Our essays were done, we needed to shop, the weather was shit, and we weren't interested in travelling beyond Zone 2 (My Oyster card only has a month pass and not like, actual money loaded on it, which makes travelling to Zone 3 and beyond a trifle inconvenient), so GW & I wound up at what I like to call The Mall. Every time I say "Let's go to The Mall!", I'm mentally referring to the Westfield at Shepherd's Bush, mostly because it's the first mall I visited in London, and I'm weirdly loyal to places like that.
It took us 20 minutes on the Central Line after class, and after passing through what I like to call the Sell-Your-Soul-And-First Child-To-Afford-This Zone, we finally found ourselves in Not-Too-Exorbitant Land where we could get our shopping done. It was here that little sampler bits of pretzels were shoved under our noses, and 2-for-£5 vouchers thrust into our palms. Being rather shameless, we took what was offered and continued on, stopping dead in our tracks only when we actually placed the squares of pretzels in our mouths and properly tasted them.
They were ridiculously good cinnamon sugar pretzels, so we had a little on the spot confab debating not if we should get them, but when. We decided to go back for them after we'd done some proper shopping around and I'd had a proper lunch. One and a half hours of wandering, one semi-ironic animal jumper, a bowl of pho and one plate of summer rolls later, we trekked back to the Pretiola stand and whipped out our voucher, ordering two cinnamon sugar pretzels. The pretzels came in Mr. Pretzels bags, which made us wonder for a short while if the pretzel stand was undergoing some sort of identity crisis, but all this was forgotten once we unwrapped our piping hot pretzels and tucked in.
It didn't matter that we were sitting in what amounted to a glorified kid's pen once I bit into the softest pretzel I'd ever had in my 22 years of existence. A small child kept running in and trying to play with the wall-mounted toys next to our luridly pink stools, but it was fairly easy to ignore him and concentrate on the wonderfully buttery flavour that complemented the thick layer of cinnamon and sugar coating the pretzel.
The tables had a write-up on pretzels laminated on it, but beyond some vague recollection of monks somehow being involved, I honestly can't say what it was about, since the pretzel quite effectively captured my attention for the most part. I spent the 5 minutes we took to devour almost everything alternately thinking how great the pretzel was, wondering how I'd managed to live without it all this while, and when I could next take an hour out of my day to travel back for some more.
Pretzels are such a joy.
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