By some form of magic, we discovered there was an English themed pub/restaurant called 'The Elephant and Castle' about a ten minute walk away, so we quickly sped up the pace in search of food.
'The Elephant and Castle' was the first place resembling an English pub we had come across on this entire journey. Liz was very excited at the prospect of something resembling English food, having been away for eight months already!! I ordered bangers and mash, Kitty got another steak and Liz ordered toad in the hole and a Guinness. Let's just say we were very happy indeed. And to make the experience all the more fun, the pub had several different screens showing numerous Olympic events! Heaven!
As we were sat eating away, the heavens opened outside. The rain was crazy, within minutes the streets were flooded. This didn't bode well with our plans since we had tickets to see Batman again at 4pm at the IMAX inside the air and space museum. We left it as long as possible in hope that the rain would subside but it was relentless. In the end we had to brave it...
It was one of the less enjoyable twenty minute walks of my life, I'm not going to lie. I put my cardigan over my head for protection, thus resembling ET. Liz was sensible and had worn a hoody, and Kitty looked like a nineteenth century Russian immigrant because she was wearing a maxi skirt and had her shawl like cardigan draped over her head. By the time we reached the air and space museum, my white top was soaked and see through and my canvas shoes were absolutely sodden and squelchy and thus ruined. Ironically, the only reason we had all bought cardigans with us was to protect against the cold of the air con inside the cinema. Now not only were we soaking wet, but we had no way of getting warm because our cardigans were also drenched. Great.
On the plus side, we managed to get quite good seats, just over halfway up, and tried to warm ourselves up before the film started. The Dark Knight Rises is just as good the second time around, if not better as everything makes a lot more sense. There really are some excellent scenes in this film, both of the action and emotional variety. Tom Hardy steals the action scenes as Bane, and Michael Caine managed to make us well up again in all the emo scenes. Bless him. The ending of the film is just too good, made even better by the Tale of Two Cities quote. All the messages about power and terrorism are so relevant as well. But I won't ramble on again, just for your own sake, go and see it!
Post Batman, we wandered back in the direction of the hostel. We were aiming to find some kind of supermarket to buy food supplies for the evening when instead we stumbled across an amazing salad bar. You got to choose all the ingredients of the salad, even the lettuce, add a dressing, and then they laid it all out on a board and chopped it up Jamie Oliver style before putting it into a tub. For three people craving salad this was just what we needed. It would also make us feel slightly healthier as we watched the Olympic athletes that evening.
Predictably, once back at the hostel, we spent the evening watching the swimming and gymnastics. Before we went to bed, we said goodbye to Liz. She's a top lad and we've really enjoyed hanging out with her for the last few days, hopefully we will see her again back on good old English soil.
As we were packing before we went to sleep, we met a new Chinese guy who had appeared in our dorm. He had gone to Liverpool University and was thus very excited by the fact that I had too (although we were there at completely different times).
Posh boy Hugh turned up at some stage and tried to join in the conversation, bringing with him his everlasting foot stench. We were so glad that this was the last evening we would have to endure the curse of the smelly feet, as we were headed to Boston in the morning!
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