Smallest Chinatown... EVER

So Saturday, after going to a picnic of all the MBA 2011 Women, Marissa, Eugene and I headed to Chinatown to look around and buy some groceries. Given Britain's ownership of Hong Kong I just sort of assumed it would be a bit bigger, or at least be comparable to Chicago's Chinatown. It is actually quite small... takes up maybe two small streets with just a handful of shops and restaurants. Not that I'm going to complain, that wasn't complaining just observing, because I saw a Taiwanese restaurant and I found a Korean restaurant that has sul long tang and soon dubu! We tried out Jen's cafe, that has homemade dumplings, not bad.. probably won't return but the fried dumplings are pretty good.

I was very happy to bring home some REAL rice (i.e., jasmine vs basmati), oyster sauce and real chinese style soy milk... thank goodness for vitasoy. We also found a bakery and stocked up on the yummy breads we missed so much... definitely not on par with LA but will tied us over until we come back to visit.

On Sunday we went to the Thames River Festival. I am quickly learning that London's version of Carnival or Festival basically means two things. 1. lots of stands where you wait in long queues for food. 2. Parades. The first part I don't mind so much because Marissa and I saw Flaming Cactus and made a beeline for some Mexican food. The burrito was the most poorly made burrito I've ever seen... she folded it in half... sure why not... and then in half the other way... what the hell is that. I didn't care because I was so massively hungry... but woman how hard is it to roll a burrito. Brits...

Later we walked all the way from the London Eye to the Tate Modern Museum to see the Fire Garden. Name sounds MUCH cooler than it actually was... it was basically a bunch of metal structures with candles on them that were lit with fire...ooooOOooo Eugene was not so pleased since the walk is not a quick one... think about 3-4 tube stops down. We decided to bounce, having lost most of the group anyways.. and on our way back we began walking over the Blackfriar's bridge (where the Night Carnival was suppose to be) home and bumped into the Night Carnival... which was just a parade. This was actually pretty cool because they were dancing and had crazy cool costumes on. Some of the girls looked like Rio Carnival costumes and I am sure were freezing their butts off in the cold nights air. I'll post those pics to facebook as I've gotten too lazy to individually post pics here.

All in all a pretty decent weekend... and to add to my list of things I've done... yesterday I got stuck in the elevator at the Tauton building. Tauton is this newly designed building across the street from the main campus that houses our itty bitty gym and some study areas. You would think it was dwinelle, but worse because its impossible to find stairs going up (they aren't all connected) and even harder to find stairs down (half of them are "fire exit only" and so doors on the lower floors are locked or alarmed. So I had given up and decided to take the elevator.. only to have it stall after going down 1 ft from the original floor I was on. In the elevator with 3 able minded men they pried open the doors and called for help. All very exciting... but now I need to find an alternative method of traversing the 6 floors of Tauton ... 8 if you included the basement and subbasement.