London / Stonehenge / Bath

This past weekend was filled with all sorts of places in England. In fact, the weekend could not come soon enough, as the work week seemed to go by very slowly. Friday night was spent at a delicious Thai restaurant with some friends. Since I've arrived here, I've been drinking to drink a new beer every place I go to and at this restaurant, I was able to sample my 9th, (out of 12 by the weekends end) Singha. After dinner, we ended up watching British late night tv, which is outrageous. Lots of swearing and when the host really gets going, he just starts rambling and rambling in a manner that makes no sense to me, but has the audience rolling in the aisles.

On Saturday morning, we woke up early (8am) in an attempt to buy tickets for the special Terracotta Warriors exhibit at the British Museum. We arrived at the museum around 930ish and found that there was already a huge line of hundreds of people. We asked if there was any chance of gettings tickets, and were disappointed to find out that we could only purchase tickets for the 9pm showing. Since we had plans for the night, we were stuck with the normal museum. While the museum was gorgeous and there was an uncountable number of irreplaceable artifacts, I found myself getting a bit bored of it by 12. Combine the fact that I had looked at about 500 different spoons from various civilizations and my growing hunger, we realized that it was time to head out.

For lunch, we descended on Chinatown, which is incredibly small. I guess there is not a large asian population in England, but the Chinatown area was one tiny street that was only about 500 metres long. Despite its size, we still managed to have some delicious dim sum. Full of food, we headed to Trafalgar Square, which is right beside the National Gallery. We played on the lions for awhile, before finding a pub for a nice mid-afternoon pint. That night, we hit up the London nightlife in Covent Garden.

The next morning, we woke up at 630, despite going to bed at 230ish, and dragged ourselves onto a tour bus to go see Stonehenge and the Roman Baths. Stonehenge was a pretty cool sight to see. I can imagine that a lot of people think it's not that big of a deal, or just a bunch of rocks, but I really enjoyed seeing it. It's pretty neat to think about how they put the rocks together 5000 years ago. After that, we went through the Roman Baths. Some parts of the Baths were pretty sketchy (read: fungusy and old), but there was certain areas that were still wonderfully well maintained. It was fascinating to think about the Baths as they had been built over 2000 years ago, yet they seemed so modern. They had piles of tile shaped rocks that were used to heat the floor of the sauna and hot tub rooms. Pretty posh.

After the sightseeing, we went to this place called Sally Lunn's, which is supposedly famous for their buns. We had lunch there, as well as my first taste of 'English' tea. Call me whatever, but I had no idea they served tea with the leaves in the water and not in a tea bag. We had to use this strainer device. Very cool. The famous buns were alright... They were basically huge buns. That's about it. I put jam on mine, but it was still pretty dry.

We got back home around 8ish and were all pretty beat. The night was spent planning next weekend. Only four more days of work until the next holiday...