On the 13th of April, Mona and I took a trip into London to have lunch and see a show. Being children of the 90s, we decided that The Lion King was a necessity, and being tourists, we wanted to eat in Chinatown.
First, the lunch. We pretty much ducked into the first place we saw that wasn't a buffet, which may have been a mistake. Mind you, the food was fantastic. Mona had a salt-and-pepper tofu dish, which she said was the best tofu she had ever been served; I had a beef and ginger dish, which was likewise delicious. They also served somewhat "upscale" drinks -- fresh juices and bubble tea among them. Again, everything was delicious, and we finished with a good forty-five minutes to spare before our show.
It was when we got our bill that we began having problems. We were handed a printed receipt with the food listed only in Chinese (I assume Mandarin, but honestly it could have been any dialect and I wouldn't have known the difference), and only the total price given as opposed to the price of each dish. This total seemed a bit off to me, and a quick mental check of what I remembered the listed prices of our food as indicated that something was wrong. We snagged another copy of the menu and totalled everything up. We'd been overcharged by a good eight pounds or so, even allowing for a 12% added gratuity fee. Okay. No problem. We flagged down a waiter and explained the issue. This took a good seven to ten minutes, as his English wasn't exactly fluent and he probably had trouble with both of our accents.* He took the bill back up, and we assumed that the problem would be quickly rectified and we'd be on our way with still some time to spare.
Twenty-five minutes later...we were handed another copy of the bill. We were still overcharged (possibly; again, it wasn't like we could read the receipt very well) but had no time to continue haggling. We booked it out of there, promptly got lost, and ended up asking a guy selling discount theatre tickets for directions to the Lyceum. We ran there and made it with some minutes to spare, though we were both out of breath.
Totally worth it.
If you like massive puppets and crazy-awesome dancing and African-inspired chant and gorgeous costuming and lions and stuffy British accents, you'd love this show. I'd never seen professional puppetry on this scale before, so I spent the entire show gawking and gasping and generally making a right fool of myself. Mona and I both left the theatre grinning like idiots. My inner child has yet to shut up about the whole thing.
(So, naturally, I wait a month before posting...I am bad at blogging. Bad blogger. Lazy.)
UNRELATED:
A short blurb of mine has been picked up by The Colchester Circle for publication! It will appear in either the June or July issue! Celebrations! Jubilations! Exclamation points!
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*Mona is German, though her English is excellent and really is only accented when she's very tired and/or stressed. I'm American, and thus don't actually speak English at all.
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