Sunny London

Mar. 17th, 2009 at 02:47 pm

The last couple of days have been beautiful out, which is my excuse for not updating.

Sunday was the warmest of the last three, and very, very sunny. I mostly did chores though, gym and laundry and grocery shopping. I bought a ridiculous amount of food at the grocery store, and it looks like I'm carbo-loading due to the myriad breads I purchased, but it was well worth it. For a late lunch on Sunday, I made my very first curry! And it was darn delicious.

After doing a bit of work, I went into the city and met up with Emma and her parents, and we went to get dinner. We ended up at a very nice Italian place called Carluccio's, and I am currently eating my leftover delicious gnocchi.

I did more work when I got back, but was feeling a little down since I hadn't spent much leisure time outside- just my grocery trip, really- and I was missing being able to drag someone outside to do work or for a quick bit of frisbee. One of my friends pulled through in the clutch though, and we spent some time throwing around a crappy pink frisbee and a cool thing called an aerobie.

Monday started out pretty standard- class, turn in coursework, nap... I played a bit more frisbee right before we had our last architecture field trip. We ended up going to the new City Hall, across from the Tower of London. It looks a bit like an onion or a snail's shell, which is pretty cool. Our professor started talking about the really ugly London Hotel across the water, and how he disagreed with everyone who said it needed to be pulled down, since he thinks you need something truly hideous so you can appreciate the pretty things more, which is why he has a large, light up Mickey Mouse statuette in his house. I was almost peeing my pants laughing.

After going inside City Hall, USC Kevin and I walked across Tower Bridge to the tube station since it was so nice out, and I bought an ice cream (delicious). When I got back to campus, I decided to go meet up with some friends in the park across the street from campus. I hadn't yet been in there, they had some fantastic fountains and at the very back there was a really cool playground. I'll take pictures sometime. The see-saw was pretty fun, it went in circles as well as up and down, so whilst Lindsay and I were on it, Damien and Hassan came up and started pushing us in circles as fast as they could- Lindsay and I ended up holding on for dear life. We also played on this cool thing that launches you into the air a bit, but these two schoolchildren had to teach us how to use it properly, and were laughing at us since we were so bad at it. They thought I was okay at spinning, though- better than the guys.

After Actuarial, I went and picked up Emma from the tube station, and we met up with a bunch of my friends and some of their friends and went off to Brick Lane. We got the same deal as last week, but Haider kept telling the guy to REALLY SELL IT to us; the doorman answered quite honestly that he had nothing else to offer, and he was definitely right. I have never been that full in my life. Also, I LOVE chicken malaya- it has pineapples in it and is heaven. Chilies also had the best lasi I've yet experienced.

Five of our friends went to the bathrooms, so Emma, Haider, his friend Pablo and I started granny-running around a pole to try to work off our food a bit, and we'd yell things like "switch!" or "backwards!" at random intervals to change it up. One time I tried to go "reds skip one!" since Emma pointed out that it was a bit like UNO, but Pablo failed at skipping one. A guy came up and was begging off of us as we ran around the pole, and someone else yelled at us to go faster- I responded that we were working our way up. When we tired of the game, another guy came up to us and told us that the amount of times we went around the pole, we probably could've done at least a lap of the street. But the pole was more fun.

I refused to go in the Beigle shop since I was so full, and then we walked to Hayfield's. It was a pretty good night there- they almost didn't let in our extra friends since they didn't have student IDs, but when they realized they'd be losing six or seven customers, they let everyone in.

The only bad point of the last two days was finding out I didn't get Orientation Leader. I luckily discovered that when I was dropping Emma off to bed before I went back to Hayfield's, so my amigos were able to cheer me up quite a bit :-) Plus, I kicked butt at pool.