London Day 2

Today started with me waking up at about 2am and not being able to go
back to sleep. I ended up channel surfing until about 4 when I finally
made it back to sleep. I ended up watching Stargate SG-1 and Next Gen.  One of the best thigs about the British is their love for good sci-fi.  Of course, then I ended up sleeping in until
about 10:30. We finally got showered and out the door and headed to the
British Museum. I had been there before, but I thought Jeff would like
to see all the mummies and the Rosetta Stone. After walking around the
British Museum for awhile we had lunch at the Wagamama around the
corner. Wagamama is one of my favorite restaurants in London. It’s a
chain of Japanese noodle bars and I have never eaten anything bad at
one. We were seated without a wait and I had some kind of spicy soba
noodle dish and Jeff had a more bland chicken one. We split a piece of
ginger cheesecake for dessert. Very good.

After lunch, we headed
over to Oxford Circus to do some shopping. We stopped in Hamley’s, a
huge toy store, for awhile and then went to the Virgin Records on
Piccadilly Circus. I bought a few cd’s and Jeff checked out the book
section. By this time it had really started to pour and it was also
pretty cold. I don’t know how it gets to be so cold and wet without
snow. We headed towards Leicester Square and discovered that Sega World
no longer existed. Too bad – it would have been perfect for a rainy
afternoon. We also discovered that the BAFTA’s were going on today at
the Leicester Square Odeon. How exciting! If it hadn’t been so cold and
wet, maybe we would have hung around to try and get a peak of some
celebrities. As it was, we decided that the best option would be to hop
on one of those tourist buses and sit some place dry and warm.

We
killed about an hour on the bus and then decided we should just go back
to the hotel. Jeff wanted to go to a casino on Edgware Road and I was
thinking I would just hang out at the hotel. Jeff and I split up and I
went to the M+S to pick up some quick dinner stuff. When I got back to
the hotel though, Jeff was in the lobby. The tournament he was going to
play in had been moved up to 5pm and he had missed it. So, I put the
M+S goodies in the fridge and we decided to grab dinner at the Phoenix
(formerly Bar Oz). The inside looked exactly the same and I wondered if
they had just renamed the place or something. The ATM even said “Bar
Oz”. I was going to ask about it, but I forgot. We split an order of
nachos and I was reminded what a bad idea it was to try anything
remotely North American in London. We ended up getting a big pile of
Doritos with bad salsa and a container of sour cream on top. I
instantly had flashbacks of the time we went to the Texas Embassy in
London with my flatmates. The concept was pretty cool – a tex mex
restaurant in the building that housed the embassy of Texas, when it
was an independent republic. It was then that I found out how Italian
people must feel when they eat at American Italian restaurants. It was
so bad – pretty much Taco Bell on a china plate! Fortunately I had a
pint of pretty good bitter to wash the “nachos” down. I ended up with
fish and chips again as nothing else on their menu was really appealing
to me. Jeff had fish and chips as well, though he had garden peas
instead of mushy peas. Over dinner, I decided I might as well go with
Jeff to the casino.

What an adventure. We sat around for
awhile waiting for a table of 1/2 pot limit hold ‘em. Jeff got called
to a table first and I sat around and waited. Finally they started up a
new table. When I got there I really freaked out inside as I realized
there was no dealer. The players rotated dealer and I would have to
deal. Yikes! I was seated with a bunch of older men and one younger
guy. The older guys all were foreign (mostly Spanish, I think). The guy
seated to my immediate left was sort of scary and kept telling me I was
dealing “wrong”. Finally, with some encouragement from the other people
at the table, I managed to deal the way they were used to. I actually
won a few hands and then won a huge pot after the guy I was heads up
with folded without showing his cards. About 5 seconds after that he
started pitching a fit and saying that he had beat me and didn’t
realize it. Of course, I had just taken about half of his money. And he
had seen my cards since we were heads up. And no one had seen his cards
since he folded them. After a few tense moments of me not backing down
and giving him his money back as he demanded, the rest of the table
convinced him that since he folded, it didn’t really matter what his
hand was – none of us had seen it. I really would have loved to have
just gotten up and left after that, but that would have no been very
sportsmanlike. We played for another hour and left; it was almost time
for the last train and we didn’t want to have to take a cab. For a few minutes I was really worried that the guy was
going to follow us back to our hotel or something. The casino was
pretty seedy. Fortunately, he stayed at the table when we left.