tgtravels

This is a blog about my travels. My "regular" life is much too boring to bother blogging about.

Monday, May 03, 2010

We're gonna rock down to Electric Avenue

Greetings. I am in London now. More specifically, south London. More specifically, in an internet cafe on Brixton Road. Truth be told, I'm glad to be here. I very much enjoyed my time in the countryside, but by Sunday I was itching to get back to a city. And here I am.

Obviously the best part of my tenure in the country was Amy's wedding. She got married in her home village, a place called Hanbury somewhere between Birmingham and Worcestershire. Hanbury Church is absolutely stunning, so of course I didn't take any pictures. It's on the top of a hill, and on a clear day you can see for miles, all the way to the Malvern Hills. Evidently the old stone church was used in some BBC program called the Arches. I don't know what that is, but everybody seemed quite pleased about it so I smiled and nodded.

I hadn't been to an Anglican wedding before, and the ceremony turned out to be simultaneously completely foreign and totally familiar. Foreign for obvious reasons; familiar because the structure, the music, the priest's spiel, the vows, and basically everything else are what we see on TV in Canada all the time.

There was a choir there, as well as people specifically charged to ring the church bells.

The reception was incredibly fun. Obviously I didn't know anybody other than the bride, the groom, and to a lesser extent Amy's family. Also, a fellow I encountered in Nottingham several years ago, who snuck into a club wearing jorts and hiking boots while the door Nazis were inspecting my passport. But he didn't remember me. No problem; being the Foreigner Who Has Drank Too Much is a role that TG can play very, very well. I don't really want to give a blow-by-blow summary of the reception, so I will leave you with three things:

-An entire pig was roasted towards midnight, and I estimate that I ate about a tenth of it.

-TG: "hello, I've never met you before. I'm from Canada, that's why I talk this way. Want to do a shot?"

-TG: "Hello, pleased to meet you. My name is Terry.
Lee: "Hi, my name is Lee, and this is my partner _________." (I'm pretty sure he said Danielle, but I'm not 100% sure.
TG: "Excuse me? I didn't quite hear that."
Lee: "My name is Lee, and this is my partner ___________."
TG: "Did you say that this is your harlot?"
Lee: "No. This is my partner."
TG: "Oh. Sorry."

This was when I stopped drinking.

So now I'm in London, enjoying the hospitality of Yellowknife expat and London bon vivant B, who has a much better blog than this one. It's a bank holiday today, so I'm just wandering around. I dropped by the Tate Modern to look at early Soviet propaganda posters, and I ran into a bunch of joyous Madeirans cecebrating Madeira Day in Kennington Park. I then proceeded to argue with an old man about how one is supposed to properly eat sardines. In Madeira, they peel all the skin away, and suck the meat off the bones. They discard the head, and ignore the liver and other inards. I think this is incredibly wasteful... in Greece, we eat EVERYTHING, although to be fair our sardines are much, much smaller than the ones I was eating. The old man thought that was tantamount to savagery. Proof that this man has doesn't have the palette to make that argument: he was happily drinking Portuguese beer, Sagres to be exact, which is likely the worst beer I've ever had in my life (other than Super Bock, another Portuguese beer).

I have big, big plans for tomorrow. Big plans. Also, Leicester on Wednesday. And Sweden on Thursday!

Ta.

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