European Adventure Recap - Afternoon Tea....at Night

Friday October 23, 2009

London, England

Our last event in London was to have a Traditional English Tea. We realized that we might be a little late if we walked there from where we were, so we hired a Rickshaw to get us there. And this guy did just that! We were cracking up as we sped around curves and took 90 degree turns on what seemed like only one half of the wheels. The view from the inside

The funniest part, and something Shannon and I still laugh out loud at now, is this: We were having the Tea at a restaurant in a fancy hotel. (We didn't realize it was all that fancy until we got there). Our rickshaw driver whipped into the hotel and we came to a tire-screeching, belly-laugh inducing, jerking to a halt stop right at the front doors of this nice hotel! Not only that, but the motion sensor made the sliding doors open right as we pulled up so our presence to those inside the hotel did not go unnoticed as our cackling billowed into the lobby through the now open doors. All heads turned in our direction.

Leave it to two hillbilly girls from Kentucky to ride a rickshaw to a fancy hotel for Tea and then practically ride right in through the front door! Still, we didn't care - we were in Europe for crying out loud!

Here we are in the rickshaw!

Once we tumbled out of the rickshaw and made our way into the hotel, we were seated (we had reservations) and given menus. I was a little perplexed because I had made reservations for Tea....which was kind of a set menu....so we didn't need menus. Shannon and I both thought that it was odd that we were having "Afternoon Tea" with a 7:00pm reservation, but I was able to make the reservation online that clearly stated it was for Tea. We asked the waitress and she confirmed that Tea Time was, in fact, already over. She must have seen how disappointed we looked, because she pulled a few strings and before we knew it we were having Afternoon Tea....at Night!

Would you like a spot of tea? I tried a raspberry flavored tea - it was yummy. Since we were in England, Shannon wanted to drink her tea English-style, so she put a bit of milk into regular tea, which she enjoyed too.No Afternoon Tea would be complete without tiny finger-sandwiches and desserts. The bottom layer of this tiered server included several different types of sandwiches such as cucumber, salmon & egg salad. The middle layer were warm biscuits (with lots of butter to spread on them!). And the top layer was a chocolate eclair, strawberry tort and fruit cake slice for each of us.