Everyone else except me planned to visit 26 pubs around London - the Monopoly Pub Crawl, but I went to meet some other people instead. I woke up at 7:30am thinking I'd slept in and then again at 9am... which appears to be too late to get hot water for the shower - so I had a cold shower and later complained and got a free breakfast. I passed Thomas at Earl's Court just after 10am - he was waiting for everyone else but they hadn't shown up yet. Peter and Alex missed the group completely somehow and didn't turn up until later in the day.
I went the wrong way on the District line (there are too many branches of this all sharing the same name) and then took the Circle line to Tower Hill/Tower Gateway and went on the DLR to Canary Wharf where Tom managed to find me. We visited the Redbus and Telehouse datacentres and then went to a Pizza Hut. I was hoping we could meet with some other people for dinner, probably at the Lotus but they weren't in London that weekend.
Instead we joined the pub crawl in the afternoon at King's Cross, after contacting Peter to help him find the rest of the group. Colin left for his hotel as soon as I arrived, and both Gavin and Tom left soon after. Almost every pub was quite crowded with people watching sports on TV. Thomas kept leading us around in circles despite having directions between every pub...
Eventually we had dinner at a Japenese restaurant called Wagamama. I'm not that interested in eating noodles but I had some salmon ramen which was floating... eating it with chopsticks wasn't too hard although I cheated by not splitting the two sticks up (they were joined at one end). I had a combination of mango and lychee with lime zest sorbet for dessert which was very nice.
Afterwards we went to next pub on the list - The Comedy - and waited for Alex (who was going around London on his own without a phone...), Andrew and Marek to show up. We quickly gave up on continuing the rest of the pub crawl and ended up at a pub right next to Leicester Square tube station. Here, Thomas managed to smash two glasses and lost his wallet (but not his iPhone). Andrew and Marek left some time after 10pm and then myself, Alex, Peter and Joe left shortly after 11pm leaving Jeff, Pierre, Thomas and Svend behind to stay out until early morning.
Lychee is the ultimate weird fruit. At least as interesting as the rest of them, but unlike most actually edible as well. Yum.
Nice report, this. Especially liked the photos.