in the cafe eating were also what can only be described as 3 dumb skanks. they couldn’t have been more than 18. not really attractive, but skinny. too skinny. anyway, the point is 2 of them are wearing mid-driff shirts with some thin looking sweaters or something and not jacket. it’s like 35 degrees! it didn’t seem like a good idea to take a picture. i might have caught something. this wouldn’t be the last instance of this moronic fashion behaviour. there was a girl similarly dressed, probably older, up at the shopping area that was standing there shivering. i wanted to ask if her brain actually functioned, but i probably wouldn’t have gotten anything more than a blank stare.
the population of watford is only about 80,000 according to the u.k. gov statistics. it seems like a decent small town. although, even with such a small place, there’s still graffiti in random areas. i guess you can never escape bored teenagers. in the “watford observer”, the front page article from yesterday was about an early morning drug raid that caught 17 crack cocaine dealers in the area. i would say that the western side of town, where the stadium is, didn’t seem quite as nice as the town centre. i suspect that the more upscale areas are to the south and east of the town centre.
the town centre has a nice blocked off shopping high street. i think you can take some sort of train that has a stop right next to it, but i haven’t looked into that yet.
decent amount of shops and restaurants. mom would be happy because there’s a laura ashley.
how that chelsea fan get in there? is that john terry? overall, seems like it wouldn’t be too bad a place to live. well, maybe not for me. the general town layout is still all wrong.
on the tube ride back to london, i found this blip in the observer about the voodoo knife block. i definitely have to have one of those. but, what would i do with the knives?
there were 2 things i forgot from the other day. the “v for vendetta” premier was on thursday in london. that would have been pretty nice to check out had i known it was going on. the other is a little depressing. it appears “my name is earl” comes on broadcast tv here. while it can be a funny show and i’m a big fan of jason lee, it does show american’s in a bad light. but is it true? of course it is. in the same way that it’s true for everywhere else in the world with people that don’t live in bigger cities. it doesn’t have anything to do with the country your from. big cities are all alike. rednecks, sorry, rural folk are all the same.
not sure what’s up for tonight. i may be meeting ze germans. it’s looking like another unfortunate weekend without a live match. i’m fairly certain i’m going to go ahead and drop the 145 pounds for the fulham vs chelsea match next weekend. the sw6 derby should probably be pretty huge. maybe i should try and get in touch with the yanks-abroad.com guy to see if i could be a correspondent. hell, maybe there are some other yanks abroad, rabid soccer types here i should get in touch with anyway.
sucks that you went to Watford for nothing. live & learn eh?
That’s kind of like that time you and Moose went to Atlanta to see Medeski Martin & Wood on the wrong night.
Just read the part about the dental issues.. Not to worry I understand the Dentist in London are awesome oh wait that’s awful, so much so that the girl that worked for Mantissa over there would use a Dentist here
Since I don’t have to micro-manage you at work Jen and I are actually on vacation, currently in Charleston SC. (NOLA replacement) We got 45 mpg Bham to here.
So if you are results oriented and your mission was to see “football games” be sure to calculate a true cost per game (tcpg) that we can use to rate other people that go on this mission. Maybe also a games per day(gpd).
You are looking at the “skanks” to early in the day and without the required amount of that dark brown lukeworm beer. When you do have the encounter be sure to have that camera in lo-res mode.
tcpg & gpd kinda sound like mpdg(that’s miles per dave gorman for those not in the know).
the gpd is probably the only important one. while cost is interesting, i would be more impressed by more games.