Jet lag finally caught up, we didn’t get out of bed until noon or so. We didn’t really have anything to do other than go see some of the touristy things, so we grabbed lunch at a pub down the street and then mozied our way to the train station next door. Side note about our lunch: two of us ordered steak sandwiches but it only came with one piece of bread. Never seen an open faced steak sandwich before.
Blah blah Big Ben, blah blah Parliament and the Palace. They are cool things to check out but we didn’t want to hang around the big crowds. We did find a big statue of Abe Lincoln across from Parliament. Not a lot of people know this but honest Abe was an architect and helped draw up the original plans for the Parliament building. It’s true, look it up. At some point I got a news alert (this isn’t news) that Shia Lebeouf had been arrested (again) and was yelling at a cop that he could shoot him if he had a gun. Now as I mentioned this isn’t news, who cares. However it reminded Ryan of this insanely silly video on youtube called Shia Lebeouf Live and he insisted we find a spot in the park to watch it. If you haven’t, you should. It’s incredibly stupid but very funny.
We thought it would be fun to find somewhere we could have a bite and a beer overlooking the Thames River. We did and it was lovely.
By the time we got back to the hotel it was close to 8, and we had told the Danish kids (Christian and Thomas) that we would meet up with them at 9. At 8 this sounded like an awful idea because we all wanted to get some rest after walking for miles around London, but they were nice enough to catch an Uber to our area so we would be super dicks if we didn’t go meet them. They were at an Irish pub 5 minutes down the street from the hotel, so at least there was that.
Now if you remember the post from a few days back where I had mentioned we needed to get on a train and head back down south to get our car from the metal guy and then bring it to the mechanic to go over the car. Yeah, that still needed to happen and we needed to be on a 7:30 train. The original plan was to hang out for a while, take it easy and head home when the bar closed. Since most bars in London close at midnight, and this one in particular closed at 11, our original plan sounded very reasonable. Wrong.
So this is where the day became really interesting. The bartender was continually blown away every time we left her a small tip. Tips aren’t expected here – no one does it – but most service you get here in my opinion is terrible compared to at home, and no tipping absolutely has everything to do with that. When you’re getting good service (the bar is pretty low now) and order 8£ in beer and leave a 10£ to us that’s not really a big deal. On one of her trips around the place checking on everyone Ryan asked her what time it was closing. Her response was something to the effect of “I’ll lock the doors at 11 but you can stay as long as I’m sober enough to pour beer.”
What? The people over at TABC (Texas Alcohol and Beverage Commission) would have a collective heart attack hearing that. When 11 rolled around there were a few locals that decided to stick around too, so we decided to roll with it. Oddly enough one of them had motorcycled through Mongolia before so he told us all about it and gave us tons of cool advice on how to deal with the locals. Next thing you know it was past 3 am, fuuuuuck we still have to get up at 7.
