A Taste of North London's diversity

GREEN LANES, LONDON

Beth’s students are craving Mexican food.  It’s true that despite the tremendous diversity in London, Mexican food and culture is not featured. But many others are!

Anna Mae's Mac and Cheese

Vats of seafood paella

Saturday a week ago we joined new acquaintances at the Green Lanes Food Festival down the High Road from where we live.  For six full blocks from the Salisbury Pub south to the Babinondas Greek restaurant near the Manor House Tube Station we found a wonderful variety of food.  Several Turkish stalls served Lahmacun, a “pizza” wrapped up in foil like a burrito.  A Spanish stall featured two snow-saucer-sized woks in which two varieties of paella – mussels, sausage, saffron rice -- bubbled away.  Abby and I enjoyed a plate of injera (spongy flat bread) loaded with five filling at an Ethiopian stall.  Two stalls near each other – one flying the Union Jack and the other the French tri-color -- competed with fabulous savory or sweet Breton-style buckwheat crepes.  Pig-on-a-spit sandwiches, fresh coconuts with a straw inserted, falafel, smoothies of all varieties, Trinidadian B-B-Q, Jamaican jerked chicken, grilled sardines, fudge, cup cakes, the most amazing creamy strawberry ice cream and a stall featuring Anna Mae’s American-style Mac and Cheese cooked up in a Mayflower sized vat: they each competed for our attention.

We ended our gastronomic tour of north London back at the Salisbury Pub, a quintessential Victorian corner pub.  An intricate mosaic floor leads 20 feet from the entrance to the middle of the large, wood paneled room.  Its expansive bar fills the center of the space serving patrons from three sides.   Behind the bar are mirrored panels and dozens of bottles of single malt whiskeys and liquor.  On the bar itself is a selection of over 10 draft ales, bitters, stouts and a German lager.  Cut glass windows look back out on  Green Lanes' main street and stream of people.  Inside, patrons are standing at the bar and seated around an assortment of booths and tables.  We finally found room to sit in the back “family” room, which sported a bright white-and-black checkered floor.  We crowded around a table with six chairs for the eight of us.  In the center of the room were two families with small children climbing up on the couches looking very much like they were at home in their living room.  They ate chips and grilled cheese sandwiches.  We drank our beer and reminisced on the food from the fair.  The band outside played 60’s rock and roll cover tunes.

Peter

Memory Lane in Kent

CANTERBURY
This weekend we hopped (if you don't count all the closed tube line encounters) on to a train to Kent, where we lived from 2001 to 2004. Our first year there was spent in a house in Canterbury, and the rest of the time in Whitstable, a neighboring town. We walked through the town, had lunch with some old friends, tea with neighbors, and visited some familiar landmarks.

Below: downtown Canterbury and St. Edmund's
I remember quite a lot from my time there, but it's a bit scattered. Walking through downtown I was able to connect places and times better. A particular parking lot brought back the time when Mom was learning to drive on the left side of the road nearby. The cathedral reminded of the field trips I'd been on there.



It was lovely to see our friends the Bushells for lunch. We've all changed, but we have lots of memories in common. We walked up to St. Edmund's, our old school. Everything was drastically smaller than I remember it to be. I peeked into my old classroom, and was astonished to find stick figure drawings proudly displayed. At seven I felt like the queen of the hill, but my drawings looked just like the ones hanging in the hall.

Our (first) house was very much the same. Our neighbors Bernard and Doris had been wonderful to us while we lived there, and they gladly welcomed us unannounced for tea. We picked apples as we had nine years before, although this time I didn't need a stool. It was lovely to see everything again, and spend time with people I haven't seen in so long. There's been a lot of change (including ourselves), but much is the same as well.

Lily

It’s Monday Morning, Time to Head Off to Work.

WOOD GREEN, LONDON
We’ve just enjoyed a lovely, full weekend.  Beth teaches Mondy through Thursday, so Friday we spent the day in Greenwich.  Saturday the girls and I explored the wonderful Portobello Street Market in Notting Hill and we all had dinner with friends in a nearby town.  Sunday we returned to Canterbury where we’d lived for 2.5 years seven years ago to see friends and familiar sites.

All of that feels like a travel vacation.  But today is a work day.  Beth is off to teach her classes and will be busy in town all day.  The girls and I begin our work week routine.  We arrive at work (our respective desks) at 8am and work until 12, when we pause for a half- hour lunch together.  We continue our work until 2:30 at which point we break free, get out of the house and see something. Today we’ll head in to Regent’s street so Abby and Lily can pick up their London Pass travel card.

During our 8:00 to 2:30 work day Lily spends two hours each on three of her five subjects (Math, Physics, World Studies, English and Spanish), Tuesday she tackles the other two.  Abby’s faster (either less work or smarter than the rest of us) so by 11:30 or so she is “done” with her daily work load of reading, writing, work sheets and problems.  I divide my work into three two-hour chunks: 1. London BCAG work – things that I can do for my business from here that I never make time for when I’m in San Carlos: writing eLetter articles, updating our web site, etc.; 2. San Carlos BCAG work – supporting my team, answering emails, Skype calls; and 3. Sabbatical work – thinking about the future of BCAG, new ideas, assessing where we stand, preparing for my return in January.

However,  while we work quietly at our desks, in the back of our minds we are thinking about next weekend.


Peter

Firsts in London this weekend--

Walk through the foot tunnel under the Thames to Greenwich

 

Scones, clotted cream and raspberry jam at a patisserie in Greenwich after visiting the National Maritime Museum and almost stepping on the 0 Meridian Line (there is now a charge for that privilege. . .)

Fish and chips at Toff's, a family-owned restaurant in Muswell Hill--with Lucia's brother Miguel and his lovely wife Marina and daughters Antonia and Sofia

My AFIS students’ impressions so far

Harry asked me to write about my students’ first impressions of London.  The students in this American Institute for Foreign Studies (AIFS) Study Abroad program are all American community college students from northern California. Many of the AIFS students have never traveled abroad before, never had a passport or used public transportation.  For them, everything is new—and I love seeing their excitement when a tour guide tells us about a medieval church or we walk into the restored Globe Theatre.  Many of them, like us, seem to be eating up the history and culture.

But they are also college students, the average around age 19.  The drinking age is 18 over here, which means easy access to alcohol for all of them and some are taking full advantage.  Falling asleep in my classes is no longer the result of jet lag!

Also, the students are in different living arrangements.  Roughly half live in student apartments in the Kensington area.  They have Resident Assistants from AIFS but in large part they are on their own, to find or cook meals, and so on.  The other half of the students are in home stays scattered in different boroughs of the city.  These students are interacting more directly with the British and many have similar aged “brothers” or “sisters.”  Two of my students reported teaching their British “brother” how to do tequila shots, for instance. 

In our British Life and Culture course every Wednesday, the instructor, a British sociologist asks the students about their observations.  They have commented on the great diversity of language, dress and ethnicity here; the “old” architecture; none of them seems concerned about the recent riots or safety in a big city.

In my Shakespeare class this week, we discussed Much Ado About Nothing, in particular the scene in which the friar counsels Leonato to pretend that his daughter Hero is dead in order to make Claudio regret forsaking her.  He says: “That what we have we prize not to the worth whiles we enjoy it, but being lacked and lost, why then we rack the value, then we find the virtue that possession would not show us”—or in other words, we don’t value something until we lose it.  I asked the students what they were missing from the US and their responses were mostly food-related: Mexican restaurants, peanut butter. . . also a fast internet connection, transportation by car. . . .No one seemed to be missing their families—yet.

More on Shakespeare later. . . .

Beth

"Are you American?"

TOTTENHAM, HARINGEY, LONDON

I've been going to swim practice for about two weeks now, and Abby started on Monday. We're part of the Haringey Swim Club, based out of a leisure center nearby. There are about twenty kids, all around our age. They all have fabulous British accents, and they're all very curious about "the Americans." One of the conversations I've had many times is:

"Are you American?"

"Yeah."

"I love your accent."

"Thank you, I love yours."

"Oh. Which school do you go to?"

"I'm taking classes online."

"Really? Do you know (fill in a celebrity) who lives in Hollywood?"

"No, I live in Northern California."

On the whole everyone is really nice. They want to know what we miss and what we like about London. Our coach gives us recommendations of non-tourist things to do in the city. I'm really enjoying meeting people my age, and it's particularly interesting to hear about what they think about the U.S. Tonight everyone wanted to know if we missed the juicy hamburgers or the sunshine. I think they were a bit disappointed that we missed the taste of the water and our cat.

Lily

Our Humble Abode

WOOD GREEN, LONDON

Me in front of 95 Boundary Road

Our dining room

Our kitchen

As my dad and I walked down Boundary road, lugging our massive suitcases, I looked at each row house. Which one would be ours? Further down the street I got more of a feel for the different kinds of houses. There was red brick, white brick or stucco with pebbles. I wished with all my heart that ours was NOT stucco with pebbles. It wasn't.

95 Boundary road is an adorable, red brick row house with a blue gate, thank goodness! As you walk inside, the tiny entry hall is lavishly tiled in a middle-eastern style. Down the small hall in front there is a half bathroom and the kitchen. Although this house could probably fit into our house at home three times, the 9 foot ceilings make it seem quite spacious. A medium sized modern kitchen, living room with 2 couches and a small dining room make up the down stairs. A breath taking trip up the steep staircase will lead you onto a miniature landing. My room is straight ahead with a long and narrow bed at one end and a view out onto our flower garden. My sister's room is to the left and she has a people watching window above the street. My parents room is in the middle and is usually brightly lit, until the sun goes behind a rain cloud. Our house has two special features as well, a cupboard under the stairs and a loose floorboard in my room (for those Harry Potter lovers).  I love our house and I'm glad we live there--so no complaints.  Enjoy the photos!

Abby

Mom in the back garden