Thursday morning we woke up around 11, got dressed, and then tried to find brunch. Good luck. Seems we missed breakfast and had to settle for lunch, oh well. We had plans to meet Julia, a long time friend of Rick's for drinks in Leicester Square (pronounced "Lester") at 7pm.

We walked down Carnaby Street, down through Soho, along Old Compton Street, and then to Covent Garden.

Covent Garden is a busy little mall.

There were lots of people wandering around, lots of tourists from all over the world.

These street performers were actually pretty good!

We walked into several shops, though we didn't find much of interest. One exception was "Sport Stop", were we found a wide variety of Body Body Wear clothes. We picked up a couple of pairs of pants there.

Did someone say "Gadget"?

The weather was starting to clear up and we were feeling pretty energetic, so we decided to walk down to the river and see the Millennium wheel (we heard about it on the Discovery Channel). Trafalgar square was on the way, so we stopped there for a bit to relax.

Randy decided to put his panorama software to the test with a multi-panel picture from one side of the square to the other. Check out the bottom of the page for the results.

This metal tree was very different.

Then we walked down to the wheel and took a picture. We watched for a bit and calculated that it was a 30 minute ride to go around, which was a bit too long for us. Seeing it was enough.

We headed to the Westminster station for the ride home. It's one of the new updated tube stations, and it's quite impressive. The hallways are much larger, and there is a very industrial "bolted metal plate" feel to it.

After a short nap, we walked back down to Leicester Square and headed for "All Bar One". Julia was waiting at the door with a big grin on her face. The bar was very crowded, but she and Rick did their best at catching up. We also found out that three other friends from San Francisco (Dana, Bruce and Fred) were in town for the weekend on their way to Amsterdam. They arrived a few minutes later and we all chatted for a while over some drinks.

Julia then lead us off through Soho to a great sushi place named "Yo! Sushi". The place has a huge winding conveyor belt about four inches wide which wraps around the seats. There is a continuous stream of small dishes going by, you just pick up what you want and they tally up your bill at the end based on the number and color of the plates. Pretty cool system!

Rick, Randy, Bruce, Julia, Dana and Fred at Yo! Sushi. You can just make out the little plates of food in the background.

Afterwards we walked back down to Old Compton Street to find one of the local gay papers to give Dana, Bruce and Fred some ideas about where to go over the following couple of days (seems they just hopped on a plane on the spur of the moment and hadn't really scoped out the goings-on for the weekend).

We intended to go to a bar later on, so we said good-bye to everyone and headed back to the hotel. It turned out, after more carefully inspecting the local bar guide, that the particular bar we were interested in was closed on Thursdays, and the couple of other alternates were quite far from the city center. We opted instead for a movie. "The Sixth Sense" was our choice, and it was very good.