Borough Market and the South Bank

Yesterday a few LAMDA friends and I went down to Borough Market on the South Bank.  On the way there, we walked on the boardwalk beside the River Thames (pronounced "tems"; hah, silly foreigners, who would think to pronounce it "thay-mes"?  ...Me, initially.)

I thought I'd tell the story in a series of photographs that I took.

The view from the Thames.  ("TEMS!  TEMS!")

On the way to the market, we found this group of men making sand sculptures.  There was a bucket positioned by the high boardwalk wall, and a sign carved in the sand, as shown, that read, "Hit the bucket, make a wish, we wished for pounds and made all this!"

   Creation.  I really like this shot.

We arrived at Borough Market, and were struck by a myriad of different smells, ranging from cheeses to Middle Eastern cuisine and dried meats.

 

Drunk Cheese?  Can't say I've had it before...

"Nice to meat you!"

My delicious sausage with onions that became my dinner.

Ladies and gents... I present... London's "Über Burger".  Unfortunately I was too full from my sausage to partake in the Über Burger in order to judge it's überness.  Next time...

These mozzarella balls were served in a cone with pesto and celery salt sprinkled on top.  Too bad they were £1.50 each.  Cute, but not cute enough for three US bucks.

Pistachio Bird's Nests from the Middle Eastern cuisine booth.  They looked (and tasted!) unbelievable.

We went outside to eat, and sat in a church courtyard.  I took this picture as the sun was setting.

The walk back to the Tube station was stunning.  The light reflecting on the Thames was something to see.

And in late-breaking news, my student unlimited Oyster (Metro) Card came in the mail!  I now can have unlimited access to busses and Tube trains within my zone.  Long story short, I have been riding red double decker busses EVERYWHERE!  I even hopped an unnecessary ride from the Tube station to my building, just because I could.  The magic of a Student Oyster card.  It's like it's Christmas all over again.

Pardon My English

It's been almost a week since I've moved here to London, and already I've been picking up the neat, the funky, the superfluous, and - believe it or not - the delicious, of London.

First order of business, and in my eyes the most important: food.  There seems to be a peculiar stigma regarding England that I could never seem to wrap my mind around.  When asking once-ago Britons back in the states what their perceptions of the UK were, aside from the gushings of this museum and that statue and a quick gambol on the Eurostar to Paris for une soirée chic, they all added in, "...terrible food though."

As a modestly self-proclaimed food aficionado, I reacted in a way that would resemble a flabbergasted Foghorn Leghorn.

Because, let's think about it...  Certain people may not have a particular palate for Indian food, but those that do think it's delicious, right?  Same could be said for Thai, or Chinese, or any kind of food.  I have never heard of a nation's cuisine as just being plain old bad...and everyone agreeing that it is.  I will be putting this notion to the test more and will report back on how it goes - as of now, I've been to one restaurant and had soup and salad and it was delightful - but it's hard to mess up soup, right?  Unless you're a college student in a dorm near the end of the semester and attempting to make magic out of beef bouillon cubes, olive oil, carrots and capers.  But that's another story.

Regardless, amongst all this hubbub about bland food, I've found two treats that I've become obsessed with...though they're not classified as "food food."  First...FLAPJACKS!  I've always thought of flapjacks as the colloquial American English version of a pancake, but these are oat squares, often with a flavored frosting on top.  (Quick tangent #1: my U.K. spellcheck is being prissy and wanting me to change "flavored" to "flavoured."  This will never get old.  Ever.)

The second are these pig nose gummies - which seems gross, but they are somehow the perfect hybrid between marshmallow and gummy, with jelly on the tops of them.  I don't understand it, but they're darn good, so I will continue to eat them.

Second order of business, American English or British English?  Being in drama school, many of us have a quick ear for accents, and since living in the UK, we all have unintentionally let our inner refined British accents slip.  The other day I wanted to put my over-practiced accent to its first practical use ever. I went grocery shopping for a few items, a seemingly harmless endeavour.  I managed to have a delightful conversation with the cashier, finally able to navigate the rising and falling pitches and new vocabulary I've been picking up for the last week.  All was going swimmingly until she said, "That'll be £3.59."  I opened my change purse - because the largest UK coins are £2 - took out three £1 coins, and then froze.

I forgot that I am an idiot with UK coins.

59 pence seems like an easy enough amount - one fifty pence coin, one 5 pence, and 4 pennies, or 2 two pence coins.  UK coins are scary, however, and, like our coins, do not have a rhyme or reason to their sizes, shapes, or colors - nor do they print a nice-and-easy numerical value on both faces.  Thankfully, I had a £5 bill in hand, handed this over to the cashier, and made my purchase as a well to do English girl.

That was close, though.  Gotta study up on them coins.  For now I'll keep my hard R's and diphthongs.

Goodbye NY, Hello London!

Whew! I made it.

Made the blog, yes, but I also got here in one piece. I'm sitting in my room in London as I type this; unpacked, fed, slightly tired, yet still prone to freak out each time a red double-decker bus passes by my window. I gleefully rode my first one today after grocery shopping, but more about that later.

First, a little bit about me. I'm a theatre student studying in New York City, and currently spending a semester in London. I've been to a few other countries before, including living in Japan for a year, and I'm looking forward to scouring through more of this vastly diverse continent during my time here.

I wish I took this image...but I didn't. My camera is currently on the charger, but I promise that the rest of the photos will be mine and not hijacked from the internet. Hooray!

Since arriving yesterday, I've already been comparing old Londontown to my native New York. I'm sure all of these observations will be combined into a mini-series or something, but for now, I'm touching upon the difference in public transit.

...Or, rather, the Unbelievable British Superiority of Public Transit.

Granted, I've only been here a day, but in that day I've ridden both the Tube and the busses. As a Christmas present I was given a pre-loaded Oyster card. I had a 65-pound suitcase in tow, and was ready for the worst regarding an hour-long subway ride from Heathrow Airport. Tons of questions flashed through my mind as I lugged my baggage off the conveyor belt: elevators? Space? Local/Express? I opted to fit everything in one suitcase to make it easier to navigate, while making it the heaviest heffa I've ever had to tow through cobblestones.

Anyway, to enter, you simply touch the Oyster card to the reader (no silly tourist-test swipe system...anyone can look like a native by touching a card to a reader). The platform was already on-level, so no elevators needed there. The station was gorgeous, white-walled, and clean - but, being the airport station, I wasn't jumping to conclusions. The train arrived (quietly!) and I immediately likened it to a Disneyland monorail. The train is smaller than New York trains, but the seats are cloth-covered and cushioned. Glass guards run upward from the aisle seats so that, at busy times, seated people aren't infiltrated by standing passengers (and their books/newspapers/sneezes). This is a brilliant idea. Too many times have I ridden the New York subway during rush hour and, fortunate enough to have a seat, had my personal bubble overly invaded by my fellow neighbourly commuters. Look just a little bit lower and...yeah, hi, that's a person your gross tissue just fell on.

Moving on, the train's atmosphere was fantastic as well. I feel that, just due to the fact that the seats were comfortable and the train was clean, train etiquette is stricter - rather, present at all (sorry NY!). In fact, everyone was reading a newspaper.

I realise that I've just written an unusually large amount on public transit, but

WAIT! SO COOL! I set my language on my Mac to English (UK) and it autocorrected my word, "realize" to "realise". Haha! Pardon the excitement. Well, since I'm in the UK, I might as well be using UK spellings. Resume:

I realise that I've just written an unusually large amount on public transit, but if you were a New Yorker and were exposed to these new, unfathomable blessings of transportation, you might be just as enthusiastic. HOWEVER, England has one of the most expensive, if not the most expensive public transportation in the world.

Which leads me to ask my NY friends:

If somehow magically the MTA had drastically minimal construction, gorgeous, functioning trains with cushy seats that allow you bounce up and down if you so please, and beautiful, clean stations, would trade paying more for your fare? For example, my fare from Heathrow was close to £4.50, which xe.com tells me, is about $7.00. An interesting question.

Time to go find a cellphone plan!

Cheers!