Thanksgiving Weekend

I managed to squeeze a little turkey and football into Thanksgiving weekend. As you might guess, neither was the variety you think of in the United States, but when surrounded by foreigners you have to make do with what you have.

First things first: I could not secure any cranberry sauce. None of the grocery stores here seemed to stock it, leaving my Thanksgiving dinner devoid of color. Deb and I had to make do with turkey breast steaks, potatoes and a chicken gravy mix.

Whole birds actually did replace ice cream in the freezers of Somerfield the week before the big turkey roast, but I doubt our little oven would have done well with a whole fowl. Therefore we stuck to our dutiful little portions of white meat, which certainly didn’t give enough fat to fill even a miniature gravy boat. Thus, it was on to store-bought gravy, which was not pre-made. Just like tea, you just had to add boiling water. There was also no turkey gravy, so the chicken variety had to stand in as a substitute. At least we didn’t have to turn to duck gravy.

As far as potatoes went … well, they’re still going. The big bag was on sale at Somerfield this week, and spuddenly we only have eyes for tatties – 1.8 kilos of them. Since we had no shortage, I made myself a thanksgiving dinner baked potato while Deb insisted on mashed.

Mashing the potatoes was a bit of an unorthodox event, since we don’t have a mixer, blender or potato masher. We ended up boiling the spuds until they had practically mashed themselves before chopping them with large spoons. It sounds like a recipe for disaster, but actually netted some very tasty mashed potatoes. I’ve had lumpier that were made with a blender.

With the big day out of the way, we went to Windsor Castle on Friday. The castle is the favorite residence of the Royal family, though the queen wasn’t there when we visited. As you can imagine, the real estate was rather exclusive, so we didn’t do much Black Friday shopping there.

Unsurprisingly it’s a rather large castle, and once you’re inside it doesn’t really look like a castle at all. If you could breed a castle and a palace, you’d get Windsor Castle. Well, you might want to throw in a cathedral as a grandfather, because the grounds contained quite the impressive chapel, which was done in the parallel English gothic style. In other words, it had a wide, flat ceiling that looked like it should have fallen in because nothing appeared to be supporting the heavy stone roof. Quite impressive.

In Windsor we also walked to the adjacent Eaton, which is home to a quite prestigious private school. Prince Harry and Prince William went there, so you know it is pretty swishy. Having said that, it really isn’t much to visit. The Swans in the River Thames, which you have to cross to get to Eaton from Windsor, were much more interesting. Apparently the Queen owns them.

Saturday was the football part of the weekend. Sadly I’m not talking about big men in tights and helmets running into each other. I’m talking about skinny men in shorts kicking a ball up and down a field. Whether you call it America’s name of soccer or the rest of the world’s name of football, the sport is incredibly popular here. We went to a Queens Park Rangers, or QPR game. They played Sheffield Wednesday at home, and the stadium is only about a 50 minute walk from Edgware Road.

Now, don’t ask me to explain the entire history of QPR as it was described to me. In their sordid past, they used to be in the aptly named premier league, but seemed to have forgotten some skills and dropped down into the next-most prestigious league. Apparently soccer clubs here can be dropped down or called up to different leagues much like players in Major League Baseball. I don’t really understand it. I also don’t understand why Sheffield had a day of the week in their name.

The game was lots of fun, even though it was a 0-0 tie. I don’t know how many shots hit the bar of the goal, and there seemed to be a lot of action, for a soccer game. Honestly, the sport is a bit mind-numbing, even compared to baseball, but fans do enough to keep themselves entertained. They chant, sing and generally have a good time. Oddly enough, the Sheffield fans were out singing the QPR fans by a lot despite the fact that they only had one end of the stands to fill. They made up for their lack of numbers with volume, though.

As we were leaving, I was put off to find out that the stadium held over 15,000 people, and it was nearly full. That’s for a minor league game. The place did not look that big.

Sunday we went on a charity fun run, which was followed by a Thanksgiving dinner at the volunteer coordinator’s house. The fun run was, well, fun, and I even managed to come in first out of the runners. That says something about the competition, and the fact that we had to keep stopping so someone could point out the correct route. But, it was fun, not a competition.

The dinner was marvelous. Mashed potatoes, turkey, pumpkin pie, it was all there in copious amounts. It was a proper turkey, too. Roast as an entire bird, not as a silly portion of breast meat. I also tried a parsnip, which is apparently traditional Christmas fare in England. It honestly didn’t taste like much except a slightly sweet piece of baked wood. Not unpleasant, but nothing to write in your blog about, other than to brag that you at a parsnip.

And that about wraps it up. I’ll still be on the lookout for cranberry sauce in the coming weeks, but I don’t hold out much hope. I’ll just have to wait for Christmas to have a proper feast.

Oxford

There was plenty to do last weekend. In less than three days I went to a musical, visited Oxford, played paintball and dropped by the Natural History Museum. Some of these activities were nothing but fun, while others didn’t exactly go as planned.

Lets start with the first activity; one that didn’t go as planned but was still plenty of fun. As you probably know, one of my aspirations for my last month here was to see Patrick Stewart starring in Macbeth. I’d stopped by the box office and checked the internet for tickets several times.

Unfortunately, the box office is completely sold out. Buying online would currently require me to sell my kidney as financial backing, so the idea of seeing Macbeth has become nothing but a ghost. But Deb and I couldn’t leave London without going to the theatre, so we moved on to plan B.

In retrospect, plan B seems like a bit of a cultural step away from Macbeth. Not because it is any less British, but because it is an entirely different slice of culture. We went to see Monty Python’s Spamalot, which is based on the ever-popular Holy Grail.

The show was great fun. It contained the perfect mix of scenes completely stolen from the movie and new material so that it covered all the high points, such as migrating coconuts but was still fresh and worth seeing.

Friday we boarded a minibus outside Faraday House and rode to Oxford. Now, the main point of going to Oxford was essentially to say we’d been there. There was no studying going on and we essentially walked around and looked at a bunch of colleges from the outside. At least, we looked at them as best we could through the white fog that was our breath. It was bitterly cold Friday.

Since it was so cold, it obviously makes sense that we spent hours and hours walking outside. By the time we’d seen about seven colleges whose names I don’t remember, my feet were numb. As I recall, highlights of colleges included the one Bill Clinton attended for a time and one where there are no students, only professors who sit around and learn all day long.

Oxford follows the pattern of a British town in that there are old back roads to stomp around, some of which could be taken straight from hundreds of years ago, but if you round the right corner, you are right on a miniature version of Oxford Street. Deb and I had to go to Oxford’s commercial plaza just so we could pop in to KFC (Yes, the American KFC). We went there not because we had forgotten to pack a lunch, but because we needed to sit somewhere warm.

After a tour inside some college that will, unfortunately, remain forever unnamed in my memory, we stopped by a traveling French market that had luckily set up shop in town for the day. Deb and I each bought a pastry to eat, but she showed off by ordering in French. I can tell she’s gearing up for our day in Paris in December.

On the bus ride back we could see the mountains of Wales off in the distance. That’s probably as close as I’ll get to them this trip. No hiking in Wales for me.

Saturday we had signed up to play paintball at the urging of one of the security guards at Faraday, who runs the trip every semester. It was just about the perfect day to play paintball – dark and threatening rain. We were slotted to play ten games on 4 courses, which made for a very long day indeed.

The day got a lot longer in the middle of the sixth game, when our organizer suffered a very scary moment. Somehow, when he was falling, a paintball went under his mask and hit him in the mouth, knocking him out cold. He fell over on his back and swallowed his tongue, cutting off his oxygen supply. If one of the marshals (paintball referees) had not gotten to him and been trained to pull his tongue out of his throat, the scene would not have been pretty. As it stood, he ended up being pretty shaken up and we had to suffer a few scary minutes off the field when we didn’t know what was happening.

Fortunately it wasn’t any worse than that, and we got to go home on the bus with exhaustion as our only ailment.

Sunday was, by necessity, a little less adventurous than the previous several days. Work doesn’t do itself, and the end of the semester is fast approaching. But we did spend a little time in the Natural History museum, which is just a walk through Hyde Park away from our flat. Entry into national museums in Britain is free, and it has been foolish to not visit the several galleries that are situated just south of my humble home.

The museum taught us about bugs, dinosaurs, and the planet earth. On the way home, we even got to help a little French boy who had wandered away from his family and was running around panicked on the street. Rather, I should say that Deb helped the little French boy. I just walked along and tried not to alarm him with my beard.

It rained on the walk home, setting up a theme that the papers say will continue throughout the week. What a dreary time. We don’t get off for Thanksgiving, and the weather won’t even give us a break.

Bathking in glory

The plan was to have a little more to report this week, because I wanted to see Patrick Stewart in MacBeth Saturday night. Unfortunately, waiting to buy tickets until the morning of a show is not a good way to actually see the said show.

Shakespear had to wait, but the week’s other fun didn’t. Friday we hopped on board a coach bus outside Faraday House and took the three hour drive to Bath. That’s the city of Bath, not a cleaning. Fortunately, the showers work in London, so I don’t need to ride for 180 minutes to rinse off.

Bath is one of the more famous cities in England, next to London of course. It was started in Roman times because a geological fault leads to hot water escaping the ground. The Romans, being lovers of public bathing houses, harnessed the steamy goodness of the earth with a complex that included multiple pools and a temple to the Goddess they attributed to providing them with the warm H20.

After several hundred years and the Roman’s withdrawal from England, the public bath houses were basically built over. By the time Royalty was building another bathing house on the site in the 1800s, the city was about 14 feet higher than it had been due to a natural phenomenon where urban areas actually gain altitude because they basically build on their own refuse. Eventually, the old baths were discovered in astoundingly good condition, considering they had been buried for hundreds of years.

They were in such good shape that the baths are still watertight and the water still flows through the Roman’s channel system properly. The sight’s original temple is gone, and the bathing houses no longer have their impressive roofs, but the floors, walls and columns are still largely there.

Walking around something so old is always interesting, but walking around something so old that is still basically in working order is even better. Because there are no roofs to the bathing houses algae grows in the water and makes it green, and you can no longer go into the baths because we understand the hazards of untreated water and lead pipes, but for all intensive purposes Bath could still be bathing. We spent about two hours in the Baths and accompanying museum sucking up all of the information we could from the telephone-like self-guided audio tours.

Once those were exhausted, we walked around the accompanying tourist trap for the remaining two hours of our stay. Marks and Spencer, H&M and all the usual stores were there, trying to snatch our money. For some reason, Deb had a hankering for some hot chocolate, and dragged me into a chocolate café up the beaten path.

I shouldn’t make it sound like it was a mistake to go, although afterwards my stomach certainly screamed that it was. I got toffee hot chocolate, which was just what it sounds like. Deb got “Chocolate Indulgence,” which was basically hot chocolate poured over chocolate ice cream. The ice cream melted and rose to the top, making a drink rich enough that I was glad to be drinking my simple thick hot chocolate with toffee syrup.

Oh, did I mention that my sweet-toothed girlfriend suggested that we get some mousse, too? I had chocolate orange moose, while Deb just had chocolate mousse. Well, she ordered raspberry chocolate mousse, but the clerk made a mistake. On top of all that, each order got a complimentary raspberry crème piece of chocolate.

It took quite some time to make it through all that since it was so rich, so it was then time to get on the bus. I was glad, since I felt a little sick and really did not want to walk much. Our tour guide drove us through some of the nice sights of the city, which has buildings that are all made of limestone that oddly bears a color and texture akin to sandstone.

Outside of the city, at the top of a large hill, we could see far enough to glimpse the mountains that mark the beginning of Wales. I don’t think we’ll be making it to Wales in the next month, but at least we saw it.

On the three hour bus ride home, I started a Soduku in the Daily Metro. It was the first time I’ve ever done any of the puzzles, and I can now say that I hate them. I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time on two puzzles, in two days now, and I’ve managed to screw them each up beyond repair. It was Deb’s suggestion that I start one, so I blame her for my trouble.

That about raps up the Bath recap. Next week I’ll be able to write about Oxford, and hopefully MacBeth.

Dublin

Dublin didn't have many of the picturesque camera moments like Edinburgh. In fact, my camera had a lot of trouble with the poorly lit situations we ran into there.

It also wasn't the cleanest city we've visited. That distinction would go to York, which was devoid of the small pieces of litter lying in Ireland's capital's streets.

We even had worse weather in Dublin than in any other city I've visited on this little European jaunt. Clear skies on Friday and Saturday morning gave way to a rainy Saturday evening and cloudy Sunday.

Yet Dublin still stands as my favorite place from this trip. Even though it wasn't the prettiest and didn't have any single outstanding activity like hiking to the top of Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh or listening to the Evensong in York Minster, I would rather go back to Dublin than any other place.

It isn't because the activities we did were all very good, though they were. It isn't because the city was cheap, because it wasn't. It wasn't even because all the Irish people in the United States brainwashed me into wanting to love the Emerald Isle with their own proclamations of its beauty, though I did want very badly to like it.

The fact that I liked Dublin stemmed from the people there. As a whole, they were probably the friendliest I've ever run into. From the man who discussed the combination sink/hand dryer in the bathroom with me for five minutes to the bouncer at a pub who spent more time asking where you were from than your age, the Irish had a more welcoming and interpersonal attitude than I've run across anywhere else in Europe. Not once were we made to feel like stupid, crass Americans. On the contrary, we were usually welcomed with smiles.

Before launching into the details, let's establish the basics of this trip. It is the only trip out of England I've taken with Syracuse London. That meant that in addition to Deb and myself, there were 11 other students, a professor and an administrator traveling with us, whom I knew in varying degrees.

It also meant someone else organized our flight and about 60% of our activities, and that we payed an upfront sum before the trip to cover these expenses. These prepaid activities were, in order: A "walking tour" of the 1916 Irish rebellion for independence, a tour of the Kilmainham Gaol prison museum, a trip to nearby Sandy Cove and the James Joyce tower/museum and a "musical pub crawl." It also paid for and organized the 45-minute train to and from Stansted Airport in London, the 20 minute cab rides between Dublin airport and the city and various other required light rail and bus transit.

So we didn't have the headache of getting to and from the airport and paying for various fares. It also defrayed the expenses of traveling slightly, since we prepaid for so many activities. Finally, it made us do a few things we probably wouldn't have done without the school's urging. Those were the trip to Sandy Cove and probably the musical pub crawl.

Although we flew in Thursday night, neither Deb nor myself did much after we arrived in Dublin because we were so tired. I don't know what it is about flying, but it just sucks the energy out of me.

Friday

Going to bed early was okay, because we needed the energy for Friday. After the hostel's complimentary breakfast of toast and tea, we set off on the 1916 Rebellion walking tour, which took us to a few famous places and told us the story of the rebellion against British rule. I won't pretend to have learned everything the guide told us, because it was very easy to simply drift off and take in some of the city's sights. However, I can tell you that it basically started out with some dissidents who decided to break British rule, took over the city for a few days, and then was crushed by a brutal British general. The rebellion itself didn't establish Ireland's independence, but it did galvanize public opinion against British rule, according to our guide.

In addition to providing historic background, the tour gave me a good look around the city. Like I said before, it isn't the most stunning of places visually, but it does have a few standout places. Anywhere along the River Liffey is pretty, and the Dublin Spire, which was originally to be named the Millennium Spire until its completion in 2003, were particularly interesting points.

This brings me to an interesting point. The hundreds of years of British rule meant that Dublin looked a lot like a British city. Cars drove on the left side of the road and the architecture was largely a lump of different styles. Even though it didn't have a particularly Gaelic style, Dublin still had some touches of its own culture. Although the mailboxes were the same design as those in London, they were painted green instead of red. All the street signs had English on them, but it was below Gaelic. Even though everyone speaks English in their daily lives, Gaelic is compulsory in Irish schools, and it might even be the official national language, if memory serves.

Next we took buses to the Kilmainham Gaol Prison museum, where a lot of Irish political prisoners and general criminals alike had been held. It was originally designed to hold each prisoner in his own cell, but was almost always overcrowded. We got a tour through the prison and walked through the museum, where I browsed through more history from the 1916 rebellion.

Those two activities took us from 9 in the morning until 4 in the afternoon, so we didn't have much more time that day. Our buses back from the prison passed right by the door of the Guinness Storehouse, which is Dublin's famous beer's tourist trap, ala Heineken Experience. The seven floor tour was a little more technical than its Dutch counterpart. It told us all about the actual brewing, rather than just the marketing, end. They also had malted Guinness barley for us to sample, and it tasted quite a bit like the final Guinness product, only a chocolate version.

For dinner we went to a resteraunt serving a lot of Irish food. I actually didn't have any Corned Beef and Cabbage on the trip, but I did manage to order a seafood cream soup, which came with soda bread and seemed to be a pretty traditional Irish meal. I should have a full review of it on the food blog soon, but let's say for now that it was jam-packed with delicious fish.

Saturday

Saturday morning we headed to the James Joyce Museum in Sandy Cove, which is about a 20 minute by Dublin's light rail, or DART system. I didn't care for the only Joyce I've ever read, so the museum itself wasn't much of a highlight. However, it was in a tower which had a magnificent view of the Irish coast. I really regret not having a chance to go through the Irish mainland and travel down the coast to see the beautiful non-urban sites of the country, but this gave a little taste of it. The rocky coastline was breathtaking.

There was also a nearby area with some swimmers jumping into what must have been a cold ocean. I was a little cold in my pea coat, but apparently there is a club that takes a swim every day of the year. Better them than me.

We had the afternoon to ourselves, and Deb and I essentially spent it digging through shops in Dublin. When it started to rain we resisted the temptation to take the DART farther out to see more of the coastline and confined ourselves to shopping. I got a nice "Ireland" hoodie sweatshirt to substitute for the camouflage one that I currently wear in half of my pictures from Europe.

We also went to the old Jamison Distillery to round out our tours of famous Irish exports. It filled in some of the parts of fermentation that the Guinness tour glazed over, so the two complimented each other well.

Saturday night we went on the "musical pub crawl," which consisted of a large group of people who had purchased tickets following two musicians to two separate pubs to listen to their music. They opened up a special floor on the pubs for us, and played and talked about their music. I know Deb and I wouldn't have done this on our own, and it was a great part of our experience in Dublin. I very much like Irish music, and just like listening to bagpipers in Edinburgh helped make that trip, listening to a man on a fiddle and a man on a guitar sit down and have some fun made this trip.

Afterward, we asked the performers where else we could hear live music, and they pointed us to another pub. After a slight detour, we arrived to find mostly gray-headed people listening to a group of five performers who were sitting around a table in the corner of the pub. Deb and I weren't put off by the age of those around us, we were too happy to listen to the three fiddles and two flutes playing away.

Sunday

Sunday we tried to go to mass in St. Patrick's Cathedral. The only problem with that plan was that St. Patrick's Cathedral is apparently now a protestant church. We still got to go in to see the service, but it just didn't feel right going to a protestant service in Ireland.

We also walked around the Dublin Castle grounds, which were quite nice. We were particularly fond of a cat that was hanging around the garden and soliciting scratches behind the ears from succeptible tourists.

And after that breathless tour, it was time to fly back. I beat Deb twice in Scrabble on the plane and train back to London, but that is the last of the highlights. It's too bad we only had a weekend. It left me wondering whether we should have spent our entire mid-semester break in Ireland.