The sunny Sunday went away and took the “nicer” temperature with it. As I wrote my last post the temperature got up to 9oC and I went for a walk: after all you can’t let past a chance like that! :)

Sunday was what I could call an “interesting” day. It started productive as I managed to finish an assignment I had to do and started to study another subject, but it suddenly got lost by the kidnap I suffered from the Stupid Friends.

Before you ask who they are, let me tell you that none of them are stupid. Or should I say “us”?

I met these guys last October, when I was still a “freshman” at Uni and didn’t know anybody. The first one was Alfred, the Greek. He lives on the flat below and is a kind of Greek “malandro”.
He exaggerates every characteristic of the Greek people (which are quite numerous here, so I’m starting to understand how they behave) and says everything loud and in terrible English. His most famous sentence is: “… ela malaka: when we were building the Acropolis you were still living in caves!”. By the way, “ela” is a kind of way of saying “c’mon” in Greek and I refuse to translate “malaka” at this time but can give you a tip: http://www.malakas.org/malakas.html … :)

One last thing about the Greeks: they are very similar to Brazilians. They like to have fun and have a uncompromised approach to life. The difference is that, like the Italians, they like to talk loud and love to argue about anything. To see two Greeks arguing about basketball (one of their most beloved sports) is hilarious and not possible to describe fully in words.

Alfred (or Al as we call him most of the time) is doing a Masters in Video Documentary, and his latest work is a report on our online gaming activities in Royal Holloway’s network.

The other one is Paul, a French who I met in Tommy’s (one of RHUL’s bars). He has a careless look, with trousers almost on his knees all the time and a hair that definitively would use a comb. But this “style” seems to be successful with girls. And as this is the only thing that matters I’m much more than ok with it. He is an undergrad in economics with great taste for music, good spirit but poor taste for beer (c’mon, would you say Grolsch is a good beer?!?!?!?). At least he knows how to make tricks with cigar smoke… so that kind of compensates… ;)

The third and last one is Inal. This guy is kind of a mystery to me. He is a guitar player who is studying music that lives in the same flat as Al. The thing is that he does not have a guitar on his bedroom, but a keyboard. He has awesome CD’s, but most of them with soft music (Steely Dan, Jaco Pastorius, etc…). I have never heard him talking about a concert or venue he is interested in London and he seems to never loose his temper, even when we are playing computer games.

Anyway, some things that I know about him: he is from the Turkish side of Cyprus (don’t know where it is? Look in the map – I had to … hehehe), is smart and very friendly and doesn’t like Dream Theatre (well, nobody is perfect).

So, we are the Stupid Friends because Al used to insist that everything in Britain is stupid: from the way they serve beer in the bar to the side that the Britons drive. Since none of us could give him convincible arguments, we decided that the stupid persons were us, not the Britons (which is probably the only right conclusion we came to): thus the name: Stupid Friends.

Well, since you now know the Stupid Friends (and you can see us looking stupid on the photo - Paul, Al, me and Inal) let me tell you what happened yesterday. I was invited at 7PM to go to Al’s room to participate in the last shooting of his documentary on computer games. I left just 4AM monday morning after a killing session of Battlefield 2 and waking up late for lectures…

As much as I repeat to myself that this will not happen again I know, deep inside, that I will respond to any other calls like that. After all I am a Stupid Friend… (grin)