Cornish Pasty Blog

Chinatown one Saturday

One minute I am posting multiple times a day and then silence. Without looking I would say that my last post was when we were outside of Chinatown.

We met up with our friend S, it was really good to see her and reassuring that she was looking so well. I've never known anyone who studies quite so hard, to the exclusion of much else; still, as she says soon it will be in the past and then there will be light again.

Eating in Chinatown is great, especially in a restaurant that is so busy. I neglected to get the name of the place but will have to ask our friend. The food was delicious and served in a traditional way, in the type and order of the dishes. I learnt that tapping the table means enough and it was interesting to make a connection with the games of dominoes and poker.

There's not a lot to say following that. After seeing our friend and having a great meal, we sadly separated at an underground station, our friend needed to get back to her revision.

We went from the station to the cinema in Leicester Square. It was raining so we reckoned it would be a chance to chill and wait out the worst of the weather. We got in a que for the cinema to see X-Men III - I was surprised that Cathy suggested this over the DaVinci Code, as films in the comics, science fiction and fantasy genre are generally not to her taste. When I asked she said that she had heard others say that the film was difficult to follow if you have not read the book; I later heard Anna say, on The Delta Park Project, that she had read the book and found it frustrating when explanations were given for people who had not read the book. If it's still around in a few weeks maybe we'll try it down our way.

Havivng been in the que for a while and only 10 minutes from the start of the film we asked for two tickets. The chap printed them and then asked for ?23 ($40US)!! In Cornwall we pay ?11 ($20) - half price with the Orange mobile sponsored Orange Wednesdays scheme. ?23 is a lot for the cachet of Leicester Square but it was the price of my embarassment I paid rather than have people watch us walk away.

The rest of our day, or so in the city consisted of our chilling out. It was a great stay. Stephenson Hall is so big and to have it virtually to yourself was such a luxury. E the Admin was very welcoming when we arrived and helpful, as was R who works there too and supplied us with fantastic driving in London directions.

We are certainly going back to Stephenson Hall, to see a show, meetup with S and things we haven't thought of yet. We got so comfy we didn't even get to the Mucky Pup just up the road a ways. I had scouted out free wifi locations and hit upon it as the nearest to where we were staying.

I need to go back and revise my Starbucks entries for London. One of the things I noticed was a distinct problem in downloading larger files. I could not seem to download any podcasts, the whole thing would go from trotting along nicely to a snails pace and downloads eventually efffectively timing out the became so slow. Normal surfing was fine and I couldn't see anyone else surfing and I had scouted around about this. E verything started off fine and then took a nosedive but I had already written up the wifi part and it was only when it came near time to leave did I notice the problem.

More later.?