The HOchies Muck About in England!

That's right, we're not adults but louts. At least I am but I think H1 would disagree on that assessment of her character.

She's more like Terry.

Law-abiding and all.

All legal.

4.5 days after the Tokyo-Ho trip, H1 and I jetted off to London for basically 2 days.

I was very much destroyed at that point but what did I care?! I was off to London with a purpose!

And that was to have H1 enjoy the best In-Flight Entertainment ever!

Perhaps that's not the only reason why but goddamn does that airline keep proving to be the most fabulous ever. More on Virgin-A later. Before I forget, I'm sorry Pandy but we did not ask the flight attendants if "all of allyuh is virgin?".

We fled the office at 2 PM on Thursday, June 14th only to get a car driver who was suspect at best. This man was so mother-fookin' racist. There was no conversation he could have with you that didn't involve the phrase, "the whites like to attack you, man. They attack your culture if you're not pure bred."

Normally if someone asks you about a band they don't know of, what do you think their first question would be? You'd think it be along the lines of what type of music that is, right?
Is it just me to think this? This guy didn't care about that. All he wanted to know was whether or not the band was white or black. I almost didn't want to answer for fear he'd kill us.

The airport was fairly uneventful. We did eat some great cheese fries with bacon and the flight was delayed.

The flight going to London was greatness. It was not without some sadness though. For one, the very politically incorrect safety flight video that I really wanted H1 to see was not working thanks to interference.

Secondly, we got stuck sitting between this family of annoying daughters. Those little bastards were so rude.

And finally, my gay British boys were not working that flight. We had mostly female attendants which was fine because they were so cute with their constant laughing. No fear though, I got all of my boys on the flight back.

We got to Heathrow on Friday London time at 8 AM or so. And as per usual, Heathrow was a mess. We were in the line at customs for a little over 1 hour, hoping that our friends Marvs and T. checked the flight to see it was going to be late.

We finally made it out of there and was greeted by our sleepy friends who had been there since 6.30 AM.

That day we did some sightseeing!

H1 and Or 2's Adventures in the Famous...Slough?

We saw Windsor Castle. Never you mind it was in the distance! We still 'saw' it!

We also saw where The Office UK was filmed. The series centered around an office in Slough and here it is -



Impressive, yeah?

We then headed to Tesco Extra, which is the most fantastic place ever. We came back to NY with 10.5 pounds (in weight) worth of candy (40 pounds in money) thanks to that place. We were told that Tesco's out to take over the world and start branching out overseas including the U.S., so here's hoping that happens very soon and that they stock all the great Euro. candies. Although, that won't help make us sugary...

The rest of the day was spent hanging out with friends we had not seen in years. It was fun, relaxing times.

WTF Moments of the Trip:

1. I didn't get my chip butty this time but next time for sure!

2. Euro Fried Chicken?

3. It's Three Tuns, H1. Not Nuns. Tuns.

4. Joy Dining, Joy Living, Joy Sleep at Joy Fur iture

5. The cameras both dying at the most inopportune moment.

6. That fookin' vending machine at Heathrow robbed me of 30p!

7. The idiot American children who did not know the meaning of complimentary and continue to give other people in the world good reason to hate Americans. Oh those kids deserve to be kicked hard in the head for their disgusting behaviour on the plane.

8. Those racist croatians and their racist bags of peanuts!



The Great Moments of the Trip:

1. Peepshow and That Mitchell and Webb Look. Those two are killer. Oh if only I could find video of the banana dance...

2. Virgin Atlantic's In-flight Entertainment

3. Tony, a flight attendant with Virgin Atlantic. He's the bitchiest Brit. I've ever seen. That man was eye-rollin' everybody, grabbed my cup hatefully out of my hand with an exasperated 'thank you' and what's more, he looked as H1 described him, "like Matt's uglier brother". I loved-ed him and he loved-ed him some Indian baby, which made him even more endearing to me because he actually has a bit of a heart.

I hope that one day, on a 7 hour flight (or a 45 minute drive...in my imagination you're waiting lying on your side), I'll run into his cranky ass again.

On Saturday, we ran off to Paddington Station (the second time we were actually in London) to catch our show at Wembley Stadium.

The highlights and yes, some lowlamps of the day:

Lamb and mint pie - yum



Somewhat of a lowlamp was the rain that poured down on us before the show started but cleared up nicely for the show.



The Drunken "headless" lout at WS was definitely a highlight. H1 rather enjoyed his hijinks, as did many others. It was very sad when they took him away and all we have left is the memory of an abandoned beer...



A Lowlamp for sure were the majority of slags at WS.

Another Lowlamp was the lack of Klaxons. Those idiots! I think it would have been awesome hearing their sound in that space. It certainly sounded fantastic during Zane Lowe's DJ set.

Rodrigo y Gabriela = good times. TD5, if you haven't already, you may want to check them out.

Dirty Pretty Things = crap band live & possibly in studio as well which is sad because they've potential. The HOchies have a suggestion though and that is to get rid of the singer!

While we love the Streets dearly, we do not think they were the best opening act. Still, it was good seeing Mike Skinner even though my one major complaint was his lack of a good selection of songs for the set list.

The Streets @ Wembley Stadium 06/16/07 Set List

Prangin' Out
Radio Ga Ga
Don't Mug Yourself
Time Is Running Out (MUSE)
Let's Push Things Forward
Smile (Lily Allen)
Has It Come To This?
It's Too Late
When You Wasn't Famous
Never Went To Church
Turn The Page
Blinded By The Lights
Weak Become Heroes
Dry Your Eyes
Fit But You Know It

Mike Skinner -



Oh by the way, Mike, what was up with your constant Radio Ga Ga-ing?!

Of course, the highlight of the entire trip for me, and the reason why I came to London for two days - MUSE. I've an entire blog forth coming and yes, I don't expect any of you to read it (except you, TD5) but I can assure you, they were totally worth the trip.

And Frass, your comment to me the other day about Madison Square Garden being too big for MUSE was perhaps one of the most frasslike things I've ever heard come out of your mouth.

My boys sold out TWO nights at Wembley Stadium @ 75,000 people per night (and did it in half an hour per show) and with good reason.

If anything, MSG's not big enough, despite what ticket sales for this may be. They may not have sold out this show yet and that's really unfortunate because people have no clue what they'll be missing.

Quotes of that weekend:

"I do like foie gras but I don't like Alzheimer's." - H1

"When God was giving out asses that girl said, 'two please!'" - H1

"When God was giving out hair that girl said, 'two buschel please. Calves? No thanks!" - H1

We found on a card featuring two nuns and one says to the other, "Jesus loves you but I think you're a bitch." Ahahaha, that's good stuff that.

Currently listening to: "Battle for Britain (The Letter)" by David Bowie

The Tokyo-Ho Japan Chronicles - Day 1.5

Yes. Tokyo-Ho has returned.

Let the slew of blogs begin!

Day 1.5 - Saturday May 26 (New York Time)/Sunday May 27 (Tokyo Time)

We will start with the incident at the airport while waiting for our departing flight to Japan. Before I continue, it should be noted that you all should expect many 'incidents' because as you all know by now, when Beetchie and I are together, we have some mini and some not so mini-misadventures.

The incident involved Beetchie kicking a Japanese flight attendant, too polite to cry out in pain but could only utter a muffled "ya ta ta" while hopping on one foot. We're not sure though if Amy Winehouse the Flight Attendant lost that tooth due to meth. use or after she was kicked.

Japan Airlines, I must say, has crap in-flight entertainment (and not just because I almost destroyed my in-flight entertainment remote control by getting it stuck on the side and later on destroying my fingers trying to get it out). Being affiliated with American Airlines will probably do that to you though. And here's hoping that Virgin Atlantic does not screw me over come Thursday (after I boasted about it for months).

The food sucked and was questionable, and we're convinced gave me the belly heebie jeebies. Ugh, it was not good times.

As you can well imagine, getting off the near 14 hour gruelling flight of bad food, bad entertainment and broken sleep, with a heebie jeebie belly was not fun. And then to discover that the nearest bathrooms were Eastern style,



was also not fun.

We needed to find that Oakhotel Inn quickly while navigating the Subway system but thanks to a Subway Smart NYC kid Beetchie, we were able to get our bearings and find our way to the Oakhotel without much trouble.

Oakhotel Inn was cute. We now value the greatness of private bath so much more but we were still naive to that reality being that we had no idea how much that place spoilt us until Day 5 of the trip. More to come in that future blog post...

Quote of that Day:

"I'll get used to it..." - Or 2, everytime a train on the other track passed the limited express from Narita Airport. I'm not sure if I got used to the sound of another train 'hitting' our train as it passed by but if you heard that sound that came out of no where, you'd be unnerved as well.

Things We Observed in Japan - Volume I:

1. The multi-coloured roof tops of Japanese houses on the way from Narita Airport to Tokyo Central was very awesome. There's nothing wrong with a blue-roof.

2. The Japanese and their subway order. They have arrows pointing to what side you should be on when walking through the subway platforms. For instance, if you're going up the stairs, you should stay on the left. We of course, walked through people instead of with them and confused those poor Japanese greatly. "Stupid Americans!" is what I'm sure they were thinking.

3. The Japanese's insistence on staring at me because I'm brown. Beetchie thinks I may have confused them some with my asian features yet big, wavy hair. I especially didn't like that one little child who get staring at me. So he knew no better but still.  It was unnerving.

4. The toilets. The toilets had incredible flushing power which is always a concern for me. But not only that, they all have two settings for flushing! To the left for a big flush and to the right for smaller business. I always flushed to the left because of my fear of clogged toilets, even if my business was small.

5. Another toilet observation - the toilet paper's perforations are singled out at either 2 squares or 4 squares and never 1.

6. Beetchie smells like an Asian pear, which surprisingly smells just like watermelon jolly ranchers.

The Day's Eats:

We got our food ticket and paid for the meal out of a vending machine. Those things are quite popular and luckily for us they all had pictures on it so we had a fair idea of what we were in for.

I had fried pork cutlet and shrimp tempura with limitless access to rice, and miso soup.