Honeymoon: Day Five in London
For some insane reason, Seppo woke up at 5am on Friday, April 14, 2006. Apparently, he had upsetting dreams about the house and couldn’t fall back asleep. He watched “Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle” on the PSP and thought about the house and Afterburner. I don’t know; ask him.
A leisurely four and a half hours later, I woke up and joined Seppo in the land of the living. We headed out to easyInternetcafe at Bond Street again, and sadly realized that the afternoon tea at Fornum & Mason that we tried to book via TopTable did not go through as a result of F&M celebrating Good Friday.
We headed over to Buckingham Palace, which, after all the beautiful buildings we had seen, was frankly quite disappointing.
Even more disappointing was the fact that there would be no changing of the guards due to it being Good Friday. Oh well.
We roamed around and found some cheap Indian food nearby. We figured having Indian food in England should be an interesting experience, as it is far more ingrained in British cuisine & culture than it is in ours. However, our meal at Cafe Mumbai was pretty unimpressive. It was just like having Indian food in the Bay Area. But we readily admit that we did not go to some really upscale, well-known place. We figured we wanted to see what the normal people get. Plus, we were hoarding our pounds like nobody’s business.
We came back to the hotel after lunch to take a nap, since Seppo was exhausted from his early morning non-sleep.
After getting up around 5pm, we went to Convent Garden and walked to Rock & Sole Plaice, supposedly the oldest fish & chips shop still open or something, to grab dinner.
I have to say that the Cornish Pasty & chips I had were fantastic. Seppo had the cod & chips and it was flaky, golden brown, and delicious. Sure, we were left with a slightly queasy feeling after all the fried food, but it was still delicious.
We walked over to Leicester Square from there, and I have to say that the area between the places was really fun & hip. It was bustling & humming with little shops and street vendors and tons of restaurants. We wished we had come to this area sooner on our trip. Oh well.
We walked back to Leicester Square from there, and sat on a bench and people-watched.
It was brimming with people. We happened to sit by three rowdy drunken Eastern Europeans who got fussy with the bobbies (three of them) regarding their illegal public drinking. The bobbies started out nice and cordial, smiling as they asked the three people to put away their open drinks, but for some reason, they didn’t want to cooperate, so the bobbies started to get tough. Hee. We were pretty fascinated with the idiocy of the drunkards but we vaguely worried that we’d accidentally get pulled into the bobby-beatdown that we were sure was going to ensue at any moment. We turned out to be wrong though, must to my relief and disappointment. Seppo observed randomly that the woman bobby had a smaller hat. Ok.
After some unknown amount of time of hanging around (I think we spent several hours there, but I am not sure), we decided to head back to the hotel. On the way back, we stopped by the corner store to grab some chocolate junk food. 😀