Oberlin

A lot has happened since my last post, so I'm going to strive for a greatest hits collection, call it "Time Life's Best of London Late February and Early March 2012." That'll sell on late night TV, I think.

There's this walking club that goes on a different country walk every Sunday. There's no leader or real structure to it, there's just a train station, a time, and printed out walking directions that features lines like, "make a 75 degree left turn at the 3rd wooden gate on your right, onto the old logging path." I went on one with Robin and Maren near the border of Surrey and West Sussex, getting off the train at Haslemere station.

Getting off the train, we saw some middle aged people with backpacks, so we followed them, and congregated with the other 14 middle aged people with backpacks right outside the station. After a kind of forced circle with names, we started walking. We went through some modern English villages before really getting into the forest and hills. We stopped for lunch at a pub that was at least 300 years old because the roof was six foot three (I know this because I am 6'2''), and the roof was sagging under the weight of at least a few generations. I had a BLT and a pint of Fullers, and we sat with some of the middle aged people with backpacks, who were pretty fun to talk to. The second half of the walk had some crazy views over dozens of miles of pastures and rich people houses. The rich people houses in Surrey are different than those in the US: here, they are converted stables and farmhouses, as opposed to huge faux-stone monstrosities with three car garages and game rooms in basements. As if the day weren't idyllic enough, we stopped for tea with our new backpack-toting, middle-aged friends at a place called Hemingway's in Haslemere before boarding the train home.

I've been to quite a few pubs, and two of my favorites so far are the Brew Dog in Camden and the Craft Beer Co right by Farringdon tube stop. They both have really awesome beers. Most of the pubs in London close at 11:00, which is weird for us American college kids, but it seems like most of the people who frequent pubs in London are adult professionals stopping by after work, so it makes sense. The drinking culture here has some strange contradictions. Drinking is more commonplace here as a social activity done in moderation than in the U.S.--I think the different connotations of "bar" versus "pub" sort of encapsulates that. Pubs are like bars except pubs are friendlier, older (both in terms of the building itself and the people who generally go there), and happier. That could be me projecting something onto pubs, but that's my impression. At the same time, I've seen more outrageously drunk people here than in the U.S, especially at clubs. That could just be a difference in being in a city as opposed to in Oberlin where, generally speaking, getting outrageously drunk isn't in the dominant culture. So there's a weird combination here, where it seems like more people drink in moderation, but there's also a fair amount of binge drinking. Actually, the government is raising taxes on alcohol sold in supermarkets in an effort to curb Britain's binge-drinking image before the Olympics. Or at least that's the rhetoric coming from David Cameron, but whatever, time for another story.

There's this meat market in the City called Smithfield, which sells meat by the kilo to restaurants and people with big freezers who are cheap and really like meat. We don't have a big freezer, but there's 7 of us in our flat, and we're cheap and we really like meat, so we thought we would go. Trick is, the market opens at 3:00 AM, and you're supposed to get there early if you want the deals. So, being college students, we decided to stay up all night instead of waking up early. We went out to Camden, which has some fun, goth-punky, kind of touristy night life, and at about 2:00 we took the night bus back to our flat to figure out how to get to the market. It took an hour of night bus confusion, but we found our way to Smithfield right as it was opening. In my tipsy, sleep-deprived state, I thought I'd walked into a dystopian movie somewhere between Brave New World and a PETA recruitment film. There were rows and rows of carcasses, and endless traffic of men in blood-stained, white coats pushing carts with dismembered animal limbs in clear plastic wrap. Through the windows behind the market counters you could see more blood-stained men with the meat-industry equivalent of hammers, saws, and powertools, severing tendons and smashing through cartilage. I had a new found empathy for the medics who amputated on battlefields in the Civil War. Somehow, in the midst of the carnage, we managed to buy 5 kilos of chicken, 4 kilos of bacon, 3 kilos of English sausage, and a huge cut of ribeye steak, all for 45 pounds. For the Americans out there, that's like finding a free cow and paying someone minimum wage to slaughter it for you.

We've put the meat to good use, cooking some for dinner about three times a week. We've made my chicken enchiladas, Maren's country fried chicken, numerous bacon breakfasts, and pastas with the sausage. Probably the best meal ever was when we made the steak, with a side of garlic mashed potatoes and salad. London can be an intimidatingly expensive city, but if you're willing to cook at home most of the time and go on some night bus adventures into hundred-year-old megamarkets where the men still wear white coats, you can eat steak without worrying about going into corporate law in order to cover your student debts.