I’ll be getting on a train tomorrow morning to London for the weekend. This should be the highlight of the trip. Manchester has been neat, and just being in a different culture is very interesting, but as far as sightseeing goes there’s not much here after you’ve seen the football soccer field.

I found a small (read: cheap) hotel about 1 km from Buckingham Palace; this should be an excellent base of operations for my recon mission. Probably will not have internet access though, so you’ll have to wait until Monday for pictures and stories. I hope to do a bit of trainblogging as well; I’m sure the scenery on the trip will be very cool.

The highlight of this week was Wednesday night, when I went to a 300+ year old pub called the Circus Tavern. It was extremely small; you could get from one side to the other in about 3 steps, and people were jammed in there extremely tight. It was like a scene straight out of a Saturday Night Live skit. Very drunken Englishmen on the verge of a fistfight one minute and hugging each other the next. Most of the discussion was centered around either soccer or the politics between Britain and Northern Ireland. I forgot to bring my camera, but I intend to go back and get some shots (and some pictures, too) before I leave.

In closing, here’s a picture of the machine that gives me a wonderful cup of cappuccino each morning at the office. I appreciate the fact that IP provides free coffee at Southwind, but they’ve got nothing on Capgemini’s little machine of wonders: