Europe, Part Two
Day Two in London!
Longer days are great
As someone who has lived in the southern US my whole life, I am accustomed to the longer days of Summer and all that jazz. I knew that the days were even longer the farther north you got, but I don't think I was quite ready for this. England being England, not many flats (or places in general) have central A/C. This itself isn't a huge deal. The weather was amazing for our entire trip - blue skies and low/mid 70s. The problem was having open windows combined with sunrise before 5 AM. This resulted in a very confused Nicole and Jeff the first couple days.
English breakfast
I've had a couple experiences with a proper English - err, maybe Irish - breakfast in the States thanks to our United supporters club local hangout McCann's Irish Pub. I still wanted to experience it in England. We did a bit of searching on Yelp and found Kennington Lane Cafe within walking distance from Luis and Monica's flat.
My Set Breakfast was different, and pretty yummy. I'm not a huge fan of beans - the texture gets me, don't judge! - but the ham (is it Canadian bacon?), sausage, egg, and weirdly dense toast were great! The toast was almost like a soft crouton. Nicole got 2 Eggs on 2 Toasts and her bread was more normal. In keeping with what we found to be the common theme of our trip, our whole breakfast - 2 meals and 2 coffees - was super reasonable at only £11 (about $14), including taxes and service charge (tip).
Tesco and a walk
We've heard Tesco mentioned all over the place in our reading about the UK, so we figured we would check it out. The most surprising thing about grocery shopping in another country is how different everything is. I mean, it wasn't a different language but it was still so different that is was kind of shocking. Some of the disconnect is just different words for different things (ground beef vs. mince), but some is just different items for dishes made in Europe, but not common in the US.
The funny thing about cereals was that the store brands seemed to have beaten the cereal companies to the trademark office, or maybe trademarking is just different in the UK. If you notice here, Frosted Flakes is the Tesco brand while Frosties is the Kellogg's offering. Others, like Cheerios, would have the proper name on the General Mills cereal, but lose the familiar-to-US bee to Tesco's Honey Hoops. More on our shopping challenges later.
On our walk, we saw these huge cylindrical structures that of course I assumed to be proper British Quidditch fields (pitches?).
Quidditch fields with Tesco in the foreground.
I asked Luis and Monica what these giant structures were later. I got some great feedback that I ask as many questions as a three-year old. What can I say? I'm a curious dude! Apparently, these are just gas holders that haven't been used in decades. There is a nice BBC article about the future of the structures if you like useless information as much as I do. While I do love useless information, no, I have not done any searching to see if JK Rowling was inspired by these structures in any way.
We noticed some cute architecture on the way as well, along with tons of flower boxes.
Lessons in public transit
Nicole had read that a good way to see London was to take a specific bus line. On our way to the bus stop, we found a lovely little pub with a gin terrace.
They make great gin drinks. We went back later in the week and the gin drinks were still great - other drinks were, well, not.
Nicole got a great picture with a bus in the background. That bus is going the correct direction for what we were trying to do.
Most of the bus routes are more end-to-end than circular. We found that out the hard way as we rode the right bus the wrong way and ended up about as far south in London as you can go while still being in London. It was a good learning opportunity.
We did get a pretty pictures of a street of houses going down a hill. Pretty sure this was while we were walking back up the street to get on a bus going the correct way. It was about this time that we realized it was going to take about 90 minutes to get from where we were, to up near Oxford Circus. Luckily, London public transportation is awesome and we just grabbed the tube.
Forget the gap, mind your head!
Buckingham and cupcakes
We got off the tube one stop before Oxford Circus and ended up right at Green Park. This is a beautiful park with at least one allée not dissimilar from some made with live oaks in Charleston.
This also put us really close to Buckingham Palace. I am by no means a monarchy geek, but it was still pretty amazing to be so close to something of such significance.
Our real mission at this point was to find this Insta-famous cupcake shop.
On our way, we found an iconic red phone booth! I'm not sure if Nicole was more excited for herself, or to show Nate.
Nicole is a sucker for pretty flowers. Put them in a flowerbox and she's in heaven! These were all over the place!
They have these historical markers placed on buildings where famous people lived. This one marks where Ian Fleming lived from 1908 - 1964 - pretty cool!
We made it! This is the aforementioned, Insta-famous Peggy Porschen cupcake place. They have regular cakes, other goodies, and coffee/tea, but we were here for the cupcakes.
Payment for our stay
As mentioned before, Luis and Monica are from Portugal. Since London is quite a tourist destination and relatively close to Portugal, they get lots of visitors. Their rule for payment is one home-cooked meal. We knew this in advance and had tried to brainstorm a bit before we got there. We took for granted how easy it is to find ingredients for American dishes in America. Our first thought was to make chicken and yellow rice. This seemed pretty straight forward, until we got to the store.
Yellow rice is not a simple staple. It's more like white rice with lots of seasoning. First of all, they don't have yellow rice. Both grocery stores we went to were infatuated with Uncle Ben. All manners - except yellow - of rice were available in the Uncle Ben variety. We needed to call an audible. We decided on sloppy joes and mac 'n cheese. Easy, right? Wrong!
How do most people make sloppy joes? Get some ground beef and a packet of sloppy joe seasoning. First of all, as mentioned before, ground beef in labeled mince in the UK, so that was a bit of a learning experience, though easily conquered - like Britain in 1066! I kid, I kid! Do you think they have sloppy joe seasoning packets? Of course not! We had to look up some recipes and then find the ingredients one by one. The main things were brown sugar, steak seasoning, and onions. I will admit, I am building this up a great deal, mainly so you, my dear reader, are prepared for the bit of culinary excellence in the picture below.
There. You're glad I prepared you with all that build up now, aren't you?
Monica has a, some would say unhealthy, obsession with s'mores since we got her hooked on their Thanksgiving trip a couple years ago. We figured it would be a good idea to keep her addiction nice and strong.
Nicole found (and executed) this recipe. It's basically a base of a graham cracker batter that you melt broken up chocolate pieces over. Then you add the marshmallows - totally different.. more dense than in the US - and throw under the broiler for a bit. It was amazing!
After dinner, we took a walk around a couple of the local parks in Kennington. We definitely needed to walk off some calories.
On the next post, surprise (to Nicole) trip to Paris!