day five: getting to london

woke up at 9 today and managed to drag ourselves downstairs to have a nice scottish breakfast before starting our day. J had to make it back to the airport to she could take a flight down to london and back to the states. we were taking the 12:30 train down to king's cross which put us in around 6:30 at the latest. due to the maintenance the 4.5 hour trip was lengthened to 6 hours. after breakfast and packing up, we took a cab to the train station, J parted ways there by jumping on an airport express bus. we bought tickets, but decided than an hour wasn't enough time to tour the castle so we decided to take the 11:30 train instead. it was a 4 hour train ride before we were to jump onto a bus for an hour. the train ride was great, we listened to music the whole time. I did reading and N worked on his song list, he's making an album!

the two big pluses for the trip were the free wifi on the train (and power plugs for the laptop) and the scotch we bought the day before. we drank most of the bottle between the two of us, within three hours. it wasn't a big bottle, somewhere between an half bottle and a full one. anyway it was amazing, extremely smokey. the taste stays in your mouth for hours afterwards. on the bus ride, N slept the entire time but laying across two adjoining rows. i just looked out the window and listened to more music.

once we got into king's cross (we had to take a short 20 minute train into the station) we realized it was about 5.25 hours and not the 6 hours we expected. so that was good news. we jumped on the underground and made our way to the LBS campus where our friends' had a place for the quarter to crash. they were out somewhere in europe or africa, so we could use the whole place. we had a lot of trouble with the keys, the guy they were subletting from had come by and locked the second lock on the apartment. we didn't have the second key, so we were starting to look for hotels when the house manager had come back and let us in. that would have been really annoying if we had to find an hotel.

N tried to do some laundry and i went out for a run around our neighborhood and regent park. i made it to the zoo before all the scotch from the afternoon caught up with me. that wasn't pretty at all. N really wanted to eat pizza hut for some reason and i had seen one on my run, so we went there for dinner. we had two large pizzas, well i had three slices, N had most of the rest of it, we took half of it back for a snack/breakfast.

once we got back we called our other friend P who recently moved to london for work. we found out his place is only a 20 minute walk from our apartment, so we decided to walk off our dinner and check out the area. we made our way through marylebone and found the monocle shop that we really wanted to check out. we met up with P and his wife's family (who was visiting from the states). we gave P the scotch that we bought him. it was a ben nevis (something that's not super easy to get in the US). it was matured in bourbon casks so it had a peppery fruity finish. he and his family loved it, which was great. we all had a little. afterwards, we headed down to the corner pub and had a few beers. we caught up about london and leaving chicago, the pros and cons of being an american in the UK. we had a few more pints of tribute beer, which N liked a lot and i found a little sweet. N swears it had a grapefruit flavor, but i'm not so sure about that.

in london the pubs close at 11pm so we finished our beers and decided to call it a night. we didn't want to head to a club, instead we decided that we should meet up again earlier in the evening to drink or have dinner. we also decided that we were going to catch a show on monday night. probably the phantom of the opera (it's the only musical i've seen actually, but in LA). we were going to have lunch with P near the river on monday too. the highlight of the night was when P called our roommate C in the US, who was probably in philly or montreal at the time and left him two hilarious voicemails. after the pub closed, we head out and walked back home. we didn't get to bed till 1am or so. N was having issues with the washing machine and i was watching a korean movie on my laptop.