My last few days in London were quite fun. On Tuesday night, we made it out to the West End and saw Spamalot. It was hilarious. Most of the script was pulled right from the Holy Grail movie, but there were some lines updated and others changed all together, but in good taste. There were times when I was nearly out of my seat laughing. The seats too weren’t bad for 20 pound.
Wednesday was a fairly uneventful day. I woke up late, watched some TV, walked around the Kings Cross and Chapel Market areas to do some errands then came back to my sister’s pad by the time she was done with school. When she was back, we went down to Waterloo station to catch a train to Egham to have dinner with my cousin. The three of us had a nice dinner at some small-ish place on the Egham high street, then went back to his house there for a while. After hanging out for a bit, we caught the next train back to London and listened to Queens of the Stone Age on my sister’s mobile phone.
While traversing the tube back to Kings Cross, it was a bit of madness with loud drunk Brits stumbling everywhere speaking what could only be guessed to be English. I was reminded more than once of having a clean shirt from Peep Show. We had plans to go out in the evening, but it turned out to be too late when we got back so we called it an early day.
Thursday about noon-ish we left SOAS and went to Carnaby Street to try to eat a bean burger that I’d been raving about for years to my sister and her friends. They’d maintained that the so-called bean burger was a fabrication of my imagination, so I decided to have lunch at a place where I know I’d had one before on Carnaby Street. Alas, it turned out to be true. The spicy bean burger is dead, long live the leek burger. My favorite pub food had been replaced. We’d in fact tried to search them out for dinner on Tuesday before the show in the West End and I’d totally failed. The leek burger, the new veggie burger at this pub, was good, but it just wasn’t the same.
We walked around the area for a while then decided to make our way to Seven Dials. Pretty cool little area and we did some window shopping there, as well as taking some model shots for Shaadi.com (look on my pictures site for examples). We started to walk back towards Kings Cross but stopped in to the Grape Street Wine Bar for a bottle of champagne, which was a great idea, then continued back on our walk. We were meeting some other friends at 830pm for dinner, so we went back to get ready.
Our dinner was in the Bayswater area, so we took the tube out there. Unfortunately, our first venue of choice (a Persian place) had almost no veg options (both my sis and I are vegetarian) so we walked a few blocks over to find a Mexican restaurant that turned out to be awesome. We had nachos, chips, salsa, guacamole, margaritas, beers, enchiladas, taco salads, the works. All told between the four of us, we put away over nearly 130 pounds worth of food (no, not “lbs” but “GBP”). Pretty dear, but it totally hit the spot. After dinner, we settled in to a nearby pub to finish the night off.
Then on Thursday, I woke up at 630ish to get ready and finish packing, then went to the Kings Cross Thameslink station to catch a train to Gatwick. The flight to Newark was uneventful and the plane was thankfully not full (altho the seat pitch on the Continental 777-200s is terrible, I could barely cross my legs). I passed out last night at 1030pm unable to stay awake any longer. This week is just going to be about relaxing and doing a lot of nothing. I’ve got plans to make it out to NYC on Monday to meet up with Derek and will probably go again at some point with my family.
The trip is 60% done! Three weeks of five finished, just this week here in NJ and a week in Central America left until it’s back to the real world.