london day 2 - post work

hello all. today was a very jam packed sight seeing day... i was taken out to lunch to this very cool place that had a french influenced menu. very gourmet, and pretty reasonable. you could choose an appetizer item, and a main course item for 6.95 quid. ( that is roughly $12 each). i had some chick pea falafels with aubergine mixture topped off with hummus as my appetizer, and then a vegetable/squash curry on top of a lentil patty. everything was soooo flavorful and great!

at promptly 6pm we left the office and headed to a bar for the nightly drink. i tried two types of samuel smiths..



i had the soverign best bitter and the old brewery bitter. i like bitters, so far they have a relatively mild taste. the guys seem to drink more mixed drinks. or some of them don't drink at all.



after the pub nik showed me a bunch of places. i didn't take any pictures with him really, but after we parted ways and i walked back, i took some pictures of the places i recognized again. we walked through soho, trafalgar square, leicester square, picadilly square, we walked over the thames and to the south bank, we walked near waterloo. i am going back to the waterloo area too tomorrow night with some other guys from the office.

nik is an excellent tourguide. he told me more then i will ever remember. here are the highlights:

burberry
we walked by a burberry store and i asked him if that was the designers store, he kind of chuckled and said that burberry is only worn by the english equivalent of white trash, he called it something else that i can't remember now. apparently there are so many rip offs of burberry, and be them fake or not, no respectable british citizen wears burberry. :)

snow
he said it rarely if ever snows in the city of london. if it does snow, it doesn't stick. but 10km outside the city it does stick.

homeless people
i have not noticed very many, i think only 2 so far, he said they do have them, but they usually come out more in the rain to be more pitiful.

clean streets
i have noticed that the streets are genuinely clean and picked up. the streets remind me of the downtown crossing area of boston, they always seem so picked up.. i have also noticed people that walk around in yellow vests and pick up trash all the time. i saw one at 10pm even on my walk back to the hotel.

firetrucks
look very much like the double decker red busses. only they are solid and red and squarer.

horn honking
i didn't notice till it was pointed out to me, but pretty much noone honks their horns. they will run you down if you are not looking though. crossing the street is pretty scary

cars
ive been told that there are tolls you have to pay to drive into london. like 8 pounds. as some sort of pollution tarry. gas is also 2 pounds per liter. curiously i have not seen a gas station yet. nor a laundromat. those two things are on my list of things to look for. actually, i have not seen a grocery store either.

vegetarian meals
very easy to eat vegetarianly here. there are whole restaurants that market the hell out of their all vegetarian menus.

alright, although its 723 for you guys, its half midnight for me...

here is a link to my pictures so far. i am just going to keep adding my pictures per day to this same link..