Uncle Traveling Matt's Adventures

The Great Lambing of 2010

matt — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:35:43 +0000

So there are a lot of lamb in the UK. In particular, lambs are quite prevelant in Wales (which ends up with the stereotype involving the Welsh and sheep-love). Half of my trips to the countryside involve some sort of lamb sightings. Last Easter, we went down to Rye and, during one walk, we noticed that it was the time of year for new born sheep. So there were tons of cute, skittish sheep trying out the whole walking thing. Very cute.

This year, the whole lambing season seems to have come up quite a bit. Dina and Adrian actually went out and took part in assisting in birthing them some lambs (Dina - feel free to provide some insight if you want!). OK, so this doesn’t sound particularly exciting. And it’s not, since i had nothing to do with lambing. But then, while looking for some interesting British television to show Carolyn’s friend Mehreen who was visiting, we found something rather odd. On BBC2, there was a show called Lambing Live (the “Live” bit is most important) on. Well, we had to check this one out. And lo and behold, the name of the show was exactly right. An entire hour long show about birthing lambs. On primetime. On the second biggest BBC TV Station. They tried to add a little excitment to it, with a profile on the family whose farm they were showing. And I’m sure, if we’d watched the whole thing, it might have included drama like death and financial fun. But the best we saw is that the lamb stands there and the baby just suddenly slides right out.

Anyway, just an odd observation about an odd show that someone felt aided in “Stimulating creativity and cultural excellence”.

Madrid Christmas Lights

matt — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 22:43:44 +0000

So we have tons of photos from Madrid, so I think I’ll break them out some more. Today, let’s look a little more at the Christmas lights Madrid has to offer the holidays. Like many cities, Madrid goes all out with their festive spirit. Let’s see what they have, shall we?

Here is the famous Plaza del Sol and the ‘mascot’ of Madrid, a bear with a tree (the Tio Pepe sign, the other icon of Sol, is next to the bear). You can walk into the big tree. Note how few people are there — normally it’s rammed full at all hours.

These were some cool-ass snowflakes on the side of a building (I think it’s a Cortes Ingles). There were also long vertical lights that ‘dripped’ down the building.

This is a cool closeup of the snowflakes hovering over Plaza Mayor, the other big square in Madrid. They almost looked like flying saucers.

This grand building used to be the post office. Now the mayor uses it as the city hall. It was under heavy restoration for over 10 years, so this was the first time Carolyn got to see it.

We have no idea what the purpose of this building is, but it is beautiful and I love anything called Metropolis . Jim took this excellent nighttime photo of it with some of the lights on the boulevard next to it.

Many of the streets had massive amounts of lights draped across them. This is a fine example with the lights acting as rugs or something.

It was fun to just wander and see all the wonderful lights all over the place. The Spanish gave the Parisians (and Londoners) a run for their money!

Burns Night 2010

carolyn — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 22:56:54 +0000

The 25th of January marks Burns Night, celebrated annually in Scotland as well as in other locations throughout the UK. Burns Night Suppers celebrate the life of Robert Burns, Scottish poet and lyricist, and take place on or around his birthday the 25th of January. Burns was considered the Scottish national poet and will be recognized by those less familiar with Scottish poetry by his works such as Auld Lang Syne, A Red, Red Rose and O Once I lov’d a Bonnie Lass.

I first heard about Burns Night Celebrations, such as the Hackney Cyclists Burns Night fundraiser, last year and was really eager to go to it. Unfortunately, it had sold out before I could get tickets. So this year, I kept a close eye on the website and saw the Hackney Cyclists celebration was to take place on the 30th of January. Matt and I managed to get a few of the last tickets. Since it had sold out before some other friends could get tickets, we ended up finding another celebration at the The Flask in Hampstead on the 25th. So two Burns Night celebrations in one week.

The basic structure of a Burns Night Supper is as follows:

Welcoming speech

Entrance of the Haggis (accompanied by bagpipes) If you don’t know what haggis is - read here

Address to the Haggis (The address is recited and the haggis slashed open with a knife)

Supper (includes haggis, neeps (turnip) and tatties (potato) - these days veggie haggis is a regular option)

Toasts with whiskey, usually including a toast to the lassies with a response toast to the laddies

Other toasts, speeches, recitation of poetry and/or singing of songs

Closing with a rendition of Auld Lang Syne

The Hackney Cyclists event included all the main components as well as some hearty Scottish dancing after the supper. And yes, Matt Badanes did participate in the dancing (maybe that was down to the whiskey). The whole event took place in a Hackney primary school and was a fundraiser for cycling projects. It was a fun night full of a great sense of community. I couldn’t help but be reminded of a good old square dance in an elementary school gym at home.

The address to the haggis

The bagpipes

The supper (veggie version)

Unfortunately, there is no photo evidence of the dancing!

International Food Festival

carolyn — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 19:13:29 +0000

Over the past few months we had a chance to learn about making traditional holiday foods with some London friends. In December, Gerry taught us to make Costa Rican style tamales that her family made to celebrate Christmas. It was an all day affair that started with shopping for ingredients at Borough Market and the local supermarket. Followed by reviewing several recipes to come up with the best way to make corn and bean and pipian tamales. Next step was to prepare the masa, banana leaves and filling and finally the whole event was topped off with the best part, eating them. Here is some photo evidence of the effort:

Prepping the banana leaves

Preparing the masa and fillings:

Enjoying the finished product

Then few weekends ago, Susan and her cousin Cecelia taught me to make Swedish semlor, a decadent pastry dessert used to celebrate Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras) before the start of Lent. Susan made a stop at a Swedish shop to pick up the ingredients which included special flour, almond paste, double cream and cardamom. Here is some more photo evidence of the efforts.

First the dough was mixed and buns rolled out, brushed with egg and baked to be soft with a crispy outside

Then the cream and almond paste was mixed, the tops of the buns removed and filled with cream

Then the tops were placed back on the semlor

Filling up on cream and dough

Its been an enjoyable few weeks of eating. Thanks for the lessons ladies!

Spanish Christmas

matt — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 12:22:51 +0000

Ok, January’s not over yet, so I can still talk about Christmas. I’ve not been in the US for the past three Christmas’, so I try to find something interesting to do each time. The first time, I ‘chose’ to have a horrible flu and spend the holiday in a feverish bundle on Dina and Adrian’s couch. Not something I would recommend. The following year, Carolyn had made the move over and we decided to rent a place for a long weekend in Paris and do the whole market-shopping, homemade Christmas meal in a foreign country. It was such fun, we thought we’d try it again. However, in order to make sure it wasn’t the same-old-same-old, we added a couple of changes. We went to Madrid this time and Carolyn’s parents made the trip across the Atlantic.

Before I start showing pictures, let me say that one of the reasons we love doing this is we basically drop into town and try to figure out how to shop for some sort of epic kind of meal, without ever having been in that neighbourhood before. The internet truly helps with this, but so much of it is hit-or-miss. For example, we learned that grocery stores in Madrid are horrible. They literally sell the worst of the food you can think of. The bread is like wonderbread, they didn’t have butter (I’m not making this up).

So how does one eat in Spain? The markets. In Paris and London, you tend to go to the markets if you want produce, meat, dairy and bread. This can also be picked up at the grocery stores, but it is possible to do much of the shopping at a market if you choose so. You have options but the basics you might go to a grocery store. In Spain, at least in Fuencarral (where we were staying), they had the Barcelo Market. It’d had recently been moved into a modern space which consisted of 3 or 4 kind of pods with stalls in each. Thanks to this market, we managed to pick up just about everything we needed. Which was good because we arrived on Christmas Eve and we had about 1 hour to find everything before the city shut for festivities.

Anyway, after writing this, I realize I’m making generalities about a city that I don’t know that well. So allow me to call this an observation about a slice of Madrid. I did not go into any of the Corte Ingles (a large department store) that dot the city and Carolyn says that they do groceries as well.

So, after dropping into Madrid and performing a surgical strike on the market, it was time to settle in for the holiday. Jim and Linda were scheduled to arrive in the late morning on Christmas Day. We decided to have a variation on the Spanish Tortilla as our Christmas Eve meal.

After dinner, we wandered around Madrid. We learned the hard way last year not to expect a whole lot of life or open restaurants at any point over Christmas (we had Chinese food last year for Christmas Eve dinner because Paris was dead). As we walked the almost deserted streets of Madrid, we would run into other tourists asking if the Metro was running of if we knew of open places for food. It was all quite eerie — Madrid is a bustling city, but on Christmas eve, it was absolutely dead. Observe the Plaza Mayor at about 10:30pm:

Beautiful lights and only like 10 other people around. Loved it!

After a wander around Madrid, we tucked in for the night so we could prepare to cook a feast to welcome Linda and Jim to Spain. The menu consisted of homemade ravioli (with a ricotta and spinach filling), roast rack of lamb, some vegetables and homemade strawberry shortcake. Here’s the prep for it:

Of course, there was wine too . Now cooking in a place you’d never seen before until the night before can always be tricky (this place had no measuring cups which is never happy when making a cake), but it turned out nicely:

(The sauce was store-bought and wasn’t the best. But everything else was tasty goodness). Overall, it was a lovely time. Good food, good company, the apartment was beautiful. I’ll leave this post with a the happy family eating and our Christmas “Tree” surrounded with presents:

A Wintry London Day

matt — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 17:22:35 +0000

So the theme for this winter seems to be, shockingly enough, snow. As I mentioned before Christmas, we had one small dumping of snow that created havoc in London (but didn’t stop our lovely trips to Madrid for Xmas and Somerset for New Years — more on that later). Well, just when we thought that would be our winter storm for the season, Wednesday arrived with most of the rest of England snowed in and snow coming to London. Unlike some other parts of the country, we only got a couple of inches, but it’s stuck and is still here. So we’ve had our own little wintry wonderland.

Today, Carolyn and I braved the sub 0 (celsius) temperatures to check out Hampstead Heath, a lovely piece of semi-rural feeling parkland in North London. Here’s what we came across:

A view of all of London - but with snow!

Carolyn atop Kite Hill

Parliament Hill is a picturesque spot where you can take in a lot of London. It’s obviously a lovely spot where people fly kites and folks enjoy the wild beauty of Hampstead Heath. Behold what happens to it when some snow falls. People go “sledging” (aka. sledding) until the hill is completely bare

Happy Winter

matt — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 19:11:26 +0000

So on this, the shortest day of the year, Mother Nature has decided to mess with us fine Londoners by snowing a bit. I know you folks in the US have seen a bit of snow, so I’m not complaining, just observing. Just like earlier this year, the city doesn’t quite handle things when it snows. This morning, there was some remnants of ice and at lunch, we had some rain. Just another nasty winter day in London, with the darkness coming before 3pm since it was overcast. Then, in the course of an hour, the big flakes started coming down and we got a whopping 2 inches of snow. A sense of panic came over the office, with the head of the UK office saying we should all leave early to beat the misery. I hung around and the snow ended. But then the fun began. The buses, which normally show up every minute or two, were taking 10 minutes to appear and were packed. The bus stop was full and people had been waiting for 30 minutes for a bus.

After waiting 15 minutes for the first bus to show up full and pass us all by, I decided it might be a good idea to walk. So I start trekking through the icy pavement. And, lo and behold, it was a good idea. I suspect I beat the bus by 30 minutes because every main road was moving at glacier pace. The Brits do *not* know what to do with a little snow. I passed a virtual graveyard of buses that seemed to just have given up and gone out of service. I made a smart choice walking home, the city is in chaos of sorts. Here’s hoping the wet stuff melts and doesn’t freeze.
Anyway, I’ve been writing on this thing for almost 3 years now, so consider this an attempt to break the silence that’s been on here for a few months. Let’s start by filling in the gaps of the autumn that are here and not just post links to pictures.

Photo Dump: End of the Road Festival 2009

matt — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:31:40 +0000

Festivals are a part of British summer culture. There large numbers of them every weekend. They run the range of the arts, but the best known ones are music festivals (Glastonbury, with 200,000 people, being the biggest and best known). Carolyn and I decided that we needed to experience one, so we went to the End of the Road Festival, a smaller “boutique” festival of about 5,000 people. It was a wonderful 3 days in the country, camping and listening to music. Here’s a lot of photos we took while we were there:

End of the Road Festival Photo Dump

Enjoy!

Photo Dump: Bruges, De Haan and Brussels

matt — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:27:11 +0000

The last Bank holiday of the year Carolyn and I went to Belgium (See writeups about the sites and the food and drink). Now that we’ve written about them, here are a lot of pictures of our trip for you to enjoy

Belgium Photo Dump

Photo Dump: A Trip along the Llangollen Canal

matt — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 14:53:38 +0000

It’s been a busy month. We’ve just finished up another long weekend of travel, this time along the Welsh border. We rented a canal boat with our friends Ben, Gerry and Dan and travelled at a leisurely pace along the one of the many canals of England. These used to be the power house that allowed the Industrial Revolution to get their goods smoothly from the North down to London and then onto the rest of the world. They were made obselete by the railroads, trucking and cheap Asian labor, but now they exist as a way to enjoy the English countryside. Here are the photos I took from that trip (our friends took many more, but I think this covers it pretty well):

Canal boat trip photos