Word Salad: Chinatown, Shopping, and the Aquarium

Chan arrived on Tuesday afternoon, having taken a bus from Leeds, as it was cheaper than the train. She looked the same as ever, but her English had become more British sounding. After she got settled in, we walked to the Tower of London to catch a river tour. I had wanted to do the river tour last year, but there’s a steep slope down to the dock, and it didn’t look like something we could manage safely with the wheelchair. That was a shame, because the tour itself would have been perfect for someone who couldn’t walk.

That night Neal had planned for us to meet at a nearby pub to compete in Trivia Night. It turned out that the pub he had in mind only had trivia on alternate Tuesdays, so he had tried to catch me by text message to tell us to stay on the other side of Tower Bridge where there was another pub. We were almost at his apartment when I saw the messages, but we got all sorted out and managed to get to the new pub, grab the last table, and enter the contest. We did well the first half, but came in third to last in the end. Second to last entitled you to a free bottle of wine - if only I hadn’t corrected an answer my teammates had cooked up while I was in the Ladies’, we would have been second to last. Oh, well, it was fun.

Wednesday we spent seeing Kew Gardens (more properly, the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew), which I hadn’t been able to see last year, either. While I was taking pictures, my disk ran out of space. Not a problem, I had a spare which I had found when I was packing. What I did not notice was that the spare only had 32 megabytes on it (where did that come from?) I wasn’t able to buy a new one until the next day, so I only got 60 or so pictures from Kew. (I may not be good, but I’m prolific.) That night we went to Chan’s favorite Korean restaurant.

The next day we started at the London Aquarium, then went to Chinatown followed by some shopping at Liberty of London and Selfridges. We only window shopped at Liberty (does anyone really pay 150 pounds for a souvenir Olympic scarf?), but I bought some Christmas ornaments at Selfridge’s. Usually my souvenir shopping consists of buying Christmas ornaments since then I never get home and ask “What am I going to do with this stuff?” We had afternoon tea at the original Bea’s. I could get used to afternoon tea.

Chan was going to stay on a few days with friends of hers in London, but she got a message she was needed back in Leeds to sign for a package, so had to take the bus back. Meantime, we had plans for the weekend with Neal, taking a train to Cornwall.