Highlight of the Week - chilling with vino tinto, vino blanco, beer, shandy and a new discovery of 'tinto verano con limon' which is red wine mixed with traditional lemonade or less traditional lemon Fanta in SPAIN in the SUNSHINE - woo!

Lowlight of the Week - Realising how unfit I am.  Getting lost on a 1-hour mooch turned it into a 4-hour hilly hike.  This was on the second day of my week-long holiday.  I then spent the rest of the week aching all over - slightly depressing perhaps.  I chose to solve it by eating lots of tapas and drinking lots of wine.

Embarrassing Moment of the Week - Where to start? I went into the women's toilet and almost walked into a 70-year-old Spanish woman, panicked because I didn't know the word for "sorry" so I bowed, almost knocking her out (I used to live on Japan, I blame it on that).  My friends and I also got kicked out of the cathedral in Toledo in a rather loud and public fashion as we tried to sneak in because we'd missed the free entrance period by about 2 minutes (due to very misleading signs).  Jesus would've been ashamed.

Yes, I haven't blogged for over a week as I've been sunning myself up in Spain.  My friend won a stay in a 'villa' in the Spanish mountains, near a 'town' called Cecedillia.  Not long before we left, the 'villa' was downgraded to a 'lodge' to a 'flat' and the 'town' to a 'village' that was more a of a cabin (but still very nice).  I've got another friend who lives in Madrid, so I spent some time with her and we also went to the stunningly beautiful Toledo (although we spent most of our time there looking at things without knowing what they were) and the incredibly intimidating tomb of Franco (plus the odd thousand civil war victims!)  I enjoyed myself immensely.  Only small problem was the lovely 4-hour delay that Easy Jet provided us on the way back.  Oh yes, and the perfectly grey sky that greeted us on our return - back to reality!

Also used the panorama function successfully for the first time on my camera - see above! Go me!

Highlight of the Day - FINALLY getting a new phone - iPhone5, woo! No thanks to Carphone Warehouse or Three - all thanks to me being intelligent, determined and (eventually) very un-Britishly forceful.  I might give you the full shabang in another post one day, but I don't want to think about it for now, I'm happily playing with my new Appley toy.  Also rather enjoy this Youtube video of idiots at the Coachella Festival in the US pretending they know bands that don't exist: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_IzYUJANfk

Lowlight of the day - being stuck in Sainsbury's whilst a man announced about (no exaggeration) 20 times that the fire alarm was about to be tested.  It was tested, he then announced 20 times that the fire alarm test was over.

I felt pretty old today.  I went to a club for the first time in quite a while and I enjoyed myself, but whereas a couple of years ago I would've partied until 5 and spent all night drinking, I stopped after 3 drinks (because I didn't want a hangover, didn't want to queue at the bar and didn't want to spend £4.50 on a dwarfed can of Heineken...so sensible) and was pooped by 1.  We went to see Mark Ronson DJ at XOYO in Shoreditch by Old Street Station.  We had to call the club first to ask them how to pronounce it because we were a bit embarrassed we might say it wrong in front of some cool kids in the queue or something! I can confirm it's just X O Y O in letters - nothing too complicated there then!

We saw Mark Ronson announce some other acts, but we're not entirely sure we even heard him DJ, because it was so smokey and we just had to leave at one before our legs dropped off.  We also had to move to a less crowded area several times, because we didn't like trying to dance whilst feeling like you were in constant junction of people and were elbowing people left, right and centre.  The mix of music was really fun though - some dance and some classic disco, and upstairs they had RnB (I had a good gay sing to Jumpin' Jumpin' by Destiny's Child, to which I still know every word - they played a quicker version and I still put myself on fast forward and sang all the way through - not totally over the hill yet!).  The strangest part of the night was when a girl came up to me (from quite far away as well, she'd obviously picked me out of the crowd) and asked if I had any "M Dog".  I had no idea what she was on about, I said "What?" then she asked again.  I said "No" (crazy girl) and then she said "How about coke?" I laughed out loud and said "NO." Really, I would've thought the fact that I hadn't heard of the first drug and reacted in such a shocked way to coke would prove that I wasn't drug dealer (although really I'd hoped I don't look like one anyway!!), but the persistent little thing still carried on "Anything?"  How confident was she that I was a drug dealer??

Looked up M Dog online today and urban dictionary tells me it's short for MDMA.  It's the first time I've looked something up on urban dictionary and it hasn't meant "shit" so I'm very pleased.

On the way home, however, we had a new lease of life and decided, spur of the moment to go to Duck and Waffle!! It's number 30 on my list of things to do, so that's a big tick for me! It's open 24-hours and it was absolutely wonderful.  It's the restaurant at the top of the Heron Tower near Liverpool Street.  If you don't know which one it is, see the picture above - it's that one with what looks like a mahusive radio aerial next to the Gherkin.  You get an absolutely incredible view over London, the staff are lovely and, at that time of night, it's very quiet up there, so you have an almost private view in a serene setting.  The signature dish is waffle with duck meat and a duck's egg, but we didn't get it, because it was a bit pricey and we weren't starving.  Instead, we got Columbian Eggs, which were only £9! It was basically posh scrambled eggs on toast with lots of avacado.  It was really delicious.  We sat there for about 2 hours chatting away (and nursing the oncoming hangover that was already setting in).  I will definitely try to go again - £10 including tip for

Highlight of the Day - Siro A! Slightly (that word is there for effect really, it was more than slightly) surreal, a tad crazy, but very entertaining, the Japanese version of the Blue Man Group is currently in London.  Siro A (meaning white A, but I can speak Japanese and really you'll probably pronounce it better if you think of it as SHiro A) were on in Leicester Square Theatre.  I had a lot of fun, laughed a lot, and learnt that I fancy Japanese guys to such an extent, that even their faces being painted white doesn't detract from the attraction.

Second highlight was veggie cafe, Vitao Organic on Wardour Street.  I always look at it there, but have never been in, because it looks a bit too hippy and I like MEAT damnit.  Risked it today, and it was really, really tasty.  I had a lovely passion fruit and raspberry mocktail thing and a huge plate of salad and bean curries from a buffet.  It was really reasonable and very tasty and the hippiness/vegetarianness, wasn't intimidating at all.

Lowlight of the Day - I don't want to go into this in too much detail, because if I let myself begin a rant, it could go on for pages and you might start to think I'm a raving loony, but let's just say that my phone's broken and that all the technical expertise, intelligence and customer service (or lack thereof) of Samsung, EE, T Mobile and Carphone Warehouse has left me with a phone that's still broken, a contract that's been cancelled (I cut off my nose to spite my face, by just cancelling with T Mobile because I was so angry with their incompetence and rudeness) and no new contract yet as the girl in Carphone Warehouse made a ridiculous mistake in my address when doing my credit check which has led me to be rejected and has caused an awful lot of confusion on their part and stress on my part.  All phone companies are muddled, stupid arsehole-y type companies and I hate them all.  End of.  People met along the way (the way to being even worse off that when I started, because I am now without phone and contract and possibly with a damaged credit rating).
Nice-but-dim Carphone Warehouse girl who can't read the letter B correctly.
Impossible-to-communicate with Samsung man who told me, whilst in his Samsung uniform in the Samsung shop that I should "contact Samsung about it."
Miss I'm-not-actually-listening-to-what-you're-saying-I'm-just-going-to-say "Maybe if you upgraded to EE"-all-the-time
And then a couple of classic know-it-all phone shop wankers who don't ask you what you want, but tell you what you want.  One particularly annoying one talked to me as if I was insane when I asked if they had a spare phone in the shop I could just put my simcard in for 2 minutes to check my texts with, in spite of the fact that the other EE shop down the road did it straight away.  Another classic was the one who told me what I needed.  I disagreed completely, and then he replied with "That's what I'm saying."  That wasn't what you were saying.  You were saying the opposite.

Rant over.  Sorry.

Now then, now then, I've been an awful blogger and haven't blogged about my today's world for an entire week (nobody emailed to check I was still alive - thanks for that!)  I have spent the vast majority of the week at work (including until 4am (!!) on Tuesday.  I've also spent the week experimenting with double denim (decided I like my black denim skinny jeans with normal blue denim shirts, but not too sure about any other combo) and becoming addicted to app wordgame Ruzzle and convincing myself it's not a waste of time, because I can do it in French and German, so I am learning something.  Anyway, let's go into a bit more detail about Friday, Saturday and Sunday.  This post is about Friday.

Highlight of the day - the end of the week and the knowledge that I didn't have any work to do over the weekend - bliss.
Lowlight of the day - being caught in the kitchen at work (which is miniscule for an office of any size, let alone a building of 6 floors!) whilst getting my breakfast with the only girl at work I don't like.  She announced (quite literally into my ear, as there was no space for her to annouce anywhere else) that she was having her second breakfast of the day.  I didn't ask further.  She announced again.  I didn't ask.  She naturally didn't take the hint and continued to tell me about she'd had poached egg and avacado and homemade chilli jam - it was like Nigella had walked in.  I just can't cope with that sort of thing at 9.30.

After finishing work, I went to a restaurant on Cambridge Heath Road called Italina.  Not too cryptically, it's an Italian restaurant, for which I'd bought a Living Social vouhcer (I may or may not be addicted to Living Social).  The pizzas were huge and really tasty, the staff were friendly and the atmosphere was very warm and homely.  I'd go again.  I had several plans to get chores done on Friday before a busy weekend, but, I accidentally conked out 10 minutes after getting in.  Bless.

Highlight of the Day - the same as everyone's in London I imagine: SUN!

Lowlight of the Day - Learning that Cleo Higgins from Cleopatra Comin' Atcha (now on The Voice) is 30, reminding me that I am not that young anymore.

I've had a great day today.  Sun is amazing.  We really get a great atmosphere in London when it's sunny...because we appreciate it while it lasts!  I mooched down to a lovely little restaurant on Cambridge Heath Road (about a 10 minute walk from my flat), called This Bright Field.  Slightly odd name, I grant you, but the food was really delicious (I had roast beef with a Mama of a Yorkshire Pud like I've never seen before).  We ate outside (it wasn't really warm enough too, but why not?) and I think my yorkshire was almost big enough to catch the wind like a sail and go skirting of the down the road!  The staff were all really lovely too.  I'll go again.

I was with two friends, and we made the most of the sun, but walking down Colombia Road, then over Arnold Circus / the Boundary Estate and into Club Row.  There's some amazing street art on Club Row and I love the Boundary Estate because it used to be on my tours when I was a tour guide (the first council estate in Britian, because, believe it or not, the now super-expensive, sought-after Shoreditch, used to be the poorest area in the UK, with slums, such as the Old Nichol Slum, where the Boundary Estate now is (built 1901, as the slum was demolished so it's not that long ago), where people lived in houses without foundations, in basements without windows and with 15 to a room.  We went to an exhibition inside Mother London on Redchurch Street, called the Secret 7".  All in the name of charity, they've taken 7 songs and asked artists to design covers for them (hence 7" records).  They are selling them next weekend at £40 apiece, but you won't know which artist's you have until you've bought them.  It's all the name of an anti-knife charity.  Some are by famous artists, like Gilbert and George, others are by complete unknowns.  I'm officially stating, in advance, that my favourite is the one above.  If it turns out to be a Gilbert and George worth 1000s, I am an art genius.   What was wonderful about it was, that, if for instance I had been to an art gallery with two exhibitions: one of Gilbert and George and one of someone I'd never heard of, I would've probably spend very little time looking at the other exhibit, but, here, you looked and appreciated all the talent, regardless of how famous they were.  It's a wonderful idea and it was great to see 700 mini pieces of art.  The staff were friendly too, not like the arsey types you can often get around Redchurch Street.

And what better way to top it off than with an ICE CREAM (not that I haven't had ice cream at home almost every day since forever, but this one was OUTSIDE).  Stopped in Motown Desserts on the way home, not it's not a Diana Ross Pavlova cafe, it's a cool cake and ice cream shop on Bethnal Green Road.  The ice cream is homemade and after several tasters (just to be sure, they even had brown bread ice cream!), I went with cookies and cream.  Yummy sunny Mothery day.  Happy times! 

Highlight of the Day - Getting up early, without a hangover, and being super-productive.  I felt like I could've seen Heather Small interrogating me with a warbling "What have you done today to make you feel proud?" and answered very successfully even at 11am.  I went into Oxford Street, which is uncharacteristically bearable and sparse before 11 and got my refund in River Island (open open open this time) and then scurried around M+S, House of Fraser and John Lewis looking for the biggest plain white plate I could find.  It was for work (I had to drop it off at work before 2).  My work's a bit confidential, so I can't really divulge what it was for, but it had to be huge, flat, round and plain white.  I also couldn't tell any of the very confused sales assistants what it was for and I imagine they were talking about crazy plate boy all day.  John Lewis was the winner.  Pizza plate - 35cm diameter, in case you ever need a ginormous plate.  

Embarrassing Moment of the Day - Apart from forcing people to measure plates, it was my unexpected item in the bagging area at Sainsbury's.  I mean, pray tell self-checkout lady, how unexpected can a bag of carrots in Sainsbury's really be??

Highlight of the day - Cafe Gourmand - a lovely little cafe and bistrot on Lexington Street in Soho.  It feels very French inside (I used to live in Paris, so I know innit) and it's a lovely, peaceful space in which to escape from the hustle and bustle of Soho.  The staff were really friendly (possibly the only bit that didn't remind me of Paris) and the prices were very reasonable.  I only had a coffee, but was very tempted by all the cakes.  I will definitely be going back for some mini gourmands (little cakes, just a mouthful) or their posh meat pies - I don't think I've ever seen a pie look so delicate!  I'm also quite tempted by their green cookie tea. I was kicking myself for having eaten elsewhere beforehand!

Embarrassing moment of the day - I call it the 'tube lean.'  You know, when you think you're perfectly steady and don't need to hold on and then it jolts off and you rather embarrassingly lean on the person next to you.  That's really embarrassing, right? However, you normally steady yourself and are off of them within a milisecond, mumble sorry, and go back to avoiding eye contact.  I went for a bit of a spectacular one yesterday - it was a 2-second full-frontal lean.  Quite a masterpiece.  Why I was facing this guy, I don't know.  How the tube was going at such a thrust that it lasted 2 seconds, I also don't know.  He was also a really attractive guy, which just made the whole ordeal (allbeit 2 seconds, but let's face it, 2 seconds of British awkwardness feels like a lifetime!).  I felt like the whole carriage were staring at me for the rest of my journey.  They obviously weren't.  Or were they??

So, why was yesterday so spontaneous? I had planned on doing nothing this weekend, but have been talking to friends recently about how my life revolves around lists.  I want more spontaneity damnit!  Then, I saw tickets on lastminute.com a few days ago for My Big Italian Gay Wedding at the Greenwich Theatre.  It's come from New York and the tickets were a good price, so me and a friend went on the spur of the moment.  It was really fun - loud, proud, camp and, in places, hilarious.  It was about an Italian New Yorker getting married to his boyfriend and all the hoo-ha that surrounded it.  It had a lot of visual humour, funny characters and farsical storyline.  There was a great atmosphere, with people from the crowd joining in on jokes and interacting with the actors.  Some singing, some dancing and a whole lot of camping.  A few of the jokes were very America-centric and went a bit over my head - I was hoping they might have localised it a little bit at least, just by picking things that were still American, but more relevant/famous here.  I'd be really interested to know if laughs came at different places in the UK and the US actually.  Me and my friend then went to the gay pub in Greenwich called the Prince.  I then ran down the road like a big poofta about to miss the last DLR.  I caught it.

Earlier in the day, I spontaneously met my friend to go the Southbank Food Market and had a lovely Beijing-style pork pancake from Mei Mei street food.  It did remind me of what I'd eaten when I actually went to Beijing, except that she'd added meat, which made it even better in my book.  I may have also sampled about 15 other stalls' foods! It was such a lovely day to mooch around London.  We then went over to Trafalgar Square and watched the outdoor pillow fight (see photo above).  We didn't join - we're not that spontaneous yet, one step at a time.  Then we went to Cafe Gourmand, then I splurged £50 in the River Island sale (all in the name of spontaneity of course).  Spontaneous is fun, but it's also expensive, and it also left me running (literally at time) late for everything I did.  Still, a great day all round! Maybe the start of spring? Dare I hope?

Highlight of the day - at the risk of sounding like an obese alcoholic, a glass of white wine and a some NEW DELICIOUS Double Chocolate Digestives (I mean, it's a crime not to try new things), at the end of a looooong day at work.

Lowlight of the day - First world problem I know, but, semi-skimmed milk shortage at work meant that I had to compromise.  I've always drunk semi and for me, skimmed is like water and whole is like cream.  For my cereal, I thought I was being really clever by mixing some skimmed and whole by pouring a splash of both on.  Should that work? It tasted like runny cream to me.  It did, however, lead to much hilarity with two of the people I sit with at work as I was talking about 'semi', which their dirty minds turned into semi-hard-ons, only exacerbated by the introduction of '(w)hole' to the equation!  Innuendo galore!

Not too much to report today, so, I thought I'd tell you about a weird experience I had a couple of weeks ago.  I've been to a bar on Frith Street called Sofa King Cool (read it out loud if you haven't got the pun).  It's got luminous sign, but looks like it could be anything (particularly a sofa shop), but it's an underground basement bar.  It's supposed to be a lesbian bar.  However, the clientele is so small that when I went with a gay friend, it was a gay bar and when I went with a straight friend, it was a mixed bar (i.e. we were the only people there).  Both times, the staff were lovely and the decor's pretty cool - it's a bit futuristic with lots of neon - something like walking into a Kylie Minogue video.  Anyway, I walked past it about 3 weeks ago and a menu had popped up outside! The food sounded delicious and, even though I thought the atmosphere and neon might be a bit odd for a restaurant, I told my friend we should try it. 

Last week, we took the plunge, however, it was sofa king weird.  We were walking up and down Old Compton Street (we couldn't remember which street it was on, but knew the neon sign stood out when you looked down the road) and we couldn't see it.  We finally decided it was definitely Frith Street and as we walked down, we spotted it! It had changed its name to the Ultra Lounge.  The bouncer/manager/stray Australian invited us in.  I asked if it was Sofa King Cool.  Straight away, she was really quick to say it wasn't, how it had changed its management and was COMPLETELY different.  I told her I'd walked past a week previously! It's pretty quick to change completely.  The same menu was outside...I asked and she said it was the same food!! Completely different, but with the same decor and menu?? She was very cagey about it all and seemed a bit taken aback when I said that I knew it was Sofa King Cool one week ago with the same menu, but anyway, she was still friendly and we went in.

In fairness, they had toned down the lighting to make it more restaurant-y.  The waitress was really friendly, but someone about it oozed 'we are brand new and we don't know what we're doing yet'.  The food was really tasty and very good value.  For £20, you got three courses and a complimentary passion fruit shooter.  I had tempura prawns, tuna steak burger, which was very flavoursome, and chocolate gateaux.  I enjoyed it all very much.  The only slight problem (bar the identity crisis) was the WINE.  I am NOT a wine snob at all, but we ordered house white and they brought us an £18 bottle of GALLO wine.  If they were going to try and palm us off on cheap wine, I honestly wouldn't be able to tell the difference, but they should at least be sneaky enough to choose a bottle that isn't a famous cheap brand.  I mean, they are usually on 3 for £10 in the off-license! To make matters worse, when we wanted a second bottle, we very Britishly said that we weren't overly keen on the first bottle and ordered the next one up (not that we're cheapskates!) which was £20.  To our disbelief (although we were wetting ourselves laughing by now) she brought out a different Gallo! We asked if she could just tell us which bottles she had that weren't Gallo.  She came back a couple of minutes later and said they'd had a rush on (which usually I wouldn't believe, but there were about 4 tables seated there which is a rush by their standards) and the ONLY wine they had left was Gallo.  I think this probably means that had we ordered the most expensive wine on the menu, they would've just brought out a Gallo bottle.  We got cocktails instead which were lovely(they were on offer).  It was a very strange evening, but the food and cocktails were really lovely and very reasonable.  The staff are also really nice on the whole, I'd just recommend that you don't get the Gallo and for some reason, don't mention Sofa King Cool.