Living abroad can be a little lonely. While trying to adjust to living in a new country, I don’t know that many people outside of work. So a nice thing about living in a city like London is that people tend to stop by for a little visit. Last month, it was Dave and Melissa. This month, Mac and Jen made a weekend trip from their travels in Ireland to check out London. Which means I got to hang out with them. Unfortunately, I had just come down with a nasty little cold that’s still sort of hanging around, but I soldiered on :). They arrived on Friday and, because Mac went to high school with Dina, she came up for the day to say hello. Since it was my city (sort of), I somehow got the choice of where to meet up for dinner and drinks and whatnot. I went the kind of lazy route: since I know North London the best (as evidenced by my map) and I was feeling shitty, I decided to show Mac and Jen a side of London that is not the West End or Westminster and had them come up to Islington. This way, they got to see the longest elevator in England (the Angel tube stop has that one) and I would know for sure that the place we went for dinner was tasty. I took them to a gastropub called the Charles Lamb. For those of you unaware of the concept of a gastropub, it’s basically a pub that decides to sell quality, non-bar food. Usually, the food is kind of French in style. They become very expensive, but this one has always had good food, good beer, a relaxed vibe and reasonable prices. They did not disappoint this time around either. And, we had the added plus of having a visitor sitting next to us. This was Mascha the pub dog. While the signs clearly say not to feed her, by her lack of energy and slightly overweight look, this sweet dog was definitely being secretly fed 🙂

After dinner, I showed them the canals and made them wander through one of those sketchy alleys all over London until we arrived at the Wenlock Arms. I’ll devote a post to this pub another time, but this time was entertaining as always. An impressively wide selection of beer and locals and the jazz band of old musicians was playing as well.

We said our goodbyes and I went home to sleep sleep sleep and planned to meet up the next day. Alas, Saturday was a nasty rainy day. I spent most of it nursing myself back to health and we agreed to meet up for dinner (don’t worry, Mac and Jen did a good deal of sightseeing). At this point, I learned one lesson: when your mobile phone is low on minutes and Mac and Jen’s mobile service is spotty, saying “let’s just meet in Picadilly Circus” on a Saturday is a bad idea. Ok, it wasn’t that bad, but we spent a little time wandering to find each other. Once we did, we headed over to Chinatown, which I hadn’t been to since I went on a trip with my family when i was 15. We found a place which had a nice meal deal thing with many courses. It was quite tasty. Since the conversation was good and the night young, we went in search of pubs. A little lesson of warning: Brewer St has no pubs (gay and straight sex shops and hookers, but no pubs). Since the pickings around there were slim and I’d dragged them to my ‘hood the previous day, we went close their hotel in search of a pub. We were getting worried when all we found were pricey clothing stores, but we stumbled upon a nice pub called The Hour Glass. It was laid back and they had a good guest ale on tap which allowed us to just sit back and chat for a while. After a few pints of beer, we headed back towards the tube and went our own ways. Once again, it was nice to see some friends!

I’ll wrap this post up with a picture of Mac and Jen in the pub (my picture taking this weekend was non-existent with all the rain and not feeling well):

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 3rd, 2007 at 2:45 am and is filed under Life Abroad, London. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.