Primark

I know I've been in this country for a while now, but I still find this whole place rather odd from time to time. For example, on Saturday I accompanied Mark to a rugby game at Twickenham, along with 80,000 other people. We were sitting by ourselves (so to speak) but Mark knew quite a few other people attending, including his brother. For reasons my American mind can't comprehend, his brother was sitting with 28 of his closest friends, and they were all dressed up like knights of the crusades. Two of them got arrested for attempting to run onto the field to have a sword fight. While Americans will occasionally dress festively for a sporting events, they usually do so to show their support for one of the teams involved. This makes sense to me. But dressing up in faux chain mail to watch the Wasps play the Tigers is, well, I don't even know what it is. Walking around after the game, I was continuously surprised at the vast array of fans that rugby seems to attract. Basically, I expect it to draw the same fans as football, but you seem to get just like loads of young preppy male types with pink polos. And then a guy with a giant beer belly walks by and everything is as it should be.

In a slight change of pace, I went shopping yesterday. Not for anything fun, mind you, but I was in desperate need of nylons as I had killed all of my flesh toned pairs, which has been limiting what I can wear to work. Anyways, to make things a bit more exciting I decided to poke my head into Primark to see what exactly the deal was. My best description of Primark is that its Old Navy on a bit of crack. Everything is dirt, dirt cheap and so everything in there is carrying around a shopping bag with about 15 items in it, and they're all climbing over everyone and you can't walk anywhere. The line to buy stuff was about 100 50 yards long. Needless to say, I got scared and quickly made my way back out again.

After getting in some practice with my Oxford Street slow shopper weave, I made my way down Regent Street to check out London's new and only Banana Republic. It was very nice, only about 80% as expensive as I feared, and there were many things I wanted. I again made a quick exit, only this time to keep myself from buying things I couldn't afford.