So I've been trying to venture out a bit more since living in the outskirts of London. I'm currently 18 and the cost of travel is going to increase as of September so I'm trying to make the most of my travel expenses as they are cheap in comparison to adult costs - plus free bus travel woo!
So my friend, Jessie and I have been trying to plan out days in London as well as around our area to explore and try out. This may range from food, to exploration days such as playing real life Monopoly, or visiting cool locations and more. Another personal reason behind this is because a lot of my college friends will be heading off to university as of September/October whilst I decided upon a gap year. So because of this, I wanted to try spend as much time with my college friends before they leave for higher education, Jessie being one of them. Unfortunately, we haven't had a chance to see each other much during our school year, since we used to attend Maths class together, but I dropped Maths after AS and she continued and we had conflicting timetables so we never saw each other because most of the time we would be in and out of college.
But enough of all this personal business, let's continue onto the topic of our new adventure of the day! We started off heading towards our first stop of day, which was the Draughts cafe. The Draughts cafe is said to be the first board game cafe in London, and we had been meaning to go there for quite some time.
As we worked our way from Haggerston station, we arrived at the cafe to be welcomed by one of the workers who told us to sit wherever we liked before he brought us some menus. We opted for a strawberry soda, apple juice and homemade hummus, served with toasted artisan bread.
As we worked our way from Haggerston station, we arrived at the cafe to be welcomed by one of the workers who told us to sit wherever we liked before he brought us some menus. We opted for a strawberry soda, apple juice and homemade hummus, served with toasted artisan bread.
A photo posted by Sophia Tang 🐼 (@sophilicity) on
As we were waiting for our food to arrive, we decided to go and explore the cafe, deciding upon what games we should begin playing first. We decided Connect 4 (ayee a classic for ya), Scrabble (another classic of course!), Gravity Maze (something new for us) and Camel Cup Super Up (which looked interesting... seemed fun).
We first selected Connect 4 to play, thought we'd go for an easy game first, and I thought I had totally won, but Jessie managed to find a way and beat me because I was oblivious to looking in one direction ah... For our second game, we decided on Camel Cup Super Up... Until we realised it was an expansion of the original game which we didn't have so we couldn't play it unfortunately... For our third game, we decided on Gravity Maze. The way the game worked was that you were given a card and you had to use the colour stacked cubes to form a route from the start point to the end point in which the marble would travel through the cubes and end up at the end point... We got really confused. We gave up and ended up looking at the solution and finally accomplished it after much confusion, at least it worked!
For our final game of our selection, we played Scrabble. This led to a rather intense game, as we were playing the mini version of the game so there wasn't any of those special pieces which allowed you to have any letter... And if I'm honest I'm sure we broke a couple of rules e.g. Using names of objects/people to make a Scrabble word, or to search up a word to see if it is a real word? Who knows, but I believe I won that round - Jessie was prepared to lose to an English Language student though, even though she was previously an English Literature student herself aha!
We didn't have long left before we had to go so we decided to check out the other side of the cafe, and picked up some Trivia games. One of the Trivia games (which ended up being our last game) involved stacking cups with a piece of Trivia in between each of the rows. We didn't get some of the game at first - You can see we get confused a lot... but eventually we got the hang of it. The concept of the game is similar to Jenga. You would roll the colour dice twice, and then picked between the two colours you rolled. Then, you answer the question. If you answer it correctly, you moved that colour cup to the top from one of the rows, if you answered it incorrectly, you moved two cups to the top. The loser is the one who knocks down the tower first. In the end, I won the Trivia game!
Overall, I really enjoyed the experience at the Draughts cafe. The price for playing the games at the cafe is £5, and then depending if you paid for food and drink that is added to the bill. Personally, I feel like it's an experience worth trying at least once. You get to try some old classics or try out some new games that may look interesting!
After the Draughts cafe, we moved onto to grab some food. Before this day, we'd spent ages deciding between two places in which we wanted to eat. I gave two suggestions and left Jessie to pick between the two - Sorry Jessie... This led her to compare distances of the food places and more. It didn't help that they were pretty much within the same distance from the Draughts Cafe. In the end, I just assigned numbers or letters (I don't even know...) to the food places, and asked my American cousin, Anthony to pick between the two. This is why we ended up at Pump Shoreditch!
What is Pump Shoreditch? Well, let me give you a little background about it. Pump Shoreditch is a well-known street food market located in East London. The reason why it's called Pump Shoreditch is because well for one, it's located in Shoreditch (a bit obvious really) and because the location of the street food market is at a disused petrol station. At Pump Shoreditch, various of vendors sell food from morning, noon and night. The food varies from Japanese, to Turkish, to Mexican to more. Prices also vary, but meals are usually under £10.
There was literally so much to choose from when we were wondering around. I definitely want to try going back again for more food there for sures! In the end, I decided on the Oyako-don (chicken and egg rice bowl) at Nosteagia, whilst Jessie opted for a marinated chicken wrap from Wrapped.
A photo posted by Sophia Tang 🐼 (@sophilicity) on
A photo posted by Sophia Tang 🐼 (@sophilicity) on
I quite liked the Oyako-don. Priced at £6 for the bowl, it was very filling, and contained all the content of food which I enjoyed. But in a way I found it slightly tedious. It wasn't what I would call, bland? But more I was hoping for some sort of slight change in the meal with the flavour.
On the other hand, my friend Jessie seemed to have a hard time eating her wrap. It looked amazing, but I could see she was struggling to take the foil off her wrap, along with the fact the sauce kept leaking.
A photo posted by Sophia Tang 🐼 (@sophilicity) on
After our meals, we decided to split a dessert between us. The bubble waffle at Nosteagia looked in enticing, but we were quite full so decided to share it. We didn't want anything too heavy, so we decided on the strawberry, cream and chocolate sauce bubble waffle. I quite liked the bubble waffle, and Jessie enjoyed it too, despite the cream dripping at the end of the bubble because of the heat.
You can check out my full review of the foods we ate at Pump Shoreditch below on my Yelp profile:
http://sophilicity.yelp.co.uk
I hope you guys enjoyed reading my adventure of the day! Hopefully I'll be bringing you more of my London adventures soon, as well as some of my other travels such as Rome!
You can also check out Draughts London and Pump Shoreditch on their websites below!
http://www.draughtslondon.com/
http://www.pumpshoreditch.com/
PS: Apologies for the camera quality - I usually bring my DSLR camera, but because I was attending a meeting beforehand it was inconvenient to bring it with me ah...
