a night out in E1/EC3

friday night i was planning to stay in. i was going to go to bed early and then run with the serpentine running club on saturday morning in hyde park. this was all fine and good, except for the sheet of ice still covering most of london on friday morning, which caused serpentine to cancel its saturday run. which meant i would be staying in on friday for no reason. :-)

luckily, my friend elijah, who i met flat hunting and only talk to sporadically, texted me on friday afternoon and was looking for something to do. i really wanted pizza, so we decided to meet at the liverpool street tube and go to pizza express. but we ended up wandering around a bit and landed at a place called giraffe. giraffe had everything in the world to eat except for pizza. ha.

the food was mediocre, although i should have been able to predict this based on the menu. my rule of thumb is that if a place serves more than one ethnic cuisine (in this case they had Greek, Chinese, and Mexican), pretty much anything you order will suck. and it did. :-) BUT we were really cold and hungry so it didn't matter that much.

afterwards, i needed to walk off my falafel burger and chips so we headed out on foot to St. Katherine Dock for drinks - roughly 15 minutes away. thank goodness i brought my proper winter coat back from cincinnati - it is long, wool, and warm, and the collar flips up so that i can hide like a turtle when its windy.

St. Katherine Dock is right next to Tower Bridge, which i had never seen before. Tower Bridge is the one with the castle thingies that everyone always thinks is the London Bridge. we walked about halfway across and decided pints were more important than going all the way to south bank. the bar we went to was called prohibition and specialized in old school cocktails, sort of a tribute to the real prohibition of the 20's. apparently, modern-day cocktails were born out of the need to mask the taste of bathtub gin and other rough things that people were brewing in their basements. who knew!

i stuck with beer and after two pints of peroni, i was ready to call it a night. but there was a brassiere around the corner and eli insisted that i had to try fischer beer:



it is a french beer that makes a champagne cork noise when opened and tastes like a hybrid of cider, beer, and port wine, in my opinion. it was good and by the time i finished it, i was a bit drunky and laughing so hard that the staff were looking annoyed. they were closing anyway, so we left. i just barely made the last train before the underground shut down for the night. needless to say, i slept pretty well. :-)