We’re going over to Winnie’s tonight to see Stephen Chow’s King of Comedy and I’m telling you this because I don’t have anything else to say.

Now I don’t know how uniform all the Tesco stores are, but I guess that there’s not that much variation between them. I also reckon that most of the minute details are laid down by the management, so there’s not much room for individual initiative. Annnnnyway.

Somebody at Tesco had noticed that the way they package the baguettes is suboptimal. See, the long piece of bread is stored in a flimsy plastic bag that a) sealed at only one end and b) is mere centimetres longer than the bread. This means that quite often the bloody French baton just drops out. But no more! Because now they had finally managed to tie a small knot to the up-to-now open end of the bag! A miracle! Sheer genius! Somebody promote the guy/gal who invented that!

In other news I also picked up three DVDs for £24 at Choices (Airplane!, Naked Gun, and Full Metal Jacket). I’m pretty pleased with myself right now.

Earlier today, when I was done with rummaging the book shops and the record stores, I took a slightly different route back home, a route I hadn’t used in several weeks, maybe months. This path took me by a short strip of shops, just a hundred meters or so, just around the corner from where we live.

It was quite unnerving to notice that several shops had closed down and new ones opened up during the short period of time that had passed. I mean, we basically just arrived to the UK and already things are changing. Very stress-inducing, that.

Yesterday, at Cardiff Bay (this is starting to sound like a bad poem), I saw a great hand-written advertisement for boat rides. The ride lasts ”FULL” 30 minutes, it said. The word ’full’ was in bold type, caps, and double the size of all the other words, but then – no doubt subconsciously – s/he had put quotation marks around it, like s/he did not believe it him/erself. What wonderful integrity!

Sonja and I bought slippers for indoor use at the same time a couple of months ago. Her slippers still look almost brand new and have retained their original lilac color, while my originally yellow slippers are now black. Why is that?

Owen and Dan left to visit Edinburgh for a couple of days. I borrowed Owen’s laptop for that time so that now I have unlimited access to movies.

Also: I woke up some time ago and accidentaly put on Sonja’s stretch pants. I look good in these, tee hee.

There must be a law against stupid tv programmers like the one at Channel 4 who has placed South Park, Family Guy, Futurama and King of the Hill back to back at 1 AM Saturday. What the hell is wrong with this person? I mean this is even worse than the Sunday afternoon spot MTV3 in Finland has traditionally used for the world’s best cartoons. Duh.

Should someone be wondering what the weather’s like here in Cardiff at this time of the year, let me tell you that right now it’s freezing. However this is something of an accident as the previous week was really warm, actually so warm that there were forest fires in parts of Wales (and elsewhere in the UK as well).

Compared to Finland it’s naturally warmer. For some reason it hasn’t been raining all that much or then I just haven’t been outside. When we arrived in January the weather was very much like the last weeks of Autumn in Finland. Somewhere around March or so it suddenly turned into a Spring, as you could clearly see trees trying to sprout new leaves and other greenish stuff like that.

But today I had to wear my woolly shirt inside cos it was so freaking cold. So in a concise form, anyone considering a Spring break in Cardiff should pack: an umbrella, a cool t-shirt, and a thick overcoat. That oughta get you through it.

Here’s a mini guide to the best way of losing your money in Cardiff city centre, especially if you like buying the same things I do. (In fact if you don’t, this probably won’t interest you at all.)

The deadly triangle is that of Virgin Megastore, WHSmith, and HMV. None of the aforementioned places is cool or special in the senses that places where young people shop ought to be but they have two redeeming qualities: helluva lot of range and offers.

So what I do is (as I enter the city centre from north [don’t laugh, this is serious!]) pop into Virgin to check out their CD and DVD offers. Usually There’s a CD or two that are going for £5 or less. Last time I picked up Muse’s Showbiz and Garbage’s Version 2.0 for just that price, and my habit of scouring the bins for offers began when I found The Dandy Warhol’s Come Down there for just £3. After the ground floor has been secured, I pop upstairs for a quick look at the DVD’s. This time I ended up with Bottom’s 2001: An Arse Odyssey (which has got to have the highest fart joke quotient ever and is in every way a very very funny show) for just £8. The ”two for £20” offers are kinda hard to resist as the selection is quite large (I’m talking about Spring 2003, remember) but sometimes you just have to pull your reins in.

Then I move down the street and go into WHSmith which might be a corporate giant and a soulless bastard of a shop but they carry an amazing range of magazines (proper magazines too, not just glossies… which I don’t consider to be proper magazines anyhow) and quite nice book offers, especially on paperbacks. This time I sampled some new magazines (The Economist, The Ecologist, The Face, New Statesman) as well as ”old” favourites (Word, The New Yorker). It wasn’t actually cheap as the magazines usually cost something between 3 and 4 pounds, but I have to support my reading and would-be intellectual habit, now don’t I?

The last stop is at HMV. The best thing about HMV is that they have the same mid-price CDs as Virgin but the prices are sometimes a bit lower. For example, Leftfield’s Leftism was £5.99 at Virgin and £4.99 at HMV. It’s actually pretty easy to figure out what CDs are going to be available cheaper at the other store once you practice a bit. This time, however, I walked out with a Sinéad O’Connor double pack (The Lion and the Cobra + I do not want what I haven’t got, her two best albums [well actually they’re the only good ones]) for £9 and a couple of DVDs which I really shouldn’t have bought but did still (ie. Raging Bull and Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas for £20 – meaning that I had to drop Pi which would’ve cost only £8. Decisions, decisions…).

After completing this round I dare not take a look at the receipt slips as I’ve usually spent way too much money on non-essential things. It’s good fun, though.

There’s something troubling about the fact that Virgin Megastore has earplugs for sale at their listening posts which, incidentally, play music way too loud on headphones.