Megan's Birthday

1-2 September

After recovering from our time in New York, the first weekend of September was relatively quiet. Megan turned 27 and, depsite being made to work most of Saturday, she had an enjoyable birthday weekend.

On Sunday, we trekked over to Putney to meet Guy and Anna for brunch. Anna chose a very nice little place, tucked away from the swarms of people on the main street, and we had an excellent brunch. Definitely one to go back to!

Then Megan and Tim rushed home to watch Arsenal v Portsmouth on TV and enjoy some a glass of bubbly to celebrate Megan's birthday. Arsenal won 3-1 and Megan's favourite player, Cesc Fabregas, scored a goal - his birthday present to Megan no doubt! Another work phone call for Megan meant that the scheduled visit to the Dali exhibition at Tate Modern had to be postponed. But once Megan was free, we headed out to a nice little Greek restaurant on the banks of the Thames for dinner. The food was fantastic, another place we will surely re-visit!

8-9 September

On Saturday morning, Megan met her friend Natalie (from Auckland) for brunch and a wander through Borough Market. Megan returned home just in time to see the All Blacks demolition of Italy in their opening game of the Rugby World Cup. Impressive start, but you can read very little into these one-sided pool matches. After the rugby, we set off for Tate Modern to see the Salvador Dali art exhibition. We had planned to see the exhibition the weekend before, on Megan's birthday, but we ran out of time. (Megan is a big fan of Dali's work).

The exhibition was very popular; we had to buy tickets an hour in advance and queue up to get in, and it was very crowded inside. But we both really enjoyed it. Dali was clearly either a genius or a complete fruit loop (or maybe both), as most of his works are very very odd and made little sense to us. However, the minute detail and striking colours in his works were amazing.

After the exhibition, we stopped off at a couple of pubs along the river bank down from Tate Modern. At our second pub, we met a couple called Sean and Jade. Sean was Irish (and also answered to the name Shamus), and Jade was a Kiwi. Sean didn't seem to mind the "de be de dee potatoes" call; in fact he even said it for us in his crazy accent. Apparently Sean has a part-time role on a really really crap Irish soap, worse than Shortland Street, so they told us. Very funny. We had a few drinks and watched some football on TV (Ireland was playing). When we went to leave, they gave us their phone number and insisted that we contact them the next time we are in Ireland so they can show us the best bars!

We discovered an interesting Turkish restaurant and had dinner there on our way home. It wasn't Turkish food as we knew it, but it was very good. Tim had a terrible experience when Megan tricked him into trying a black olive. Tim has always insisted that he hates olives, although he cannot ever remember trying them...perhaps he had blocked out the bad memories of the past. Anyway, he tried a black olive and it didn't go well. He claimed that it was the most disgusting food he had ever tasted and that it wasn't even worthy of being described as food. Never again.

Sunday was a very lazy day: sleep in, house work, watching more rugby and watching Roger Federer clinch his 12th grand slam singles title in his US Open final win over Novak Djokovic.