Northern Immersion - I’d like to do it all again…this time in reverse.

My morning started off with a potentially awkward situation.  I was going to the bathroom after breakfast, sitting with the door open so I could hang my head out and still watch the news.  I had just gotten to the moment of standing up, pants still around my ankles, when the door handle started to jiggle.  I had just enough time to drag my pants up before the door burst open, and I was face to face with the cleaning lady.  One minute sooner and that could have been awkward for all parties involved.  I was telling this story at dinner later that night (read below) and Michael says, “Well, that’s what you get for not dead-bolting your door.  That’s why they put those things on the door.”  No sympathy at all.

The class today didn’t go as smoothly as I had planned. I thought the assessment would be pretty straight-forward compared to what I had put the guys through the last two weeks.  I was dead wrong.  They struggled even more with this.  Most likely because they had the added pressure of thinking this was a graded test.  The whole office got out early except us.  I eventually had to kick the guys out because they weren’t done and we needed to lock up.  In the end, I only failed two guys because they were missing quite a few fields from their files.  Ironically, it was the two guys that finished first.

For lunch, I wanted to have one last hoorah with the guys, so we head out to Brown’s in Town.  This was to compliment the crap experience I had had earlier in the week at Brown’s on the Waterside.  I had the battered cod, which was a lot better than the regular cod I had had before.  The portion was larger too.  We had a big controversy at the table about whether we could order skinny fries or fat fries, and if we could order skinny fries would they come out as regular fries or sweet potato fries.  SS wanted sweet potato skinny fries, but the waiter told him that they were only serving regular that day.  Later in the lunch he was telling a story about this restaurant that had burned down.  SD asked him what year that was, but SS said that he couldn’t remember the year.  Then, he said, “It was on September 27^th at about half ten.”  When SD asked how he could remember that amount of detail, but not remember the year, SS said, “I remember because the bloke burned the restaurant down when he couldn’t get sweet potato skinny fries.”

For dinner, LF, DS, and I decided to head back to La Sosta again to see if we might run into John Hume and could convince him to take a picture with us.  We were not so lucky, but we did run into JM and MH from the office, so we decided to join them.  I will admit that I had been so impressed with the dinner from the night before, that I chose to do it all again.  It was just as good the second time.  When it came time to order dessert, I ordered the pudding again.  LF and DS decided that they wanted to try it this time as well.  JM chose to get the tiramisu.  When the pudding came out this time, it looked like a piece of chocolate cake with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.  Thinking it was the tiramisu, because it looked exactly like what DS had gotten the night before, I sent it down to JM.  The waitress was completely confused, because she had two more plates of the chocolate cake “things” coming out to the table.  MH, being the only from Northern Ireland and therefore the only one who could make an intelligent observation of the situation, informed us that pudding in the UK doesn’t look like pudding in the US.

Apparently, the night before, they had switched DS and my desserts.  I had ended up with the tiramisu and DS had had the pudding.  We had both enjoyed our desserts so much, that neither of us even questioned it.  Besides, we were in a foreign country, so who were we to criticize that the food looked different than we expected?  JM didn’t want the “soup” looking thing they brought him, so we switched and I had my “pudding” after all.  I probably should have done the whole meal in reverse and started with the dessert, just to be different.

After dinner, JM and I walked back to the hotel and had a long chat with Chiree, one of the lovely ladies that worked at the front desk.  She had been on rotation with Laura and Marguerite at the front desk, so we had come to be a first name basis with them all.  They were the most helpful and friendly staff I have ever encountered at a hotel.  I would suggest people stay at the Maldron for this fact alone.

I ended my night by repacking all my clothes and evaluating all the students in my class.  I didn’t get to bed until 12:30 a.m.