Having the time of my life

As promised, a day late, but a blog entry nonetheless.

Do you remember how I mentioned last week that I was probably going to do some Final File Deliveries on trailers now? Well, I was wrong. When I arrived at work on Monday last week, my supervisor told me I was going to do a Quality Check on an entire film! It was a bit of a struggle the first few times, but now I'm doing the checks all by myself. My supervisor only has to double check the finished files I want to deliver and 8 out of 10 times, it's totally fine. Sounds like I'm on the right track!

My working week lasted only three days last week (as it will also be this week). On Thursday, I still had to wake up early in the morning, but this time it was to pick up two lovely girls from Victoria Coach Station. I was ready for a weekend of fun and sightseeing. And that's exactly what I got!
That first day, after breakfast, Ineke, Friedali and I went to Buckingham Palace, where we saw the none-moving guards move, which was a big thing! After that we walked over to the Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. On the way, we walked into the change of the Horse Guards and were nearly knocked over by one of the guards (not on horseback), who looked as if he would've walked straight through us if we hadn't moved out of the way. In the end we managed to arrive at the Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament unharmed. When we'd seen those, whe crossed one of the many bridges that cross the Thames and walked over to the London Eye. Sadly, prices to actually take a ride were a bit too steep for us poor students.
Later that night we planned what we wanted to see and do the rest of the weekend.

Friday, we went to a very well known store, called Harrods. It is really unbelievable how a store can be so big. It has over five floors and every floor has about 10 different rooms in which different things are sold (like clothes, perfumes, toys, food, furniture, you name it). I won't talk about the prices you have to pay for most of the things, it's unbelievable.
We'd found out the night before that the Royal Albert Hall was within walking distance of Harrods, so we decided to pay it a visit (especially since Ineke turned out to have a bit of a love for the place). After we'd taken a couple of pictures of the outside of the building and discussed the fact that it just wasn't possible to fit it all in one picture,, we went inside. There we found out that tours taking you inside the building were only ten pounds for students. It wasn't much of a choice if we should take that tour, we wouldn't miss it for the world!
I'm still very glad we decided to spend our money on it, because that auditorium was just beautiful. We were also a few of the lucky people who could hear and see the rehearsals of that night's performance. We weren't allowed to take any pictures though, so I cannot show you anything of the actual tour, but it looks way better if you see it in person anyway.
We ended our Friday by visiting the Waterstones bookshop at Piccadilly Circus (which has five floors). A piece of heaven for all three of us.

Saturday we went to "Funky Street" aka Camden Town, where I bought a new Johnny Depp shirt, Ineke had her first ever crêpe, and we found a deserted tiki bar with a hot tub that was actually hot-tubbing (you know what I mean).
From Camden Town we took the bus back to Soho, and we spent the rest of the afternoon there visiting, among others, the Disney Store, Hamleys and the M&M store (yes, we loved it, no, we are not five-year-olds).

Sunday, we went on with the real sightseeing. We started at the Tower Bridge and the Tower, which is still surrounded by Remembrance Day Poppies. The field really looks beautiful like this.
From there we went on to King's Cross Station, because Friedali really wanted to see the "Harry Potter Station". At first we were a bit disappointed, because we didn't see anything we could actually connect to the books or the films. But then I noticed a little shop tucked away in a corner of the station, an actual Harry Potter shop! When we entered, we were asked if we'd taken a picture with the trolley... We had no idea what the guy who asked us this question was talking about, later we found out that there was actually a spot not far from the shop where the path to platform 9 3/4 was recreated by making the back of a trolley come out of a wall, and you could get a picture with it.
At the shop you could buy character wands (I personally really liked Sirius Black's wand), clothing of the different Hogwarts Houses, and lots of other Harry Potter memorabilia.
Our last stop that day was The British Library. Unfortunetaly, we soon found out that most rooms open for public were closed on Sunday. There was only one room open, and we took a few sneaky pictures of things written by Jane Austen and William Shakespeare.

Sunday night, our alarm went of at 3 in the morning (or is it still night at that time!?), because my guests had take the bus at Victoria Coach Station at 4 am. I was really sad to see them go. We had such a great weekend! They made me notice things I normally wouldn't even have paid attention to. Thanks for the laughs girls! I hope we can do this again sometime!!

Now I am really tired and I'm going to cuddle up in my bed again. Next weekend Winnie will pay me a visit (please tell me you won't have to leave this early in the morning...), so you'll probably hear from me a bit later again.

As for recipes, last week I attempted to make Oma Apekops "crème de crake" (if this name doesn't ring a bell, it's chocolate mousse), and I succeeded! If I can believe Ineke and Friedali (and myself) it's delicious. Very proud girl right here!