Interns' Night Out

So, the reason you've only had one, rather cryptic post in the past 5 days is that Julie's come down to visit me, and kept me rather busy. Apologies for that.

Being the bad influence that she is, she turned up to my workplace on Friday afternoon, and after a tour of the Microsoft campus, dragged me off shopping. It's the first time I've shown the campus off to someone in quite a while and I didn't realise how novel most of what I now take for granted really is. Most people, for example, apparently don't have pool tables lying around their offices, or remote control boat racing on their office's lake.

It was also quite touching to see the level of detail the facilities folk had put into Christmas - even on the far side of the lake, in the woods, where no-body walks now that it's gotten rather cold, there was still a beautiful Christmas tree, with little fairly lights powered by a generator, and steel guy lines securing it to the path. No-one's ever going to see it unless they walk around the lake, and I don't know of anyone who does that in this season - but someone still went to all that effort. Quite sweet really.


_{The red circle is about where the tree is}

Now, I don't believe the phrase 'organised as a bunch of students' is yet a common simile, but we (the intern community) certainly advanced the cause for that Friday night. Four of us got to Nando's at the 'agreed' meeting time of 7.30, booked a table for 8, and waited half an hour for it. The four of us then sat there for a while, whilst other patrons stared angrily at our remaining spaces until the other four turned up. And then a few more, and then a few more...

Well, once we'd ruined Nando's seating plans for the evening, and had a couple of Savanna Ciders (which our resident South African informs me is actually quite an 'alternative' drink over there), it was time to hit some bars. Bar 38 (now rebranded to something else) was as expensive as I remembered it, but pretty good fun, but I was mostly looking forward to Mango, which had been billed as a 'dance/trance club'.


_{Obligatory picture for those of you who can't read large streams of text}

Unfortunately, the trance was lacking and the dance turned out to be generic modern house and r'n'b but a few tequilas and that wasn't a problem. A few more tequilas and things started to get really fun. I'm not entirely sure what time we stumbled out of there (or how we got home), but I can't say I really recommend going there again, unless you're prepared to intake your RDA of salt as a by-product of tequila slammer drinking.

If that's fine with you though, you'll have a fab night.