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 27th
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.
