Of Travel And Commitment

David, the ozzie, sent me an email recently. He's in Chile, the bastard! :-) How can some people be responsible, work their arses off, support the capitalism in their progressive countries (as opposed to the 'Axis of evil' gang) while others care-freely travel the world and laugh in your face (by email!). Well, the world is unjust, we need another Marx to dream about another utopia, one that would free man from work, the ultimate slavery.

Ah well, if it's not clear by now, I envy him, travelling like that in South America ... he plans to go to Brazil too and then come to London in June. Where I hope he's thinking of staying for a while, find a job ... girlfriend proved to be more difficult last time. :-)
He also promised to start blogging about his adventure. Hopefully he will, he has a great sense of humour and he goes on for ages, so that would manage to fill my idle time at work.


About the ceremony to become british. I was one of the few white people there. I'm not judgemental about that, it's just the fact. Most of people were from Pakistan, Bangladesh or African nations. I was the only romanian. Other nations representatives: one person from US, one from South Africa, one from Brazil, 2 from Colombia. We had to register, we got a sticky name tag which we had to stick onto our cloths ... so that we wouldn't forget our names when we had to shout them out loud.

There were 3 people at the control centre, the table before us delivering the blah blah. One was a council representative, dressed ceremoniously, in a purple robe with something dangling from her neck. Didn't pay much attention to that. She said something about life in the UK, in the council, the regular stuff, democracy, respecting each other, things we all know. There was another master of ceremonies, carrying a huge metal stick ... huh? Careful with that mate, you don't want to hurt anyone now do you?

His only intervention was when they entered the room saying Behold the representative of blah blah... some unforgettable words no doubt.
After that, each one of us had to say "I " out loud and individually, not in a chorus. As you can imagine, most names were unspellable, but hey, that's diversity. D-I-V-E-R-S-I-T-Y. And then we had to chant in chorus, the actual allegiance to the Queen and pledge of faith to the UK.

Once that was done, the national anthem was supposed to be played. There was a small technical problem, they couldn't get the right anthem, twice another song came out. And this is when the master of ceremony had the second intervention saying "Oh, they changed it and didn't tell us anything about that". Funny. That's what I like about this country. People take the piss. I imagine if that happened in the States, it would be high treason. Everybody would put their hands on their chests, deeply absorbed in a trance-like state of national pride, no smiles please ... this is serious matter.

That was it, your status changes in about an hour. You're no longer "Others", you can go to the "Us" queues at airports. What else? Ah, yes, you can register on the Electoral Role so that everyone on the Internet can find your address with a click of the mouse. Cool, ha?