I slept for 14 hours – something I hadn’t done in years – so by the time I got up, it was pretty much time for a bite to eat at the Pancake Cafe around the corner. We hadn’t actually seen anyone from the group, so Charles and I decided to hit the day up with a chock full of activities. Our first mission was to see Trafalgar Square, so we decided to walk down through Covent Garden and through a few of the shops. Every place we passed, I thought of things I needed to get people back home, but then realised that funds prohibit me from getting everybody everything, especially since it would be nice to have a souvenir for myself as well.Covent Garden was neat – a little like Faneuil Hall in Boston with the open air market and boutiquey shops and the likes. My camera was running out of batteries (since my charger isn’t rated for 220v conversion, I can’t recharge my batteries) so I went to Boots to get some batteries. I think that Boots is an interesting name for a major pharmacy chain and the fact that they were recently taken over by KKR intrigues me. One of the topics I’m presenting on is mergers and acquisitions and I’m somewhat thankful for it because between that and the Barclays merger, I’ve been really fascinated by the takeovers/M&A market that’s been so dominant for the past year or so.

We walked down to Trafalgar Square, where there stands a monument honouring the Admiral Horatio Nelson. The column itself is rather tall, but the statue is small, making it all look oddly disproportionate. There were a couple of cool fountains next to the monument, but we kept on going, continuing along past the cabinet offices and Downing Street. It would have been neat to see 10 Downing as did Seth and David via our old roommate, however it is ordinarily closed to the public, and was as such on this day.

Keeping on going, we walked by the Parliament building and Big Ben, crossed the Westminster Bridge and the Thames River and then decided to take in a museum. After finding that the Star Wars exhibit that just opened last week was like £16.50, we went the cheaper route and hit the Dalí museum for almost half that price. The Dalí museum was interesting for two reasons: 1) it was more of his later workings and sketches, rather than the usual paintings that are featured in nearly every museum and; 2) it also contained a couple of works in different media, allowing for us to get to see more variety.

When we got out of the museum, it was raining (as always), and we headed back up to Trafalgar Square to the National Gallery. The National Gallery is a lot like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. There are a lot of the older paintings accumulated from various estates, but no real significant works or modern art forms. Admission was free but the temporary Renoir exhibit was an extra £12. We went downstairs to see a couple of the modern art works, but on the whole it wasn’t that interesting. I think the Louvre in Paris offers more.

We left and walked up to Jermyn Street to see all the bespoke shirtmakers such as Charles Tyrwhitt, Pink, Turnbull & Asser, and more. I thought it might be nice to get a bespoke shirt made and Tyrwhitt makes them cheapest of the bunch at £30, but that’s a luxury I might not actually get to take home.
A couple blocks from Jermyn Street is Savile Row. I somewhat expected more from it since a lot of the shops on Old Bond Street seemed to be more in line with what Madison, Park, and Lexington Aves offer back in New York, but apart from a few stores, I thought Savile Row to be a bust. I enjoyed Jermyn Street more. After walking about 4 miles worth without sitting down, we decided to go back to the hotel and get off our feet for a few hours before heading back to dinner.

A bunch of people that have visited/lived in London before recommended going to Brick Lane in Spittlefields for the best Indian food in the city. It took a while for us to find, but once we were there, we definitely had our choice of restaurants, so we settled on Preem. It was good, but nothing you couldn’t find made comparably well in New York (boy, I feel like I’m getting that “New York is the best at everything” mentality).

After dinner, we walked over to Charlotte Lane to The Bricklayer’s Arms, a pub that was recommended to me by my rane buddy, Justin Novick. He claims to have spent many nights drinking pints on the street, and though no one was drinking on the street, it wasn’t hard to find it as the local destination in the middle of a seemingly nowhere corner. An older, bald, toothy man with a goatee – Paul – asked me if I wanted to fight him, but it was obvious he was looking more to have a good time and for some reason, that included a round of fisticuffs. Charles and I had a couple rounds there and then headed over to Night & Day, where Tim and Mike ended up showing and joining us.

It was actually a pretty good night because Charles and I got a chance to talk about our girlfriends and compare stories and highlight the commonalities that actually do exist among women – everything from arguments, the things you do/n’t say, going out with friends, drinking, and more. The more we talked, the more universal truths came out. No matter how nice the girl, no matter how much the guy loves her, men really are from Mars and women really are from Venus. And as Dalí put it, “man has two defects: modesty and women.”