London Day 2

David had to work Friday so I spent the day at the hotel working, relaxing and looking through the guidebook for cool things to do. Around 4:00 I left the hotel armed with handwritten directions to the Stroud office so that I could meet up with David and his colleagues and grab a beer at a pub. I have to admit that it feels very unsettling to walk around without a cell phone (and one with data!) now that it has become such an integral part of my life. Luckily I only had a short walk with a few turns and David and I met up quite easily. We spent a couple of hours chatting with his work friends at the pub, and then headed back to the hotel to find a place to go for dinner. After a bit of time looking online and at the guidebook we decided to just head out in the general direction of an area on the map that looked like it contained a high restaurant population. We weren't looking for any particular type of food and ended up at an Indian restaurant that was very busy and quite tasty.

  

On our walk home we stopped at a grocery store to buy some bread, cheese, fruit and salami for breakfast the following morning (we kept them on the balcony in our room so they would keep cool overnight). We also bought some Aero chocolate pudding, since we'd never had it (and everyone knows how much I love chocolate). Back at the hotel we spent some time looking through the guidebook to make a tentative plan for Saturday, and we continued a fight with the shower that had begun Thursday night. David and I have decided that bad showers seem to follow us around. This one produces lukewarm water that is warm enough so that you aren't in a bone-chilling shower, but not warm enough that you actually feel like it's a warm shower. We read the somewhat odd directions for the shower carefully, and decided that we were indeed using it correctly but that it just didn't get hot. 

 

The sink, and the tub, both had hot water. We ended up calling maintenance the following morning, which got us nowhere other than they offered to let us shower in another room, but were clear that the room would be used just for showering. Given how odd that sounded to us we decided to keep our lukewarm shower. We managed to improve the temperature slightly by either flushing the toilet multiple times throughout the shower (which really just got us laughing) or by turning the cold water on for the bath while showering. The latter worked pretty well, but meant that you had cold feet.