Finally, reading week is here! Thursday night I stayed in and worked hard on my synthesizer. It started snowing again so people were very excited, but I was less excited because that meant I had to wake up even earlier to get to my early class! I left two hours before class on Friday (normally I only leave an hour ahead of time), but I actually didn't have any trouble! The Jubilee Line was completely out of it (severe delays, etc) and so was the Metropolitan, so I walked about fifteen minutes to get to the Northern line, expecting that everyone in the world (and farmers' mums) would also be there too, but I was able to smoosh onto the first train and arrived near campus ten minutes later! The below image is a picture of the underground line status when it was snowing so hard last weekend, if you want an idea of the havoc that snow causes with London travel:
This was the view out my window on Friday morning:
Walking past the church on my way to the tube station:
Last night a bunch of us headed to the London Philharmonic Orchestra, as Marin Alsop was conducting Kodàly, Dvoràk, and Chopin! It wassssss awesommmme! I lurve Dvoràk! It was a really fabulous concert. Sanjiv had never seen an orchestra before, so he was really funny. At intermission he had a bunch of questions and comments. "It sounds just like wearing very high fidelity headphones and listening to a lossless format!" He told us. "Which is the instrument that is...how to describe it? It is made of wood and it is tall." "Is the person with the wand, are they, well, what is their job, do musicians actually follow what they are doing?" "Is that an organ?! Oh my gosh, how do they get them to be so big?" "Do people own their own instruments? Or do those belong to the Philharmonic?"
We saw a ton of people that we knew, randomly. It is good to know that so many young folks like us go to classical concerts, haha. We saw a few people from a different residence hall that we occasionally hang out with, and a German Erasmus (exchange program) student as well. Maia saw some folks she used to room with and we added them to our group after the concert. We walked around the Strand a bit looking for a place with food, but a lot of pub kitchens shut down around 10 so we ended up at a fast food place chilling for a few hours.
Today around lunchtime I was putting some pizza leftovers in the oven to heat up when I saw from the window people I knew walking out of the house. I yelled at them for fun and they invited me to go get cheap Indian food. Can't turn that down! So I threw my pizza back in the fridge, grabbed a coat, and went out the door. We ended up in Wembley, which is kind of north-London. It was probably a half hour tube ride to get there. To my eye, it seems like an Indian / Sri Lankan type area with a lot of interesting food stands and things. A stand was selling "Sweet Corn" but with limes, chili pepper, etc, meaning that it was actual esquite, a Mexican dish, so that confused me a bit. Anyway, we found a cheap restaurant specializing in dosas, a kind of crepe-like food. Before the dosas came, I ordered something called a gobi, which I figured would be hotter than heck, but it was actually cauliflower fried in neon-orange stuff that wasn't super spicy or anything. Gross, cauliflower! Sanjiv had me try some of his appetizer too. I should remember the name but I can't at the moment. It was just kind of a light, dumpling type bread that you dipped in different sauces. And then, our dosas came!
Enormous crepes! At the bottom of the photo you can see my bright orange cauliflower, haha.
The proper method of eating a dosa, by the way, is to crumple it up at the edges. It is very crunchy and thing, and on the inside we each had a different potato mash going on. I had one of the very traditional ones with buttery / masala (spice) potatoes, but some people had ordered hot variants and they suffered for their choices, haha. You tried to pick up some of the potato mash with the shell, and then dipped it in any of the four sauces that came with the meal, including a coconut one that I actually liked quite a bit.Then it was time for round 2! I was already full, but I helped Sanjiv split a giant bread thing that he ordered. When it first came to the table, it was almost as big as a basketball, but it started deflating fast. I liked it a lot!
Lakshmi demonstrating the proper way to eat a dosa:
The insides of a dosa exposed!
After dinner, a few people ordered chai, but I got a yogurt / mango mixture thing. At first it tasted gross to me, like sour cream or something, but then I decided it tasted more like cheesecake and I enjoyed the rest of it, haha.
They also got me to try something called "Pon." I am not entirely sure how to spell it. Apparently, in India you buy it from Pon Shops, which made me laugh. It was a bunch of herbs wrapped up in a leaf, stabbed through with a clove. I figured I would be able to stomach it, but after only about twenty seconds I was fighting off the gag reflex and losing, so I had to spit it out before the worst occurred. The taste and texture was just very unpleasant, but then it left a minty freshness in my mouth which lasted for a long time, so I guess it accomplished its purpose as a kind of after-dinner mint. Here's a photo of the pon experience:
Before you can drink your coffee, you have to make it frothy first! Two of the people at my table were masters of this art, but the third person with coffee made a mess, haha.
We walked down the street to an Indian sweet shop after lunch. I saw these corn looking things right away and decided they must be mine! I passed over the milk based candies and sweet bread items to get a cup of these (the store clerk thought I was weird). They were like chewy rice krispies, but sweetened with syrup or something, I don't really know how to describe them. I would recommend them, haha.
We came back just for a few hours and tonight I am torn between social activities! I found ping pong balls at a store for 50 p, and so I was planning on introducing the UK to beer / cider / liquid pong tonight, but some people are going to a dupstep club, which would be very interesting! Another of my friends (who was randomly at the symphony concert also, haha) is on call at a residence hall and wants people to come play an Israeli / Mennonite card game with her....whatever that means! So I will let you know what I wind up doing tomorrow!
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