I went to Norway today for a short while, about ten minutes or so. We visited the Royal Norwegian Embassy (opposite the Spanish one and next to the Dutch one) in order to vote fo the upcoming parliamentary election. Great fun. They even had a Norwegian-made lock on the door. Anyway, we weren't quite sure whether we should speak Norwegian or English to the receptionist...until we saw him and thought Norwegian was a safe bet. Only joking, he was speaking to us first (probably assuming, from our looks, that we would understand Norwegian fairly well). The whole thing took a remarkably short amount of time and suddenly we were out of there.

We then went all the way from Hyde Park Corner to Leicester Square so that we could find out when the premiere of Pride and Prejudice (the film version, which I haven't seen but which will be considered by me as the lesser version) would start. Then my flatmate went slightly amok among the DVD shelves in two of the most typical tourist shops in London (HMV and Virgin Megastore, Piccadilly) and I saved some money on not buying the ones she had already picked out.

Feeling a bit peckish, we took to looking for some place to eat and naturally couldn't be bothered to venture far away from the Odeon, which was where tonight's premiere was to take place. One delightful meal later, we sauntered down to the Odeon and strangely enough found a superb lookout point. Being hung up on Spooks we naturally wanted to catch a glimpse of Matthew Macfadyen and Keeley Hawes, but we saw some others as well (including a couple of female actors we never really understood who were). My favourite (and typical) moment was when the crowd had noticed Donald Sutherland getting out of a car down the road. My flatmate saw him, but I was standing behind an almost punch-drunk guy and couldn't see much in that direction, so had to wait. Then Brenda Blethyn appeared and Keira Knightley had been hijacked by the MTV crew for about ten minutes already, so I paid attention to them, all the while looking down the road to see Mr. Sutherland. It wasn't until my flatmate said "I'll just hide behind my camera so that it doesn't look so daft standing in the front row without an autograph pad" that I saw him standing there right in front of me - I had actually been trying to look behind him for about a minute. Sometimes I'm just too blind. Anyway, it was a nice celeb-spotting event and the (lesser) popularity of the film led us to not having to wait for three hours in order to get a good place to stand and we were in and out withing 30 minutes. Brilliant!

Then we went home to watch Marian, Again (which was above average), Graham Norton's show and The Grudge, which wasn't quite The Ring (not that we expected it to be) but nevertheless was a bit thrilling from time to time. Well worth the five pounds my flatmate paid for it, haha!

Both Bulldog Broadband and Barclay's made my shitlist this week, but I'm the stupidest of them all since I still want to be a customer of theirs. I have come to realise how silly it is for Norwegian to be bringing the English word "service" into our vocabulary. There is nothing remotely typical English about "service" at all. The kind of customer service we have seen here so far (and believe me, we have been brought up to behave in a very polite manner) is complete crap. I was a patriot before I moved here, but now I have also started to lose my Norwegian built-in feeling of inferiority. From now on, when British people make fun of anything Nordic and/or Dutch, I will sit there thinking they are the ignorant ones. The Nordic countries as well as the Netherlands are years ahead of this country when it comes to efficiency, technology and customer service, believe me. Many of the systems they use here are relics from the Stone Age, I'm sure. It would have been embarrassing, if not for the fact that I'm not British and don't intend to be (unless they start allowing dual citizenships). Relax, I'm still an anglophile. I'm a daft cow, I know.

Current track: The sweet humming sound of my computer's processor...or the two flies I have in my room.

Labels: film, name-dropping, Norway, personal, TV