Windsor + Reading

What an exciting day!!

Not only did I get to experience Emma/Maidenhead's famous £4 curry, we got to sit at the White Horse pub to eat it without even buying a drink!! We met Emma's cousin Chris for lunch (yeah we had a lazy morning, whatevaaa!) and went to the curry place - which is really just a table set up inside a store with curry in crock-pots.... Not that i'm complaining, they had both green and red curry, which was delicious and kinda spicy, and Chris laughed at me for being a little bit pathetic on the spicy food front... Again, whatevaaaa!

(I seem to have adopted that from chavvy Brits...?)

Following lunch and Emma's 'creme egg milkshake' aka deliciousness-in-a-cup, we caught the train to Windsor. Originally we were going to walk but the weather was shitty and grey...

Arriving in Windsor was pretty amazing; the castle is HUUUUUGE and so impressive, it made me a teeny bit jealous of the Royals! We went through the State Apartments and took some sneaky photos. The presentation of the armor and armory (guns, swords etc) was very well done, and we saw the old amor worn by kings, which was very very small! Turns out everyone of that period, BAR Henry VIII, was teeny tiny! Unfortunately we didnt buy the audio-guides, and it didnt really explain what the rooms were for or what any artwork was about, so we interpreted...

In the Waterloo chamber of the castle, there were giant oil paintings covering the walls, of all the people involved in the Battle of Waterloo. It looked like all their names were all Lawrence, as they all said 'Lawrence - Duke of Wellington' for example. We stood in awe at this room for a fair few minutes, disscussing how Lawrence must have been a popular name in the 1800s, until the Castle staff member in the room had enough of our ignorance and interjected, explaining how Lawrence was the name of the artist, Thomas Lawrence... Which thus made sense! According to this man, it took Lawrence a year to travel to, and stay in Rome to paint Pius VII. Very cool...

Following our departure from the castle, we had a nosy around the town of Windsor (a sneaky look into Zara where I found some gorgeous shoes) then we made our way back to Maidenhead, to get ready for dinner in Reading.

Very excited to go here - this is where Georgie lives (almost, she's in Sandhurst) and so Em and I went to Jamie's Italian (as in, Jamie The Naked Chef Oliver!!) and it was amazing, delicious, scrumptious, exciting, tasty, and FILLING!! We had a meat anti-pasti to share, then pasta as mains - mine was prosciutto spaghetti with lemon and parsley, and Em had spaghetti bolognese with pork and beef mince and homemade breadcrumbs. For dessert, Georgie had the most decadent brownie and vanilla icecream, Em had the citrus pudding and I had tiramisu (with orange liquer - v. nice!)

Catching up with Georgie was great, she's working at her old school on a Gap year, so it was awesome to see her... I'm hoping to see her again before she goes!

We waddled our way back to the train station about 11pm, caught the last train home in each direction and passed out from gluttony.

A great day!