Sunday 13 March 2011

Mummy!

The brief London sojourn to visit Mum was absolutely fantastic.

I took the train down to London on Friday afternoon (a very easy, 45-minute straight shot) and went to meet Mummy at her NCR office. Or rather, the London NCR office.

Brief detour: I love trains. In trying to vaguely continue my theme of 'things I love about England' trains are very high on the list. I love showing up to the station in Cambridge, and (almost) suddenly being somewhere completely different. The Cambridge trains go into King's Cross, and on Friday we arrived in a platform right in the middle of one of the huge arch thingys (No idea what these are called. Here's a random photo I found:

Jumping out of the train from sleepy Cambridge into this is always a little breathtaking, as in literally takes my breath away for a moment.

Eh, I am not articulating myself well. I love trains!! That is all. Oh also, I love the underground. A lot. The idea of all these little trains zooming around under the ground all the time is so cool! (I am such a geek. I will stop talking about this now).

So! I arrived at the Baker Street tube station with a massive rucksack (backpack) full of stuff for Mum to take home (winter clothes and such that I don't want in my room). After a bit of walking (I love London!! Walking down the busy streets... Sigh. Ok, will devote another post to babbling about how much I love that city in general..), arrived at NCR, and went up to Mom's office. I got to meet some of her 'workmates' (a term I coined at some point earlier in my life), and hung out while she finished up her work.

Our plan had been to go try and see a show (we'd decided on 'We Will Rock You' based on the music of Queen), but by the time Mom was done with work, we would have been slightly rushed to get dinner and get there. We also didn't have tickets and the website wasn't cooperating. We decided to just head back to the hotel and have a leisurely dinner and catch up.

I dumped my stuff in the room, and we headed down to the bar for a cheeky pint before dinner. (Pint for Mum, cider for me. Mm.) We got a chance to start catching up, and decided to try and find a place Mom and Dad had been to before for dinner. Mom described it as a pub with 'lots of pictures on the walls' that served great Thai food. It was called 'The Windsor Castle' and had memorabilia and general crap on literally every surface. Quite awesome though, for someone like me who really likes stuff!

The bar (Hi Mom!)

We had some really really really good Thai food, including my absolute favourite Coconut Soup. This made me very very happy. The rest of the meal was very tasty, and the pub was hilarious. There was lots of stuff from the previous Royal Engagement, which was amusing, including this tea towel which was framed in the women's toilets..


Post-dinner, we headed back to the hotel for an early night. On the way, we walked up Edgware Road, which is a very Arabic-speaking neighbourhood, so I was quite excited!

Back at the hotel, we'd hoped to find a movie or something on TV for relaxation, but just found quite a lot of foreign channels. Got to practice my Arabic again though! In the end, we bought 'Secretariat' on pay-per-view, which neither of us have done before so it was rather exciting.

On that note, I need to get back to work. I will recap the rest of our adventures later!

1 comments:

Lee said... [Reply]

Nice!!! Thanks for sharing!!