We went into Starbucks for coffee.
Toilets
Good ground floor large toilet big enough for wheelchair. Unisex. Free?
Free - so? We failed to find a free toilet in another coffee bar. They claimed their toilet was out of order. So we didn't go there for coffee.
The public toilets in the nearby area were in pairs. They take a twenty pence coin. Or two ten pence coins. This confused one foreigner. He put in one ten pence coin. We all throughout the system was malfunctioning.
We stood in line twice. The first time I refused to go in. I'd read about a woman who died. She was electrocuted in a metal toilet. Vandals had broken a light bulb. So the electric part was exposed and touched the walls which ran down to the metal toilet which was filled with water and as soon as she touched it, the whole place was live and she was electrocuted.
Other people came out alive. And I was desperate after wine and coffee. After use the toilet is self-cleaning so you wait while it cleans. No proper maps or signs to the toilets. No sign saying how far away they are. You don't know whether the public toilets are 20 yards away, 500 yards, or a mile.
No toilets inside the Rioja festival. I had a long skirt and was starting to look for a drain!
Souvenir Cups To Buy
So I was well disposed to Starbucks for providing the toilet. Then I spotted this pair of espresso cups. I could not resist a little cup with William Shakespeare and scenes of London. We had just visited the Rioja wine fair next to Tower Bridge.
What's good about these cups? Under £10, price of two cups of coffee, for a couple of souvenir cups.
What would I have liked different? White inside. You have to hold them under the light and up to a window to be sure they are really clean inside.
I would also have liked matching saucers. Eventually going through my stock of saucers I found two roughly the right size. Reasonable match in colour. Not so big that the cup slides about. Not so tiny that it doesn't fit at all and scrapes.
The saucers look too big. Unless you like a small cup made more important by a huge saucer.
The cup showing Tower Bridge and Big Ben has the word London.
The cup showing Shakespeare says England.
Not ideal to have to find a saucer the right size from your stock. Ok to 'borrow' two saucers from elsewhere for just the two of you. But for a dinner of half a dozen people you might not want to be juggling saucers. Anybody else helping would not be able to work out which saucers went with the cups as they don't match.
I checked underneath the cups and the writing says the design is 2014 so they are new, which is why I have not seen them before.
I like the fact that they are different, so if one of you wants sugar or milk or decaff you know which cup is whose.
One more last good point, about the design. The handles are big enough for two or three fingers. My favourite Rayware cups have smaller handles.
I can often buy a whole set of four espresso cups with matching saucers for that price in Oxfam. But if you fancy these two, you know where to buy them.
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