Day 2 – London – Riley’s Dorm Kitchen

Highlights:
Sights of the day: St. Paul's Cathedral, Burroughs Market
We went into the cathedral, free to all worshipers. The church has way too much money, and has made beautiful, terrifying monuments. Burroughs is described in the entry below.

Quotes of the day: Eddie, Sean
-"Chuck Norris is so awesome that he once stuffed 12 children into a refrigerator."
-"It is a war crime for Chuck Norris to hold a baby."

Drunk of the day: Eddie
-Managed to puncture 2 beers with one knife stab. Then was forced to shotgun one of them on the balcony, not allowed to return until finished.


reenactment ^^


Journal Entry:
It’s 1030 in the morning, I’ve been up since 8, but Riley and Sean are still asleep. Whatever, I’ll get over the jet lag sooner or later. We got into London at 11am yesterday dying of thirst. Sean and I had drunk a good portion of our duty free Smirnoff on the plane (against specific request), but had little in the way of water. To our dismay, though, London apparently doesn’t believe in water fountains, so we had to go find change and then pay 2 pounds each for 500ml vitamin waters. Then it was about an hour and a half ride on the tube from the airport to riley’s dorm, which was kinda fun. While riding I even helped some Brittish people remember their harry potter terms, a kid kept arguing that it was "evaporation" instead of "disaparation," but his mom saw me shaking my head from across the aisle and told him he was wrong because "that man" (point) agrees with her.

Riley found us wandering the streets near the underground exit, and took us back to his dorm. As soon as we got settled, we headed out to Burroughs market, a very international, outdoor marketplace similar to pike’s place. It was crowded but pleasant, with a wide variety of shops in different sections of the market, part of which was underneath a huge brick bridge on which the tube runs. Cheese, salami, Turkish delights, smoothie shops, mulled wine, and thousands of other crazy/awesome things for sale. We ate at the rare meats store, Sean and I had kangaroo burgers and riley had ostrich. Pretty delicious, though I sort of thought kangaroos were endangered.

We then went to a pub for our first pint of room-temp ale. The temperature turned out to be not that much of an issue, it was quite good. Pretty much all beer here is good, even the cheap stuff seems a little better than cheap American beer. We met up with some American friends of riley’s who were also studying abroad and went to Brick Lane, a street littered with Indian restaurants. For each restaurant, there would be a guy outside trying to gain our business by offering various deals on meals. We ended up eating at a place that gave us nan, rice, appetizer, main course, and 2 rounds of drinks for 10 pounds each. 10 pounds is like 17 dollars or something, but people here spend pounds like dollars, so quite a good deal, especially for the quality food we received. We wanted to go to “Calloh Callay,” a nearby bar, but they were only accepting people with reservations, so we went to “El Paso,” a shooter bar, instead. I had a “Ground Zero” (Kaluah, Jim Beam, and two other alcohols I couldn’t recognize, delicious) and a pint of Carling. We came back to riley’s dorm and played “Cheers, Governor,” a brittish drinking game. On our way back, we saw a person just carrying a sex doll around, picture. We also played beer pong with cups brought from America (not by us), since they don’t sell keg cups here!


not a reenactment

All in all, a great first day in our trip : )