There and back again…

 Today:

Slept late! I woke up at 1:15. Heidi knocked on our door to see if we’d be up in time for the walking tour. Our guide for the bus tour was our walking guide. Most of the walk was through beautiful Hyde Park. I can’t believe such serenity exists within such an urban sprawl. It’s gorgeous! Fairmount Park x 10.

The Serpentine is a long, snakelike man-made lake with a handsome arch bridge across it. Paddleboats cruise the lake. We saw the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain, the Prince Albert Memorial (3 layers of 24k gold adorn Albert’s statue), The Royal Albert Hall. We walked through Kensington Gardens and saw people playing soccer (football) on the greens, cricket games, picnickers.

We also passed Kensington Palace and visited a sunken garden near a place called the Orangery, where we are scheduled to go to tea.

The tour guide gave us a rccomendation for a pub that is partly a Thai restaurant. After to walk we found it, it was called the Churchill Arms. The service was really slow, and we were starving by the time we got there, but the place was really cool! We sat in the back which was the restaurant. To order drinks one had to walk to the front of the place which was strictly a pub. It was like the two were stitched together in the middle. Strange! The walls were heavily decorated with knick-knacks and pictures of various things, while vine plants hung from the ceiling. This created the need to duck for anyone over 5 feet tall. The place was really pretty inside. Venuri, Chris and I ordered Thai dishes, and I sipped some Fuller’s. I reccomend Thai chicken over rice #3– delicious! Outside, I wanted to take an exterior photo of the pub, and a bus driver stopped to allow me to do so. How kind!

So Venuri phoned her cousin, invited us to join them that evening- good decision! Our party was Venuri, her cousin, her fiance (Malik?) his older brother and his younger brother (Navin?) and a fellow American student. We cruised the streets at Picadilly Circus, stopping briefly in “Nike town”, but only briefly as the prices were outrageous. 

I didn’t really like Picadilly Circus very much. It’s essentially Times Square. Too many people, too much going on, loud, busy, crowded… not much fun. Venuri’s family/friends were very cool. We talked with them in a chain coffee shop for a while. The middle brother seemed very knowledgeable about just about everything. We talked about how to get to Europe, politics, things to do in London, everything.

Had a subpar chai latte…

We left Picadilly and took the tube to where we could walk to what was apparently the Middle Eastern section of the city. I had Lebanese food for the first time. I ate a sandwhich that was lamb wrapped in Lebanese bread. So good! There was plenty of falafel there as well. The food was great and talking to locals was even better. We learned a lot about how to get around and what to look for in terms of food and drink in London.
We got on the bus, singing Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line” for fun. We ended up at the Black Sheep, a friendly neighborhood pub. Pretty good beer, Hoegaarden, Guiness, etc. A DJ was playing songs that drunk neighborly types could platonically dance to. I didn’t like the Lefe I had. I think I traded up with another member of out party. The Guinness was much better.

It got late and we split with the group. It took a while to flag a cab in the rain, but I got one eventually. I tipped him about 50%, not because I was drunk, but because he went pretty far out of his way for us.

Oh! I almost forgot, on the tube earlier I recognized a Wharton School shirt. I asked its wearer if he was from Philly, and sure enough, he had just graduated. He was in London on vacation. I talked to him about London and Avenue Q, and other shows playing around town. I also showed him the Guinness glass I managed to swipe from the Black Sheep. He laughed and congratulated me, saying that it was so easy here! He told me he’d gotten like 9… I guess I have some catching up to do, hahah.

 Thanks for reading this hurriedly written account of the drunken debauchery of a B student and a petty thief!

Love,

Zack