Cookie for Lunch; French Cuisine for Dinner

Cookie for Lunch

I kept meaning to make myself a real lunch. However, when Noura and Shannon were going to get Ben's Cookies at around 3 in the afternoon, I had to tag along even though I hadn't eaten lunch.

I have been hearing about Ben's Cookies for the past several months. This place is just really famous for having the best cookies, or so I have been told. So, I had to tag along for the cookies. We walked down to the Covered Market on High Street, where there are all sorts of shops selling different things (the royal wedding cake photo was taken there). Shannon and I both got Triple Chocolate cookies - chocolate dough, chocolate chips, and white chocolate disks on top. They were almost fresh out of the oven, so they were really just half cookie and half goo. They were so good. The chocolate chips were not even chips, unless chips can be a liquid.

The cookie was absolutely delicious, and did not disappoint. I will say, though, that they had been hyped up so much, and I am not sure that they are truly the best cookies I have ever had. I will have to go back again to see if they are.

We continued walking around downtown. We stopped in the famous Blackwell's Books to look for materials for our courses. The store looks quite modest from the outside but is actually an enormous building that extends way behind the store front and into a giant basement. I have been told that it used to be the largest bookstore in the world. Maybe it still is; I don't know. Anyway, it was very cool to visit. I expect I will be back again when I have a better idea of what I will need for my classes.

French Cuisine for Dinner

Later that day, everyone from the Stanford program got to go out to dinner at the Brasserie Blanc.

Quick, funny story - The previous night, when I was walking back to the Stanford house, accompanied by Elisabet, the Danish lady at the seder, we passed this restaurant on Walton Street. She pointed it out and told me that they served very good food. That was the only restaurant she pointed out on the whole walk. The next morning I found an email from Stephanie Williams saying that we were going there for dinner that evening.

The food at the dinner was excellent - avocado salad, beef stroganoff, sticky toffee pudding with ice cream, and nice French wine. The conversation was also excellent. I sat across from Stephanie Williams, the administrator of the Stanford program at Oxford and probably one of the most stereotypically British people I have met so far. She talked a lot about England, wine, and British accents. Next to us were also Yordanos, Tara, and Lily. I got to know them all much better as well.

Overall, I am just loving all the people I have met on the program. They are wonderful and a lot of fun to be around. I'm sure there will be more on them later.

That is all.