I’m back from the UK. All in all it went pretty good! The game turned out pretty good and I think all the players thought it was good fun. Unfortunately, we didn’t get many players :/
Some comments on the trip, first of all: British food sucks.
For some reason they only seem to eat bacon and french fries (or “chips”). Now granted that the food experience from this trip might be a bit biased because the number of restaurants and in general the different kinds of food available at the venue were limited. We were unable to find anything that had not been deep-fried except “pot noodles”. So we ate noodles most of the time. One time I tried a chicken and mushroom pie, which is what you can see here to the right.
It didn’t suck horribly, but it was some sort of crusty pie filled with slime accompanied by luke-warm chips on which you could still taste the oil from the deep-fryer. We did manage to find some good food in the end though (read on to find out what :P)
The game was won on Sunday night, the winners were the same as last year and they were the team that usually plays at DreamHack. Since they have experience they kicked pretty much ass, but there was one team that had only played at the last i-Series event and they came pretty close too! New players are always fun.
The pic to the left here is of a Call of Duty – Modern Warfare 2 tournament, of which I think first prize was £800. Our prize-ceremony was right after this.
After the game was over we took the train into London and had two hours to spend there.
We ended up going to Harrods, which is a pretty cool place (although expensive).
They have several of these “ROOM OF LUXURY” deals, which is pretty fun :P
This is a picture of the “Egyptian hall”. Some Egyptian dude bought Harrods a while back and is now owned by an Egyptian family. It has these Egyptian influences here and there.
This was the Christmas room, bunch of decorations lights and cards!
This was one of the coolest things in the place. The orange text says Luxury Seatoys and it’s like a mini-waterjet-scooter-thingie that you hold on to and it drags you in the water. It can be used for cruising the surface or to dive and do all sorts of acrobatics under water. It’s pretty awesome, the most expensive model was £80,000 and the cheapest (in the picture) was £7,300 or something like that.
After Harrods we went back to the Tube and headed off to Heathrow. We intentionally headed to Heathrow pretty early because we have started a tradition in which we eat a nice good meal at the airport to talk and relax and put the trip behind us and prepare for the things to come when we get back home (like school 12 hours a day again).
This time we found a cool place called “Gordon Ramsay plane food”, they had an early supper menu in which you got a 3 course dinner for a discounted prize (because it was early) so we got that and it was some of the best food I’ve ever eaten! Especially the entrée pictured below.
This was beetroot with walnut and a pesto with goat cheese salad. The white stuff there is the goat cheese and it was incredibly awesome, best I’ve ever had with a myriad of flavors that melted in your mouth.
If you’re at Heathrow and want a really good meal – go to “Gordon Ramsays plane food”.
The main course was roast chicken with mashed potatoes for me and penne with tomatoes for Emanuel.
And for dessert we had an Apple and blueberry crumble with some sort of custard sauce.
And of course to top it all off we had a bottle of nice Italian red wine.
Perfect end to a trip and perfect start of a new shitload of work.
After this, we went home. I haven’t flown in the dark in a while and it was pretty cozy.
Do you see that green spot in the middle of the picture? That’s a football field, there were a lot of these, at one time I had three within my field of vision from one single window and they were all lit up to look like it was day on the field :P
All in all – it’s always nice to get a away for a while.
