House guest #2

John (a.k.a. Country Lawyer) arrived very early on Saturday morning, looking bleary eyed and disheveled after his flight from DC. As is our custom, we opened a bottle of champagne upon his entry into our apartment. We were all pretty hungry so we wandered around the neighbourhood until we happened upon the S&M Cafe, where we ate huge servings of English breakfast goodies. Service was a bit slow, as we've come to expect, but the quality and quantity of food we got for the amount we paid, made this a great place which we'll go back to again. John kept passing out while eating his breakfast, so we decided to bring him back to the apartment for a nap. Then, realizing that John was a bit larger than our couch, I went on a mad hunt in search of an inflatable mattress. The late afternoon/evening was spent walking around the Tower of London, wandering around part of the South side of London, finding a pub, playing some rummy 500 (which I won!), then heading back to our neighbourhood for some Vietnamese food and an early night's rest.

Sunday, we awoke early, and began what I like to refer to as one of Leo's death marches. These are walks which seem endless, appear to have very few defined destinations, but always involve drinking, eating, and blisters. This walk took us to the Hayward Gallery, followed by a pub near Covent Gardens, where we introduced John to a Sunday roast, followed by passing by Leo's office (in order to find another pub which turned out to be closed), and heading back to the pub by our flat. It was probably about a 6 mile hike around central London. After which, we wanted nothing more than to sit quietly, so we went to the movie theatre and saw Be Kind, Rewind, which we all thought was a wonderful movie, made even better by the fact that you could buy beer (at the theatre) and bring it in (to the movie) . For dinner we dined at a Turkish restaurant around the corner from our place, and again drifted off to sleep well before midnight.