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I'm still in London. Friday night, I came back to the building where I taught my class this week, primarily to check email. I was going to dinner immediately afterwards, and once I left, I realized I had left a book that I had wanted to read at dinner. So I turned around, went back in to see if I left the book at the internet terminal. It wasn't there, so I walked back out to go to dinner, no book to read. As it turned out, it was just as well.

Now, next to the building was a pub that I walked by on my way back to the hotel. I had gotten about 200 ft past the pub when I realized the whistling and yelling behind me was one of the technical support guys trying to get my attention. I turned around, he caught up to me and chastised me for making him run after me when he was in the middle of having a drink. He said I needed to come back to the pub to have a proper English pint. Who was I to say no.

So I went into the pub, and three of the support guys were there. Brad, Esteban (the one who ran after me), and Andy. I'm not entirely certain what all three of them do, but Brad is the head of tech support here, Esteban does some sort of tech support function (I think it's product development related), and I have no idea what Andy does, though I think he might manage the ed center. (Hell, I hope I got the names right, getting the jobs right would be a bonus.) Andy asked me what I wanted, I said a lager of some sort, and I ended up with a Kronenburg 1667 (something like that), which they told me was a French beer. Halfway through this first pint, I was already feeling pretty tipsy. It had been 6 hours since I had eaten anything, and I don't drink all that often, either (last time was at the baseball game).

Talk about lightweight. They ordered a second round, which I realized I really shouldn't be having, as I was plenty buzzed off the first beer, which had been consumed in about 10 minutes. Just as I realized Esteban was ordering a third round, I told him that I was done, but he had actually ordered the third round a few minutes before, and the drinks were already there. So I felt obligated to drink the third beer.

Now, I normally have a hard time hearing people in bars in the first place. The background noise drowns out everything, at least to my ears. Add to this problem heavy accents, and I'm lucky to be understanding 30% of what they're saying, though it's all in English. Or at least, I'm assuming it was.

I did manage to stop at the third beer, but I was plenty drunk by this point. I was thinking about the chinese restaurant I had been planning to go to, and how if they were still open, I was probably a little too tipsy to go in there anyway. So I just stayed at the pub.

A word on English urinals. English urinals are of a different design than American urinals. American urinals are generally very upright, and due to flanges on the sides, provide you with a little bit of "cover," shall we say? Not so the English urinals. English urinals are of the low "slingback" variety, providing zero cover. So when using them, I tend to get probably a little closer than I do with American urinals. On top of the design being different, they also don't have any flushing mechanisms. Randomly, somewhere the water is released and flushes the urinal, but it's not on a one person, one flush basis.

Well, I was drunk enough at this point that when I went to the loo, I wasn't 100% awake. I snuggled up to the urinal, and the urinal started to flush. Before I realized it was happening, the urinal overflowed, right onto my jeans. Yum. I didn't get much on me, probably just a couple tablespoons, but it was more than enough.

Eventually, around 10:30 PM, I had made enough comments about eating something that Andy and Esteban (Brad had left about 20 minutes after I got there) agreed to go get some food. So we went to this dive Chinese place around the corner (not the Chinese restaurant I had intended to go to), where I got pork dumplings that were pretty undercooked (the pork was, anyway, they managed to overdo the outside of them), and lemon chicken. Neither was that great, which was fortunate for me, since by the time we sat down, I realized I was pretty full from all the beer.

I ate about half the food that I had ordered, we left, they walked me back to the hotel and we said goodbye in the lobby. I showered and washed my jeans in the shower with me. Not bad for my first English pub experience.

Other than the urinal overflowing onto my jeans, of course.