One year in the making Mirela was awarded her Masters today. The year has fairly flashed by since I met her and she began her Masters. Mirela jokes that in my reviewing and editing her assignments I contributed somewhat to her award. Ha ha. I ended up taking half a day from work to attend the graduation which was held mid-afternoon at the Barbican. I’ve never actually been into the Barbican and I must admit it was an impressive and nice venue for the graduation. When I arrived the Barbican was fairly buzzing with all the students and friends and families milling about.

For some reason Mirela’s class (admittedly pretty small with about 15 graduating students) was being awarded their Masters with the School of Architecture students. The graduation ceremony itself was not very exciting. Various official people gave some speeches with a guest speech and honorary distinction being awarded to some dude who, though graduating with fairly average marks, has gone on to be revolutionary in charitable work in building and architecture. After he gave his speech is was a matter of sitting through and clapping through what felt like a couple of thousands of students! It did go by very quickly but my hands were a bit sore from all the clapping. Sadly two students had died since finishing their course so their degrees/masters were awarded posthumously. As you can imagine they got some of the biggest claps and congratulations.

Tickets to the graduation ceremony had to be paid for and this was to cover, presumably, the hire of the hall, tea/coffee/champagne/juice and biscuits. The price, which I can’t recall how much, was pretty cheeky really for what was served.

After the ceremony we headed to a nearby Italian where Mirela’s parents shouted the bunch of us (the family, Enrique (Mirela’s boyfriend), Mirela’s cousin Harry, Sabrina (who had also finished her Masters but had chosen not to go to the ceremony) and Sabrina’s boyfriend) the celebratory dinner which was nice of them!

We finished the evening by heading over to St Katharine’s Docks near Tower Hill for a couple of drinks. St Katharine’s Docks is really very pretty and it’s a shame to say I’ve never been there in my years in London. By the time we got there it must have been about 9.30 or so – so it wasn’t too busy and actually most restaurants/bars seemed to be closing. However the Prohibition Bar was still open for business. Actually part restaurant part bar Prohibition was pretty cool. There was also plenty of seating as it was relatively quiet. Drinks were impressively reasonable and different from the usual offerings – including the non-alcoholic versions.

The night couldn’t last too long as we all had to get up before 5 the next morning so that everyone could catch their flights to Madrid so we managed to catch pretty much the last tube home. Hopefully Mirela had a nice day today!