British Birthday

I had a fun and relaxing birthday weekend in London this year. It started out with waking up on Saturday and discovering I had a delivery upstairs. I found a huge box from a London flower shop. Turns out my mother had sent me flowers for my birthday. On top of it, a card she had sent from Tucson was taped to the box. Thanks so much mom! I loved them.

I decided to be a tourist for the weekend, so I headed to the British Museum for the afternoon. I had read something before going that many countries were always fighting with the British Museum to get their artifacts back. I really did not think much of it until I visited the museum. It appears that the British have taken everyone's history. For example, they have rooms filled with sculptures from the Parthenon. Apparently, the British ambassador in 1801 removed half of the Parthenon's sculptures and brought them back to the UK. He then sold them to the British Museum.

Overall, the museum was extremely impressive. I have never seen so many mummies and large statues in any museum before.

After the museum, I walked to Covent Garden. It is a place packed with shops and restaurants. There I met up with Jessica. She is the sister of a friend of mine that use to work at GAO. Jess is a social worker who lives in Croyden (45 min south of London) and has been living in the UK for about a year. She took me out for my first restaurant experience. We headed to an Italian place where we ordered salads, pizza, and wine. Now here is where I see the bland food. It appears that the British really don't use any type of seasoning. As Jess says, the British want a potato to taste like a potato. The prices were also over the top. Everything was about double what you would pay in the US. So the side salad was $7 and the personal pizza was $18. We split a half bottle of wine for $14. After dinner we met up with another American social worker friend of Jess, Sarah.

We headed to pub where we stood outside and drank our pints of beer. Let's just say that Jess and Sarah have been here a while and they drank me under the table. I will need to get my alcohol tolerance up! After about 4 hours, I was done. Lucky enough....pubs in London close at 11 pm. Yup, 11 pm. They just passed a new law that pubs can stay open later, but none of them apparently do.

On Sunday, I decided to hit the Portobello Market in Notting Hill. I took a double-decker bus for the journey which was really fun. I sat on top in the front.

I walked around the market for about an hour and then headed to Holland Park in Kensington to check it out. I then jumped on the subway and headed south to Wimbledon. There I met up with Jess again and another American social worker named Marie. We did lunch and then headed to a beer garden for the afternoon. The weather was in the 70's so it was a really nice day. All in all, it was a very nice weekend. This morning it was topped off when I opened my email and had tons of birthday wishes from everyone. Thanks for all the e-cards!