Saturday, September 17, 2011

Day 9-12

With no internet connection and all the touristy sites taken care of pretty early on, we spent the last days wandering the streets of London, riding the buses and window shopping. On the 15th, we had the best afternoon. It was relaxed, we watched soccer in the bar with our new friends, we had snacks, played cards, and then finally set up the laptop and watched Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

 After we went to sleep, we had a not-so-pleasant surprise when 7 Dutch guys game rumbling through the doorway at 4:30am. Out of a 12 person room, there were the 7 Dutch guys, Chris, me, a Canadian girl, and a lady with a broken leg. We were kind of outnumbered! Earlier that day, the girl at the receptionist explained to us that there had been a mix-up and she gave one of the guys the wrong bed – so his stuff was moved to the new bed, which was a total of maybe 10 steps from his “old’ bed. When they came in, they turned on the lights, they lit up cigarettes in the room, they drank whiskey from the bottle, and guess who didn’t like that his bed was moved? Yep. Guess who he so generously took it out on? Yep. They started smashing the beds against the wall, they were trying to provoke Chris into fighting and after certain &#$words were exchanged, it was all I could do to keep the two guys from fighting.

What were the other Dutch guys doing? Stripping down to their underwear and taking pictures of each other. The girl with the broken leg explained to them that she was allergic to smoke and was constantly coughing and their response… was for her to shut her mouth. I can’t make this stuff up people. It was without a doubt, the worse night we’ve ever had. I’ve never seen Chris so mad and I’ve never had to deal with that much testosterone and anger!

We decided to get up and go into the bar and eventually it was us and the Canadian girl watching Cash Cab on the bar TV between 5-8:30am. After the day, we decided to make our evening twenty times better than our morning and we got everyone together to go out for the evening. The first stop was of course, the Queen Elizabeth. The girl in our room with the broken leg went to the doctor earlier in the afternoon and they said she’s ok to finally go home. She had been there for weeks and that was the best possible news (especially after last night) and on her way home, she picked up wine, crackers, and a bunch of different cheeses from the store to celebrate!

It was the whole group – us, the two Canadian girls, the about 5 New Zealanders, 3 Aussies, 2 Irish guys, and the guy from Munich. It was so much fun!! Talk about confidence when you walk through the street – we practically had a gang of people with us. We were out until about 2:30 or 3am and when we got home, where did we all immediately head? The KITCHEN! Haha. I made soup and Victoria (one of the Canadian girls) had chips and soon we were sharing the chips and dipping it in my soup. We had the whole bunch of us smooshed into this little corner kitchen all hunting for our food.

Saturday was a relax day. First thing in the morning, we went back to Notting Hill for the Portobello Market. Talk about beautiful! We saw the home of George Orwell and the streets were packed with vendors selling everything from antique china to wallets to weird kinds of meat. We said we’d walk down the market and back, but we didn’t realize how big it is. We walked for one hour straight in one direction before we started going off into the little side markets. After a couple of hours, we were starving and headed towards the food section.

I am not kidding you when I say I have never in my life seen fruit like this. Everything was triple the size of what grocery stores sell. There were stands for so many different nationalities, all selling their signature dish. Chris walked by a Greek stand selling “Big Burgers”. We stopped and the Chris asked the lady politely, “I just want one big burger please”. She said, “Have you pay yet?” He pays, and then she says, in this exact way: “What you wunt an yurr beeg berger”. We could not stop laughing! Later on, Chris took me to get a book, which was super exciting for me anyways ;). That night, we went on a date, out to Bodean’s BBQ (the ONLY place we have found to have BBQ sauce in Europe). We walked around and finally, did laundry!

I know that’s not very interesting, but it had to be done. One thing I do not like about European Laundromats is that they insist on washing and drying the clothes for you. You put your coins in the machine and then when it’s done, the guy working at the Laundromat takes out your clothes and puts in it a basket to wait for the dryer… then puts your clothes in the dryer for you. Awkward!! No thanks. Tomorrow is day 1 on the train. That should be interesting   Alicia & Chris

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