If Water is the Essence of Moisture, then Will is the Essence of Time

I mean, time for me, I can make it go slow or fast, however I please, and that’s how I know it doesn’t exist. - Willow Smith

Willow has totally got a point, youguys. Like right now, I'm going to post photos from an adventure that happened TWO WEEKS AGO, but I'm going to act like it was THIS week for the sake of relevancy, and that's how I know time doesn't exist. 

So, recently* a girlfriend and I were trying to make plans to catch up because we hadn't seen each other since her birthday many moons ago and a reunion was long overdue. We were debating the merits of visiting a haunted pub when she had the idea for bingo. BINGOYOUGUYS. BINGO. Obviously, I was immediately on board. Then she sent me the following information. JUST WHEN I THOUGHT IT COULDN'T GET BETTER:

"[It's] at the oh so multi-cultural and slightly edgy Elephant & Castle shopping centre. It will be full of African women sucking their teeth, Polish people eating cabbage and Colombians tapping their feet to salsa tunes. I went for a recce the other day and it is a fantastically parallel universe of London. Do you like the sound of it?"

'YES' WORDS FAIL ME HERE.

This is outside the shopping centre:

World's Most Literal Design Interpretation of Elephant & Castle. The artist they commissioned just nailed it.

This is where we ate the promised Polish food:

I know, right! You totally thought it was going to be full of plastic tables and florescent lighting. Instead it's full of HIPSTERS. It has been discovered. In the grimmest shopping centre that London has to offer, after-hours when everything is shuttered down and you think surely if you stick around, they'll find your body in one of those urns in the morning, there's this place, a beacon of light and hope and good smells. It was so so tasty. Sidebar: Polish food has got to be the most unphotogenic food ever. I tried taking a photo of the pancakes covered with gravy and I don't even want to talk about how it looked. Also, all the food is the colour of nothing, the colour of soviet-tenement-beige. And it doesn't even MATTER because HOLY PIEROGIES, BATMAN. GET IN ME. 

This is us before we went in to play, holding our new member forms so they would let us in. We are now** official members of the Palace Games Club! 

Don't be jealous of our coolness. I know it's intimidating.

Now to get down to the meat of things: THE BINGO. First off, can I tell you how difficult it was to take any pictures? They do NOT want that, people. Anytime I'd even REMOTELY hold my phone up, I'd instantly get tackled by a host of staff members: 'what was that?' 'what'd you do?' 'did you take a photo?' 'let me see the photo you took,' 'delete the photo you took,' 'oh, you didn't take a photo? okay.' Absolute denial (even while clearly holding a camera) generally satisfied them, at which point they'd smooth down each other's ruffled feathers and get back to wandering listlessly around. 

This was so worth the battle.

EVERYwhere you'd see these little slips crammed into the machines. TO SAVE THEM. 

I pulled one out (right before getting tackled again) and IT'S A REAL SAVE SLIP. It's not a bunch of old ladies cramming wads of tissue in there. 

Needless to say, I got no photos of the actual bingo room (the vultures!) but I DID manage to sneak a recording of the guy doing the number call. Can you believe that VOICE? So hypnotic. So very, very unbelievably hypnotic.***

I want to go to bed every night listening to this guy read numbers.

Needless to say, we'll totally be returning. Especially now that we're *cough* members. It's only a matter of time until we win big now that we've got all these slips.

I leave you with this original Bingo Haiku, created with real British Bingo Lingo:

Lucky musty hive
And Grandma's getting fisty
Oh Dirty Gertie

The first person to tell me in the comments the numbers I've just called is totally getting a prize.****

Big hugs and lots of love,

Essss

*A month ago, three weeks ago, yesterday - who can say? So is the nature of time.

**Or not now. Again, time. Also, the guy who took our cards said his 'machine was down' - I'm sure he meant computer and wasn't making this up at all - therefore he couldn't process our membership forms at that moment, but he would TOTALLY get to it. I'm sure my card will arrive in the mail any day now.

***This is the sound of time disappearing.

****I'm not saying it's a good prize.