Weekend in London (3.24 - 3.25)

Before I get to the story of my weekend, let me give you a quick mobile update. So I have been waiting and waiting for my bank statement to arrive in the post so I can get a mobile. When I arrived home Wednesday Nick gave me my mail and there it was. So my first order of business on Thursday was to get the phone. They put in all my info, but it still had to do a credit check, and I was declined. Most likely because I don’t have any credit here. The guy said I would need to bring someone else who had credit to sort of be a co-signer for me. I went home and asked Nick if he would do it. He said sure, so Friday we go back to the store. They put in his information and HE is declined as well! What we realize is that it’s our address that is messing things up. The people who lived at the pub before apparently had a lot of debt and the computers see this when it looks up our address. Pretty lame. So the guy said to bring in someone else with a different address. You have no idea how annoyed I was at this point. The only other person I could think to ask was Alex. He said he’d do it, but we would have to wait until his next day off, which would be Monday, since he works during the day and on the weekend. Skipping ahead to Monday, we go to the store, and my understanding from my last visit was that we could use Nick’s account info to pay for the phone and plan, and that we just needed someone else’s name for the address check. Well that wasn’t the case. The phone has to be under one name, and Alex would have put it under his name, but he just found out the people renting his house are leaving at the end of the month, so he didn’t think it was a good idea in case he runs into money issues. Understandable, so now I need to find someone else to get this phone for me. I talked to my lovely boss Chris and asked if he’d do it and he said yes, and in fact he wants me to look into what deals they have for business accounts because his phone contract is about to run out and he’s thinking of switching to this company since it has such a good international call deal. However he is on Holiday for the next two weeks so I’ll have to wait. In the meantime I have a temporary mobile, thanks to Alex. He told me he had an old phone and I could just buy a new SIM card for it so that I at least have something. Bless him. So now I have a mobile, yay.

Okay, on to the story of my weekend. Took a train on Saturday afternoon to Reading where my friend Liz and her husband Paul were going to pick me up. I had met Liz back in San Francisco when we both worked at Nimblefish. She and her husband Paul had moved to SF and lived there for about 5 years but just moved back to England in July 2006 because they wanted to buy a house and start a family and just couldn’t afford to do it in the Bay Area. Works for me, now I know more people in England. They picked me up from the station then we went to their friend Andy’s house. We were all going out to London that night for their friend’s going away party (he’s moving to Australia). It was me, Liz, Paul, Andy and Rachel. The place we were going to was called Zebrano’s off of Oxford and Regent Street in the heart of London. You know how people say driving in London is a total nightmare- well I didn’t realize how terrible it was until this night. We drove to the bar and it was so bad. We sat and sat in traffic forever, moving less than a full car length at a time. I would take driving through downtown San Francisco any day over London. Never again.

Zebrano’s was a cool place, very schwanky. Mixed cocktails were 7 pounds! Corona’s were only 3 so after having 1 cocktail I stuck with Corona the rest of the night. Met more of Liz’s friends but ended up chatting with Andy mostly and hanging with him and Paul near the bar. It was a fun night. On the way home we were all feeling a bit peckish and tried to find food. We saw a McDonalds and pulled over to go in. Me, Paul and Andy walked over only to find that it was closed. As we walked back toward the car, the boys had to go pee and decided to do it in this doorway. I kept on walking to the car, and when the boys came back, we could see that the front of their trousers above their knees were all wet. We thought they pissed themselves but what happened was when they stood in the doorway, water started spraying at them from the doorway! How funny. The door took a piss on them before they could piss on the door. Hahaha…good times. We stopped at a petrol station and got food there. Dropped Andy and Rachel off then continued on to Liz and Paul’s house. We were all so tired, we went straight away to bed.

Woke up Sunday morning, had some coffee and toast, took showers and tried to figure out where to have lunch. We went to this cute country sort of restaurant and met their friends Paul and Linda, who just had a baby boy. I had a beer and ale pie, which was really yummie. Paul and Linda were lovely people. When we started looking at our watches we realized we wouldn’t make it to the train station in time to catch the 3:45pm train so I’d have to take the next one which left an hour later. Thank God my ticket was an open one, meaning I can catch any train at any time. Caught the train but it was so crowded that I didn’t have a seat and ended up standing more of the way home, as did many others. Played the quiz at the pub (we did such a crap job this time) and then chilled with Alex for the night. I am still feeling under the weather at this point so plan to stay at home next weekend and take a break from traveling.