Anthropological Rants

Mud and Spam
I spent the day in mud in a Roman well and the night laughing at a bunch of singing knights. I must be in London.

So I went to work today. We have the option of working on weekends, if we want to. Normally it pays time and a half but since the current client for a particular site has money galore but is short on time, they are paying double time, to try and get more people out. Well, it works!

I would have gone for normal pay, since I've never been on a Roman site before. It's by the Moorgate station, very central London. Kind of bizarre to think about what kind of sites are out there. The site is basically below the basement of a demolished building. There are still buildings everywhere around it, so it's extremely low. It's kind of fun, we had to climb down a bunch of ladders to even get to the site. Since it's the tail end of the site, there isn't much visible left but there is a giant trackway. Basically hundreds of wooden planks laid out, on a road. The current (and highly debatable) interpretation from what I could gather is that it was the base of an outside wall of a roman fort. It's right by London Wall, so it's the outskirts of the Roman boundary in London. Apparently they've found lots of very weird and cool stuff, like a complete Roman door. Anyways, I was in a well. And the well still had water. And I had to shovel out said well. So I was very muddy. Very very muddy. But I did get to find some cool stuff (Roman pottery, a bone hair pin, etc) and I got paid a bunch of money, so I'm happy.

After I got demuddified, I met up with Alicia and we decided to go see Spamalot. I'm amazed at the sheer number of plays and musicals that are playing here! Everything from the Lion King, to Les Mi to Grease to Patrick Stewart in Macbeth. As the good geeks that we are, we chose our first London musical! Spam Spam Spam.

It was hilarious. Very similar to the Toronto production and I loved it. Very strange to be sitting in a theatre in London, singing "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" with several hundred people. Very cool. One of the funniest moments was an improv by one of the Knights Who Say Ni. BAckgound: Tonight was the world cup of rugby and England was in it. So this is basically an excuse for everyone to go to the pub, get drunk and generally be drunkenly patriotic. That's all people talked about at work today, Rugby rugby rugby. The game was on at the same time as the show. So anyways, when the Knights who Say Ni declared himself to be the "Knights who say icky-icky-ptang-ptang-brumbra-don't-you-want-to-know-the-score?-I'm-not-telling-you"!! Explosive laughter.

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