Wednesday, May 04, 2005
The most amazing thing I saw last night on The Amazing Race
Personally, I was amazed (and I’m sure Adrian would have been horrified) to discover that none of the teams automatically knew which London street’s zebra crossing was made famous by a Beatles album cover. They all need a John Lennon tapestry sent to their homes immediately!
While we’re on the subject of the destination of London, a few things:
-Unless they’re planning to fly everyone back to the U.S. across the entire continent of Asia for the finale, this season it seems that we don’t so much have a “race around the world” as we have a “race kind of to one side of the world and then…back.” If that’s the way they’re going to play it, then the world might as well be flat after all. Was Magellan’s work all in vain??
-What was this, the Hideous Eyesores Tour of London? The Millennium Dome? The London Eye? (And they didn’t even show the best part of the Eye, which is when they crowd you in this little room before you get on, and they take your picture and superimpose you inside one of the capsules with this super-fake blue sky in the background.) Would it have killed them to go to some nice-looking landmarks? Like St. Paul’s? Or Trafalgar Square? Or my personal favorite London landmark, the Topshop on Oxford Street? I mean, if they wanted to give the contestants a real challenge, they should’ve made them search for a clue in there on a Saturday afternoon.
-Whenever I see footage of London, I tend to feel intense pangs of longing. However, it’s not the shots of famous sights that inspire these feelings; it’s the shots of the tube stations. Seriously, when the Rob and Amber and Ron and Kelly had to go to Hammersmith (which was on my line, and which is where Hannah and Ann and I saw The Violent Femmes), I almost cried. And when Uchenna and Joyce couldn’t figure out how to get from Victoria to the Millennium Dome, I wanted to jump inside the TV, grab the tube map out of their hands, and tell them what to do. If I still had the tube map memorized, I no doubt would have been shouting specific instructions at the TV. (I did, however, remember that the Dome was on my favorite line, the Jubilee, so I was yelling, “Jubilee! Jubilee!” over and over again, for whatever that’s worth.)
-So homesick was I for London after this episode that I pulled out my journal to see what I was doing at this time five years ago. In case you care, five years ago today, I was getting my hair cut at a swanky salon, going to see the English professor I had a crush on to make an appointment to meet about my final essay (and getting really excited when he wrote my name down in his planner), and hanging out with Heather, Hannah, and Ann at The George, where we played a drunken game of Trivial Pursuit (which turned nasty when Hannah told Heather and Ann that she and I were winning because “we’re just so much smarter than you are”), hid some disgustingly sweet wine in a bathroom stall, got stood up by our British men, and spotted our crazy tour guide from Wales wearing a hideous salmon-colored blazer. Somehow, I don’t think today is going to live up to that, but I could be wrong.
Personally, I was amazed (and I’m sure Adrian would have been horrified) to discover that none of the teams automatically knew which London street’s zebra crossing was made famous by a Beatles album cover. They all need a John Lennon tapestry sent to their homes immediately!
While we’re on the subject of the destination of London, a few things:
-Unless they’re planning to fly everyone back to the U.S. across the entire continent of Asia for the finale, this season it seems that we don’t so much have a “race around the world” as we have a “race kind of to one side of the world and then…back.” If that’s the way they’re going to play it, then the world might as well be flat after all. Was Magellan’s work all in vain??
-What was this, the Hideous Eyesores Tour of London? The Millennium Dome? The London Eye? (And they didn’t even show the best part of the Eye, which is when they crowd you in this little room before you get on, and they take your picture and superimpose you inside one of the capsules with this super-fake blue sky in the background.) Would it have killed them to go to some nice-looking landmarks? Like St. Paul’s? Or Trafalgar Square? Or my personal favorite London landmark, the Topshop on Oxford Street? I mean, if they wanted to give the contestants a real challenge, they should’ve made them search for a clue in there on a Saturday afternoon.
-Whenever I see footage of London, I tend to feel intense pangs of longing. However, it’s not the shots of famous sights that inspire these feelings; it’s the shots of the tube stations. Seriously, when the Rob and Amber and Ron and Kelly had to go to Hammersmith (which was on my line, and which is where Hannah and Ann and I saw The Violent Femmes), I almost cried. And when Uchenna and Joyce couldn’t figure out how to get from Victoria to the Millennium Dome, I wanted to jump inside the TV, grab the tube map out of their hands, and tell them what to do. If I still had the tube map memorized, I no doubt would have been shouting specific instructions at the TV. (I did, however, remember that the Dome was on my favorite line, the Jubilee, so I was yelling, “Jubilee! Jubilee!” over and over again, for whatever that’s worth.)
-So homesick was I for London after this episode that I pulled out my journal to see what I was doing at this time five years ago. In case you care, five years ago today, I was getting my hair cut at a swanky salon, going to see the English professor I had a crush on to make an appointment to meet about my final essay (and getting really excited when he wrote my name down in his planner), and hanging out with Heather, Hannah, and Ann at The George, where we played a drunken game of Trivial Pursuit (which turned nasty when Hannah told Heather and Ann that she and I were winning because “we’re just so much smarter than you are”), hid some disgustingly sweet wine in a bathroom stall, got stood up by our British men, and spotted our crazy tour guide from Wales wearing a hideous salmon-colored blazer. Somehow, I don’t think today is going to live up to that, but I could be wrong.
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