Woodies, Airbnb, and Cricket

Last day in the office… the team decided to take me to a local favourite pub of theirs: Woodies in New Malden.  This was originally a club house on a cricket pavilion but has been converted into a freehouse.  It’s filled with programs attached in any manner possible to the walls and ceilings from football ranging mainly in the 1960s and 1970s through some early 2000s.  Quite a locals’ place as this was way off the beaten path and through some residential areas.  Well-hidden and a quiet place to enjoy some food and pints.  A very nice lunch with my new friends in New Malden.

Back at work the mood has turned as it usually does after lunch:  food coma time so everyone’s just a bit lethargic, like lizards on ice blocks.  I decide it’s time to research exactly where I’ll be needing to walk tomorrow for my Airbnb room.

As it turns out, it’s only a half mile away from the hotel (a ten minute walk).  It’s also just a three minute walk farther away from where I’ve already been: The Barley Mow.  Well, auspicious luck!  I know where I can go for a pint, if I feel like it but there are new pubs to try out as well.  Also, around the corner is The Laughing Halibut, which is a place I have been told has excellent fish and chips with your choice of fish.  Great, dinner will be an easy decision!

I'll sign off this post with the thought that I'm looking forward to going to my first live cricket match today:  T20 NatBlast Somerset at Surrey in the Kia Oval.  I was hoping to catch a game at Lord’s as that is the oldest field for cricket and a lot of history there.  Last week the national team just finished a five-day test (five-game series rough equivalent) against Sri Lanka and next Thursday is another test against Pakistan which is going to be an awesome match up.  Too bad I wasn’t here during that week.  Though, I’m sure tickets would have been hard to come by.  I heard just hours after I purchased my T20 ticket that it was sold out and that was Wednesday late morning for a smaller, regional game not the big international game.  Well, maybe I’ll be able to catch it back in the States.  Right… Football, the #1 spectator watched sport in the world, not really popular in USA.  Cricket, the #2 most spectator-watched sport in the world, unheard of in the USA with the difficulty of trying to understand it, falls somewhere between quantum field mechanics and plasma-fission boundary flow calculations.  However after watching one match with someone explaining the game a bit so you can understand it, it became a very engaging game and I’m very excited to be going.  Next post should have a couple pictures of the Oval, the field, and some of actual play as well.