The Theatre

These past few days have been the most theatrical yet. On Thursday I went with my flatmates to Shunt, a club that's built into the cavernous tunnels surrounding London Bridge tube station. It was exactly the sort of thing that I would enjoy; the entire place was Soviet-themed, and there were people running around finding clues and announcing them into telephones scattered around the room and weird dance music and some guy in tights and a fanny pack. I'll be back at some point, although hopefully with some idea of what was going on.

Then we went traveling! First we went to Warwick Castle, built by William the Conquerer but currently under the ownership of Madame Tussaud's wax museum. You could tell. My favorite part was when we went to go see a trebuchet launching where the 'trebuchet master' described it as a 'giant, monstrous seesaw' and emphasized repeatedly for a good twenty minutes the amount of toil and danger that trebuchet engineers had to face every day! There were also a lot of really, really lame wax people. Beautiful views though.

We went from Warwick to Stratford, which at first glance is a lot like Disneyland for a certain subset of people, namely the subset that's obsessed with Shakespeare. Basically I loved it. I had some incredible Thai food in a reasonably-priced while 2 Michelin starred restaurant, and then saw a production of Hamlet featuring David Tennant, Patrick Stewart and this guy from Star Wars that was probably the best theatrical production I have ever seen. Pretty perfect. The next day we saw a much more terrible production of the Merchant of Venice which basically amounted to a recital of the script without any meaningful interpretation. And then we went home!

It's worth noting that the entire town of Stratford is completely rife with Shakespeare references, with a bunch of rentable boats with female character names (Juliet, Viola, Beatrice), restaurants called Iago, Othello, Cordelia, an As You Like It Café, et cetera. Oh, and the gem of a toy store in the picture above.

Yesterday we saw a contemporary production of Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author that was probably the most clever play I've ever seen. I'm not sure if I liked it, but I did like that it starred Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars (sci fi seems to be the second theme of the week) and referenced Hamlet quite a bit, at one point specifically referring to the production I had seen two days previously. I can't even begin to describe what the performance was about, but there was one scene in which the writers of the play explained the whole story to a producer and then were horribly murdered by one of the characters. The whole thing sort of reminded me of a much more self-referential At Swim-Two-Birds.

It's cold and rainy out today. I should probably start getting used to that.

Ahh!

Oh lordy, I have been bad at updating this blog. Two weekends ago we went to Oxford, and last week we went to Bruges and Ghent to eat a lot of waffles (which are truly divine creations) and frites and chocolate and see the Ghent Altarpiece and some really funny paintings by Memling (and a Bosch!). Belgium was a really great change from London, and Bruges was probably one of the most serene, fairylandish towns I've been to (Ghent seems more like people could actually live there). We did nearly go to a bar called Retsin's Lucifernum, but given the name and the location on a sketchy (or sketchy for Bruges, which is Not Sketchy) street, we got scared and got beers elsewhere. Next time!

My flickr page is probably a better indication of what I've been doing than this is for these two trips, alas.

Tomorrow we go to Stratford for quite a lot of Shakespeare. What else! Today I bought a coffee mug for my favorite Underground line. The whole set is pretty cool, although the Hammersmith & City line mug probably looks like something of a dirty joke to the uninformed.

It's somehow already phase one midterms week here. I'm not sure where the time went.

Catching Up

The fact that I'm studying abroad is maybe catching up to me, and I've been really busy. But here are some of the cool things I've done recently:

1. A country walk near Silchester. I saw the remains of a Roman amphitheater of the city of Calleva, miles of Roman walls, and a 12th century church whose back wall was a bit of one of these Roman walls. The town we began in, Mortimer, had streets with names like "The Street" and "The Avenue," and the weather was pretty wacky and we basically had to wade through some giant pits of mud. This was all a really welcome change from bustling London.

2. The Hunterian Museum, the museum at the Royal College of Surgeons, which was probably one of the strangest and coolest museums I'll see while I'm here. Essentially a display of hundreds of preserved of preserved, uh, things in formaldehyde, I got to see (among other things) an armadillo fetus, Winston Churchill's dentures, syphilitic penises, a giant collection of nipples, and pretty much every other weird thing you could imagine. The staff was sort of surprised that we were there and kept whispering to each other, "They're just a group of friends!" as if the normal visitors are actually interested in studying animal fetuses and weird skeletons.

3. This amazing farmers market in Marylebone, right near my flat! I talked with the jolliest man about yogurt and then bought some.

4. A blues bar, Ain't Nothin' But the Blues which is located in a room that's smaller than my bedroom here. Lots of fun, good music (the lead singer kept twitching in a sort of British rocking out way), and once again, just the tiniest place. There was a woman with a tiny hat there as well.

Autumn's a coming. It's fast becoming coat weather. I'm terribly excited.

Tomorrow we're going as a class to the Tower of London, and the next day a bunch of fun friends are headed to Oxford. The future holds Bruges, Stratford, and maybe Cardiff.

Oh, and here's a picture of the Hunterian Museum, which might give you an idea of how bizarrely this place was set up. Cases and cases of preserved things!

Food, Greenwich, Beckett

I've done a lot since I last updated. Last Friday we went to Westminster Abbey on Friday and while we were in the Poets' Corner (Samuel Johnson! Lord Tennyson!) the choir started rehearsing and it was pretty epic. The next day we went to Greenwich and revisited a lot of the places I first visited when I was thirteen, as well as the house of Queen Anne of Denmark which had a gorgeous spiral staircase. Then on Monday we went to see a bunch of Samuel Beckett shorts at the Young Vic, some of which were absolutely amazing. And then yesterday Maddie and I went to the Courtauld Gallery, which has my favorite Manet and so much else good in it.

But this post is going to be about food. Some basic points on British eating followed by an adventure:

1. Tikka. I read a few months ago about how the UK Foreign Minister proclaimed that Chicken Tikka Masala is Britain's national dish, but lordy, it's everywhere. Yesterday I saw a bagel with tikka flavoring, and the day before I saw tikka flavored potato chips, and every day I go to Tesco I see tikka sandwiches. I've yet to try any of these.

2. British chocolate. It's better, and that seems to be as empirical a fact as there is. Some of the varieties are just more well constructed (the Mars Bar is a perfect candy bar, no contest), but some of the British candy bars are better than their American counterparts solely due to the quality of the chocolate (British confectionary manufacturers don't have to worry so much about their candy melting since it's colder and smaller here, so they use fewer stabilizers and other candy tainters). Thus, Kit Kats taste fabulous here even if their American cousins taste like chalk. There's a NYT article from last year which explains the issue quite well.

3. Feathery eggs. Regular food items (even the cheap stuff) seem more natural here. Our eggs are sometimes entirely covered in feathers (this is frightening) and our bread molds much, much faster than I'm used to (this is frustrating). It's just a shame that quality produce is so expensive and hard to come by, although I suppose if we started eating more of peas and carrots we'd be all set. Note of interest: the idea of a veggie pasty/wrap/etc. here is much more carrot-and-pea-oriented than I'm used to or care to be used to.

4. St. John Bread and Wine. The big culinary fun was today, when Maddie and I went to St. John Bread and Wine in Spitalfields, a spinoff of St. John, which I guess is ranked in Restaurant Magazine as the sixteenth best restaurant in the world or something, as well as one of the bricklayers of the current ongoing British culinary renaissance. In addition to having just really good bread and wine (wowowowowow), St. John Bread and Wine is a British restaurant in the most traditional sense, so that not only are the items on the menu contingent on what's growing in Britain, but the meat served is the sort of meat that Britons have been eating for centuries, even if it seems sort of repellent now. So Maddie and I had deviled rabbit kidneys along with a whole artichoke, local green beans, corn on the cob, and two delicious desserts that each somehow had currants in them (and the bread, oh the bread). It was all really wonderful, and rabbit kidneys have the consistency of sausage and are actually really flavorful. Pictures later, hopefully.

The pound is falling! The pound is falling! 1.785! 1.785!