Wednesday morning we had a slow roll as we didn’t need to be anywhere until 2. We had some coffee in our room. Coffee over here is interesting. All the coffee shops make amazing, delicious coffee. But in the hotels and air bnbs, you get freeze dried coffee. And, oddly, it’s pretty good. All the rooms have electric kettles. Our hotel had little packets of milk. Just throw it all in a mug, add hot water - bam. The best of this type of coffee we ever had was in Adelaide Australia. Man. I can’t believe how good it was!
While reading and surfing the web, we realized we could get going earlier and meet up with Ashley again before high tea. She was down so we got ready and grabbed an Uber to Harrods.
If you’ve been to London, you’ve likely been to Harrods. To call it a store is…not sufficient. It’s this massive…I don’t know, 4 or 5 story complex with everything for sale from cars, to whole pig legs, to perfume. There was a tea room and that’s where Ginny booked us a reservation for high tea.
When we rolled up, we hopped out and realized that saying, “I’ll meet you at the entrance” as dumb, because there are something like 194 entrances. Approximately. So, we strolled around the building looking for a pub. Didn’t find one but did find a lovely little Italian restaurant with outdoor seating and plenty of room at the bar. We grabbed a seat, texted Ashley where we were, and a few minutes later - there she was!
Now, Jason was able to login to Verizon and add a 2 week plan that gives him cell service for something like $10/a day while we’re here. We decided it was a good idea if one of us could pull up a map or call a cab at any time. You know? But also, in London, every place we went had very good WiFi and only one place so far required a password. This means you could reasonably walk up to the front of a pub and hop on WiFi long enough to look at a map or something. That’s pretty great!
Anyway, we enjoyed our drink and chatting with Ashley for a bit and then needed to split up and find the MALBEC crew. When we last heard from them, they were meeting in their lobby and getting a cab over. The guys were going to hang at a pub while we had high tea. Jason and Ashley took off towards a pub that sounded promising and left me waiting outside the Italian joint, across the street from Harrods. I was hoping for the best because if I walked away I would lose WiFi and have no way to contact anyone.
Right about 2, I saw the group heading my way! I told Rich and Mike what pub Jason and Ashley had gone to and provided ample directions by saying, “They went that way” while pointing down the street. They also didn’t have WiFi but just started wandering off. Ginny and Diana didn’t look concerned so I thought, ok, well, good luck! I texted Jason to ask him to walk this way and make sure Rich and Mike found it but I couldn’t tell if the text went through. Good luck gentlemen! I can’t worry about it - I have 27 little sandwiches to eat.
Ginny, Diana and I went in and found the tea room. We were a few minutes early so we waited at the bar. There was an absolutely delightful pianist playing - everything from the Mama Mia soundtrack, to Billy Joel, to Miley Cyrus. I loved listening to it! He was an older gentleman. I’d say maybe 65+? Which made his set list all the more impressive.
We were seated at our “couch” which was a velvety half moon shaped couch booth thing. It was very comfy once you were in, but if you’ve ever tried to slide across velvet, you know we struggled to get around that sucker!
We ordered a glass of bubbles, picked our flavor of tea (I went with jasmine) and then the trays of goodies started coming out. All the usual suspects - cucumber sandwiches, smoked salmon, egg salad, little tiny tarts and cakes. Everything delicious, of course. After we finished our sandwiches, our server asked if we wanted more of them. Good Lord man. We just ate 17 sandwiches, still have a tray of sweets, and THEN the scones would be brought out. I think we’re ok here. Plus, we have to slide back out of this velvet thing and we don’t need to weigh any more when we do it!
It was quite the treat! Delicious and relaxing and fun.
When done, we decided to walk through a couple of shops. Mostly so we could laugh together and the ridiculousness of someone paying $490 pounds for a tan colored sweater that looked like one you’d get at Kohls. That said, the clearance racks were pretty impressive. I saw a really cute dress that I would have loved to wear for the yacht wedding if I could somehow drop 25 pounds while eating and drinking all day in the next week. You know.
So, now we were walking through the bottom floor food halls and HOLY COW. Every delicious thing you can imagine for sale down there. Including entire pig legs at the Charcuterie place. I have my own ample supply of pig legs back home, not to brag, so I just admired theirs and walked on.
Jason and I were trying to figure out how to reunite the group. Should we walk to pub? Would they walk here? Problem was, the texts weren’t going through all that quickly which made it get confusing fast. Finally Jason said, “to be clear we ARE NOT WALKING THERE. You ARE WALKING HERE” Ok! He sent a pic of a map and walking instructions since we’d lose WiFi when we walked out.
Problem was, when we did walk out, we weren’t where the map started. I sorted could make sense of part of it so we went that way. WE realized we weren’t on the right street and needed to cut over one, which was fine but also great because then we saw a car being towed. And dang man. I had no idea that other countries tow cars differently. This tow truck had this claw thing that dangled over the BMW and then connected to some chains they slid around the tires and then plucked the damn thing right up into the air - swinging around and all and then placed it on top of the tow truck. How cool!
About that time, I saw a store that was conveniently marked on the map and then we knew how to get the rest of the way. So, we met up with dudes and Ashley who had been having a great time of their own. We stayed for a drink and then Jason, Ashley and I took off to ride the subway to meet up with Janine for dinner. The rest of the Malbec crew went back towards their hotel for dinner as well.
We ate at this cool outdoor place that’s really a bunch of permanent food trucks called Vinegar Yards or something like that/ You can sit anywhere, order by QR code on the table, and it texts or emails when you can grab your food. I wasn’t hungry (obvs) so I had a drink while everyone else enjoyed some dinner. We were right by the Shard, which is a gigantic tall skyscraper that looks like a shard of glass. Across the street is the Borough Market, which we planned to go to later in the week. It was a very busy, bustling area and everyone was out and about enjoying the evening. So nice to see such a lively city. When we finally got an Uber back, we realized how late it had gotten. I think we got to the hotel around 9 and we were once again very worn out!! What a lovely day of being out with friends and enjoying the sights!
As a bonus, we saw some graffiti while waiting for the Uber - a shoutout from our favorite very good boy- Hi, Brix!
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