Pub City – II
Saturday, November 13th, 2010Scrambled Powder
So day two! Saturday morning – we were up quite early and I had not yet had that English breakfast so that was the first objective! We walked around a but and finally found a small cafe – Cafe 54 – in a corner of a small street; it looked cosy enough. I ordered a “Traditional English Breakfast” – baked beans, scrambled eggs, bacon and toast. Maria not being a breakfast person had just coffee. What a disappointment! I could swear that those scrambled eggs were from powder… as in powder eggs. Till this day I cant believe powder eggs are sold and people actually buy them but there you go. The rest of the breakfast wasn’t anything to write about (although I am doing just that here) but I enjoyed it anyway.
Covent Garden
From Cafe 54 we walked in the Eastern direction headed to Covent Garden. I have to note here that Maria had picked out most of the must-see places. If you need a touring partner, she is your bet. She downloads the entire Wikipedia contents of any destination! In Covent Garden there is a market square with shops all around, lots of nice cafes and lots of street artists performing. One of the streets artists in particular (check out the pic below) had me shaking my head and thinking “the things we do for money!”
Things we do...
Another street performer was playing tricks with a dice and cups and asked the audience to choose for him any country and language that he can count one-two-three in. I put up my hand and shouted “Uganda!” and he shook his head for a moment.. “Hmmm thats a tough one!” In the end his version of “one-two-three” in Luganda was “I-dont-know”!
The market itself gave you the feeling of wanting to sit and hang around all day – nice looking eating places, a group of musicians playing classical music but with a more funky spin, and even some dance to it, free tea in a tea shop and pastries and all kind of food stuff in the windows!
Eat to the beat. Was a nice atmosphere
London Eye
The south exit of the market led us towards Thames River and on to the London Eye. I wanted to go up to see the view of the city from above. Unfortunately when we got there, the line looked like we would have to wait an hour or more to get in so we just passed by like stereotypical Japanese tourists – we stood by it, looked up, said “ooh–aaahhh”, took pictures and moved on! Along the river there was enough to see though. More street performers doing all kinds of tricks. The one thing that they all seemed to repeat was “I could die doing this!”. This was their line to convince people to give them money! We ended up in a good ol’ pub for lunch. I had a pie and meanwhile Maria still wanted to fill her fish n’ chips quota!
Pie + FishnChips
St Pauls Cathedral and Tower Bridge
By the time we were done with lunch and chatting, it was already getting late so we hurried towards the last to-do for the day – Tower Bridge. Luckily on the way we came across St. Paul’s Cathedral which looked amazing with the lights at night and strangely dull the next day in plain daylight.
St Pauls by Night
The tower bridge was also pretty amazing. Huge towers on both sides, very nicely lit and over looking the river. Maybe an architect can fill in the gap for me here. We took a strange auto-photo in which the camera decided that I do not exist! Luckily that was not a permanent decision!
Picture of one?
Nice view of the Tower Bridge
What was even more impressive for me was a huge castle – Tower of London – next to the bridge. Massive, tall buildings that look straight out of movies and the lawn had grass very well cut and tended. Whenever I see such things it makes me think of leaders who suck up all the wealth of the people around them to live in such incredible luxury – worldwile phenomenon.
Les Miserables
Since we had run out of time we rushed back to the theatre to watch Les Miserables. The place we were seated in was so high up that I always got the feeling of tripping and rolling down straight onto the stage! The play – more like musical – was quite well done. I do not have too many other musicals to compare it to but I enjoyed it once I was over the fact that the text was sung and not spoken out. Maria also seems to have enjoyed it and she did not know the story before hand so that might have made it nicer.
After the theatre we stopped at an Indian restaurant that we had spotted earlier on, to have dinner. It was while having dinner that I had time to think again about the play and I was asking myself “If the tickets guy had three options, how come our seats were the second last row from the back?” I took another look at the ticket stub I had left and almost shat in my pants! Not only had we paid 50 pounds for what we found out later we could have bought for 40 pounds, but in addition we had been actually sold 26 pound tickets! The guy had made 100% profit off of us!
I was so angry I started making up scenarios in my head how I would go there the next day and shout at him and demand that he refunds us what he had stolen from us “Look here ‘mate’ you bloody cheated us! These tickets cost half what we paid for! You spotted a poor African student tourist and figured the best thing to do was cheat him out of his scholarship money! You are a dishonest person. Dishonest!!! Now I demand that you give me back the 35 pounds that you cheated me out of or else I shall stand here for as long as I have to and inform every person who comes to buy tickets from you that you are a thief!”. Yes, my friends, I had the perfect plan and I have discovered that playing on my African background and connecting it to poverty has a way of bring out even more sympathy from Europeans. I have not actually done it but I have sometimes noticed situations where I realise that if I played the african-poverty card it could actually be to my advantage. Hey, you have to play with the hand you are dealt. When I told Maria that we should go back there, she was also having the exact same thoughts – telling the tickets guy that she would stand there and chase away his customers until he refunded us… but alas when we went there on Sunday the shop was closed.
