Phil Black, one of my best friends from school, is in London visiting from Austria for the week, and I spent yesterday hanging out with him! It's been a very fun 24-36 hours...
He and his travel companion Jon arrived at Farringdon Station around 8pm on Tuesday night and I whisked them back to K-M for a dinner of walnut-gorgonzola tortellini with pesto, garlic bread, salad and strawberry cheesecake for dessert. Gotta love cooking on a Tesco budget...it sounds fancy but cost less than 15 quid for the entire meal. :D We finished up, hung out in my flat for awhile, then decided to head over to Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese to introduce Phil to a real English pub. After a half-pint each for the low, low price of 95 pence, we went on our merry way and Phil and Jon returned to their hostel on Russell Square for the night.
Wednesday I started the morning off with class and met the boys at 2:15 for a late lunch in the basement of the London Centre. We then went on an adventure to all Central London's great tourist hotspots...after I purchased a new pair of black flats for only 7pounds at Chockers (I had walked holes into the soles of my old pair!), we goofed around and took lion-riding pictures at Trafalgar Square, then walked down The Mall to Buckingham Palace. After a few jokes about going to go visit the other Lizzie and Phil (that would be the Queen and Prince Philip, duh), we talked to a lovely old man outside the gates who was a Royalist through and through...he LOVED the Queen. A lot. Then we were lucky enough to see the South African president's motorcade heading past Buckingham! He's in visiting for the week, much like Phil, although probably to do more important things than take photos in telephone booths. Which we did next, en route to Big Ben and Parliament.
After a walk around Large Benjamin, down Parliament, and past Westminster Abbey (and one picture-taking interlude with Italian tourists later), we walked back up the Thames in the direction of Embankment Street, passing Whitehall, my favorite building in London, and the memorial to the Battle of Britain, which made Jon very excited. On the road we used to cut back toward Trafalgar we found the Sherlock Holmes pub! So we went in and ordered pint of the Sherlock Holmes Ale on tap. It was good, not remarkable, but the pub's ambiance and the company of friends made it great.
As we were planning on seeing "Avenue Q" last night, we had dinner at a pub called The Captain's Circle (or maybe Corner) right off Piccadilly Circus. Roast beef, steak-and-ale pie, and chicken-chorizo pie made for a great classic English pub dinner which, shockingly, was really delicious. After eating we got our tickets (main floor, row M, centered!) for the show and went to explore Piccadilly Circus for a bit. We checked out Lillywhite's, the Dick's Sporting Goods of the UK only bigger and better, and then headed back for the show.
Oh, my gosh. If you ever have the means or inclination to see a show that will literally make your sides hurt from laughing, "Avenue Q" should be it. It was hilarious. I laughed so hard I teared up. The off-color, totally un-PC humor just made my night, and it was a perfect show to take Phil to, being that he has a moderately off-color, un-PC sense of humor himself. We walked back and got right down to spring break finalizing business when we got home; Phil and Jon were nice enough to just hang out as everybody in the London Program is running around like a bunch of headless chickens getting ready to leave for break today.
Today we're doing the British Museum in the morning, having lunch at Café Saffron to introduce the boys to good British-Indian food, and then I have to bid PBlack goodbye as it's time for me to leave on a jet plane for Tuscany, Barcelona and Paris!! I'll do my best to update this somehow from the Continent, but I will definitely at least be making regular Microsoft Word "blog entries" to publish when I get home.
Have a lovely week, enjoy spring break for those of you who are on it, and I will write soon.
Arrivederci!
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