Some friends of mine, and also blogger readers, asked me if I was feeling good. It seems I seemed not to be happy, and it might be that when I wrote my last short post I wasn't. But the reality is far more complex than just feeling well or bad. I'm feeling ok, I have my good and bad moments, and also I met good and evil people on those two last weeks.
As I said on my last post, I had the opporunity to see the bad side of England, but I would be unfair, because I also saw the good one. Let me speak a bit about Milton Keynes.
Milton Keynes is a strange city. If I hadn't known from the scratch that it was a city, I wouldn't have thought Milton Keynes as it. The "city" is just a very big comercial center surrounded by some buildings, hotels, companies and a church. You could walk the entire city from side to side in just 20 minutes or less. So the impresion I got was "where are those 250k people?". It seems they live in small cottages in the surrounding areas. But there's a lot of money on the city. I saw a lot of really expensive cars and also there's the fact they have the biggest comercial center in England, an indoor ski field and big cinema. It's full of discos, clothing shops, restaurants, modern pubs, and all that kind of leisure things to expend money and time. I went out on thursday and it's full of young people having fun and drinking. You can be very bored there, but you can have a lot of fun, the distinction is there's always the same things, there's nothing else and nowhere to go apart from the city centre. There's also a lot of companies central offices there, so that's why it seems to be a lot of money there.
I work on the Abbey National office at Milton Keynes, designing the intranet web portal, wich is the tool they'll use at bank offices to make any transaction. It's not a bad job, and the office is 50% 50% of english and spanish people, so I can speak both languages. We have a lot of security guys there and I have to wear an ID all the time. Some of the officers aren't that funny, but there's some of them who are really kind, specially a Jamaican who always stop you to chat a bit, he even speaks in Spanish, well, not really speaks, but says some phrases, he's really funny. There's nice people there, spaniards and english.
But this time I had a chance to feel offended three times, not as my last time at London. I was called prick from a car in the street, I was told by the restaurant attendant "this curry is far too hot for you" (but I believe she told me that just because I'm spanish), and also we (My colleague Iñaki and I) have a problem with an English kind of drunk hooligan. I also don't feel my stomach really well, and I'm not sure why, it might be the water, wich doesn't taste really good at Milton (London water is much better), or it might be the food at the Abbey restaurant, I'm not pretty sure.
Let me talk about the incident with the bald dog. We (Iñaki and I) where having two pints after dinner at Lloyds. We were talking peacefully and drinking and then this piece of a bastard came. He was totally drunk, and he have the look of a holligan, no hair, muscles and a bad lookign face. He asked Iñaki for a cigarrette, wich I believe is a bit rude here (because of the price) but that's not too bad. Then he stayed there, standing up and mumbling nonsenses. I catch all of them but I forgot most, he said something like "fu ma una" wich I believed was "fucking Manchester United". He constantly tried us to touch his strong arms saying "feel my arm", where it was more like "fi ma am". I didn't touch it.
I know for sure he was just looking for an excuse to have a fight with us, and it was perfect for him because we were foreigners and we could misunderstood something and give him a bad answer. Of course my English is good enough to treat drunkens with no brain at all. He continued saying "I don fa mai", wich showed us he might want to fuck with us, he could be homosexual also, we weren't sure. And also "ma waif doen fa me", and then I understood he was just badly fucked.
He asked me if I wanted him to fight the people from the other table. I wasn't sure what to say, apart from I didn't also liked the chavs on the other table, I wasn't sure if it was right and also if that's what he was looking. We didn't want to find out, and as he gave us an opportunity to leave we did. The problem is we saw him again trying to get into our hotel 20 minutes later, we ran into the lift and that's the last time we saw him.
But not everything was bad last two weeks. I had a chance to meet really nice people, including colleagues at work, like Paloma (spanish), Aban (indian), my boss Rafa (spanish) who's really kind and nice, Chema (sp), Julian (sp), Kenny (an scotish), Dani (half english, half spanish), and of course Iñaki. There's some others but I forgot their names, I'm really sorry.
There's also this lad I met at work. I knew him since my university time, that's eight years ago. I never thought I would really see him again, and there he was at the Abbey National office at Milton Keynes. When I saw him I couldn't believe it. What the hell he was doing at Milton Keynes????? I couldn't believe it, and so did he. But it was true. So I have some friends there. In spain we say "the world is like a tissue", wich means that you never know who are you going to see anywhere (It sounds like a Forrest Gump phrase, doesn't?).
I spent my weekend at Bournemouth, visiting a really special friend. She's living there, and she lives with three russian girls and a Korean. The Korean girl had her fioncee there. He was visiting her for some weeks. They're lovely people, I really like them, or even more than just like. They're called Sary and Richard (those aren't their real names but their English adopted names). I made them promise they'd visit us at Spain on their honeymoon and I hope they will, because I really enjoy being with them. He's really funny and that kind of people who makes you feel well, because he's always smiling and laughing, he's got a nice sense of humour. My very kind regards to both of them. Wish we'll meet in the future, and also thank's for the Korean lunch. I loved my time at Bournemouth because I could enjoy both the koreans and my beloved friend.
My new Korean friends and my her
Well, I'm sure I left something. I have some more short stories about taxis, trains, and the feel I had at the Heathrow airport (full of policeman with big rifles). But I think it's enough for now.
Farewell and cheers everybody, or as I said all the time to the taxi drivers:
Cheers Mate!!
Manoel.
