A stitch in time saves how many? ... London.

The title is a reference to Father Ted, which of course everybody should watch. It's also appropriate since this post is about 2 weeks late, and I forgot to take my camera to boot.

Yes, a trip to London on a Saturday. This turns out to be an expensive proposition, considering that it takes as long to get from Cambridge to London as it does to get from there to the other side of London. I only went for the day, since day returns are about half the price of other tickets. It started off with a visit to the British Museum, which those who know me will know is not my usual cup of tea. But Carl wanted to go see the Terracota Army, so he paid for a ticket for me too (after queueing for 3 hours), and it was rather good. If you haven't read Pratchett, then to fill you in: the first Emperor of China had serious issues with death, and he was buried with 7000 terracota people to run his empire in the afterlife: footsoldiers, archers, cavalry, wrestlers, acrobats, civil servants, the works.

After that it was the London Eye, to look around and go "what's that big building? I don't know." It was nice to just chill out and do nothing for a while. Then we headed off to Carl's shared house in Wimbledon (one of his housemates and her boyfriend where with us for the day). I've been told how Wimbledon is basically Little South Africa, and it didn't take much to convince me when I get off the train and in the station, where you'd normally except to see a M&S or a pie shop, there is a South African shop selling biltong and boerewors rolls. It made me positively homesick.

Dinner was homemade pizza, preceeded briefly by some writing collaboration with Carl (together with Marco we submitted a description of the South African Computer Olympiad to a programming contest conference). Then back to Cambridge, a long, slow process: first an overland train to Farringdon station (the English have such, well, English ways of naming things), then a tube to Liverpool Street, then wait around half an hour because the incoming train from Cambridge is late (apparently there was a "security alert" in Cambridge), then an hour or so on that train, then stand around for 10 minutes because I'd missed the bus I'd been planning for, then about 20-30 minutes on the bus home.

Since then, not a whole lot of news, although I have booked flights home (and back) for early July.