Late at Tate Britain

We ended the day Friday by attending Late at Tate Britain. We started the evening by grabbing a glass of wine and watching a multimedia presentation by Savage Messiah on alternative visions of urban London. Then we wandered through a room bursting with electro pop by duo Petit Mal.

Eventually we found our way to the Manton Studio and watched a loop of contemporary Romanian short films. Our favorite by far was "The Yellow Smiley Face" by Constantin Popescu. It was a sketch about a set of parents trying to log-on to Yahoo Messenger to chat with their son in America. Hilarious. If you ever have a chance to watch it you should; it is a very comical film showing "digital imigrants".

After catching the entire loop of movies, we headed down to the cafe to grab some dinner. We generally do not eat in museum restuarants because we find them expensive and not very good; however, we found ourselves eating in quite a few of the British musuems (maybe because they are all mammoth in size and take days to go through) and were quite pleasently surprised by the prices and quality. This meal is only important in mentioning because I had tea and a scone. The "homemade" scone was delicous and made even more so by the fact that it was served with clotted cream and jam. Ahhhh, I now felt like I had had a proper English tea.

A Spot of Tea

Since a two-hour high tea wasn't in our time or wallet budget, we stopped in Sacred Cafe for a spot of tea on Friday morning. We ordered a pot for two of red berry fruit tea and then sank into wonderful cushioned couches to enjoy our tea break. Our tea was served in a lovely flowered pot with two over sized tea cups. It's the kind of place you would want to pick-up your daily cup of tea (coffee) from - too bad it's halfway around the world.

Errands and a Wreck

After visiting the TU Delft Botanical Gardens, I cycled to the center of town in search of the cute coffee shop I had seen there during dinner last week. I bought fresh roasted coffee beans from Simon Levelt, a shop that has been selling coffee and tea since 1817. Let me tell you, Starbucks doesn't have anything on them. I also picked up some orange spice tea; the kind that doesn't come in tea bags, but rather looks like potpourri and you put in the permanent tea dippers. It smells absolutely wonderful! I can't wait to go back next week to try a new flavor of coffee and type of tea.

On the way home, I witnessed my first wreck. Too bad I was the one doing the wrecking. I ran right smack into the back of another lady, who just stopped with no warning right in the middle of the road. I might have also gotten confused on where the brakes where...At least the only harm done was that Inge has a new distinctive squeak.