London day 3? 4?

*If you click on the pictures you can see a larger version. Some are blurry because I didn't use a flash.

On the 7 hour flight to London I met a fine Dutch woman named Caroline La Poole, with a phD in cellular biology. I drew her a picture of the drawbacks of my lighting rod/wind turbine fields idea. Only slept about 30 minutes of the whole flight, and I'm still figuring out a sleep schedule in this place where the cars never stop driving past my window (on the other side of the road).
My flatmates are cool, everyone is trying to get along. Each, in their own drunken ramblings, has revealed enough personal dirt that it demands trust and respect. Out of the 6 flats in Westburn Place, 4 are filled with students from Pennsylvania. A few of them came over the other night to help us figure out how to get pressure in our 4th floor shower.
Brad and I went a bought some food at Sainsbury's and I've found if you don't think about it in American Dollars, 10 pounds sounds like a deal. The one pound coins are the most useful thing I've come across, and they're a substantial piece of metal; they're about 1.5 x as thick as a quarter and slighty larger in diameter than a nickle.
Last night, on the way to an authentic Italian restaurant (serious language barrier), we saw a double-decker bus collide with a standard bus. The sound was pretty nasty, you don't hear something like it often; a mix of hydrolic airbrakes, spiderwebbing glass, cracking plastic and warping metal. Coming back out of the tube station, the corner was crawling with bobbies in yellow reflective vests. I spied a piece of debris in the road from the crash and I darted out and grabbed it. A piece of the blue fiberglass skirting from a double-decker bus in the shape of Illinois(e) now hangs over our mantle.
As we were walking the river Thames I spotted a huge banner for a Mime convention. Yea, facepaint, clad in black and white, mimes. I want to go. I keep trying to imagine the cutting edge material mimes must have these days to warrant a whole convention for it, and I can't sleep at night. Also, Jack Saucy and the Space Vixens.

The tubes have great tile artwork. One station has profiles of Sherlock Holmes' head made out of small Holmes heads. I'll try and get a picture.
The countrymen here are nice in certain areas, but the older folk that frequent the pubs near us are rather judging and insanely hard to understand. The only word I clearly heard was "Fookin!'" And heard it quite often. But, on the whole, everyone here is really tolerant of other cultures. The white building you can see in the first picture is the Islamic Center of London.

From the drafty living room,
Ben