Turkey Day!

We're hosting Thanksgiving at our house on Friday evening. As a result, I'm not updating this week.

Instead, the turkey whisperer.

We hope you've enjoyed your Thanksgiving day and are currently checking the blog in between return trips to the fridge for leftovers. I'll update again on the 30th.

Foodstuffs

The weather has officially turned. It's dark just after 4pm; it's rainy; it's cold. Kenz isn't impressed. 

Last weekend, she and I went to Borough Market. It's only about a 15 minute bus ride from our house (which is to say it's really convenient), but Kenz had never been there before. Saturdays are the busiest days in the market.

Borough is to food what Brick Lane is to artisans, hipsters, and 'vintage' clothes. Translated: Borough is McKenzie's new favorite place in the world. The entire time we were there, Kenz kept muttering - half to me, half to herself - look at all this fun stuff; we need to come here every Saturday. I mentioned to her that this wasn't fun stuff - it's food, forgetting that food is fun for Kenz.

I knew she was genuinely happy to be there when I realized that the crowds (overwhelming, clustered, slow, frustrating) didn't phase her; they got to me, though. It's usually the other way 'round.

I've come to believe that any market can begin to bleed into itself after a while. Borough is basically a series of butcher, cheese maker, butcher, cheese maker, florist, butcher, organic grocer, cheese maker, poultry dealer, and sausage maker. After thirty minutes, I lose interest, thinking that it's all kind of the same. Of course, that's not to say it's not cool. I just don't want to spend all day there.

Kenz loves cheese, though, so she has absolutely no problem strolling from one cheese booth to another for hours.

Spending lots of money on cheese; happy girl

I bought some wild boar sausage

I also bought some of the best coffee I've ever tasted.

Sunday was pancakes, haircuts, Owen in British attire, and cheese & onion pie.

Just a normal 'going to the grocery store' outfit. It's the most noble combination of colors and patterns I've ever seen. 

Kenz had requested we get pancake mix, but the little baggie we found in the grocery store didn't cut Owen's culinary standards. We wound up buying the necessary ingredients instead.

Kenz's job was staying warm

Sunday Funday!

I've become Owen's barber; he let me 'experiment' with a 'part' in his hair...

Kenz wound up, late in the afternoon, seeing a recipe for cheese & onion pie that she wanted to make. Another trip to the grocery store (which I refused to make myself, "I've already gone once today!"), and she had all the necessary ingredients to make the pie crust and fill it with the cheese she had purchased at Borough Market the previous day. Result!

It must've weighed 12 pounds.

Everything's better with gravy. I mean, the plating may not be 5-star, but the taste was great!

 Random picture break:

Likely the only book you can effectively judge by its cover.

Kenz's ability to fall asleep in any circumstance is uncanny. "The computer keeps me warm!"

Filmmakers on Walworth Road!

My in-laws gifted me an Amazon gift card for my birthday. In an effort to follow my own gift rules (buy something for someone they'd want but couldn't justify buying for themselves), I bought a juicer! You'll likely see too many pictures of various juice concoctions in the coming months.

Owen and I unpacked it the day it arrived and went to town. The instructions read as if they had been plugged directly into 'Google Translate' from some language that doesn't have the same syntactic structure as English. We quickly abandoned the directions. In all reality, directions are for people who don't know what they're doing, right? We convinced ourselves that two reasonably intelligent men could figure out the machine and set, straight away, to making delicious juices.

The color wasn't appetizing. Owen: it looks somewhat like cat sick.

 
Our first attempt was blueberries, apples, an orange, and two bananas. After noting that the bananas were vaporized in the juicer, we did go back to read the instructions about what kinds of fruits are best and what 'speed' we were supposed to set the juicer to in order to yield the most juice. The instructions said fruits with starch aren't meant for the juicer - at the top of that list was bananas...

The taste, though, was great!

Then we got ahead of ourselves. I opened the tupperware container that houses all my week's prepared 'snack' vegetables (about a week old), and emptied it into the juicer. A head of broccoli, about fifteen chopped carrot sticks, and what amounted to an entire bell pepper. That concoction is not recommended.

Afterward, I dared Owen to eat a handful of pulp that had collected inside the 'pulp bin'. Not capable of backing down from a dare, he acquiesced...and made himself sick.

"It looks like Vermont in the Fall" - Owen, in his best American accent

I think it was the bits of broccoli that got him

All in all, I'm happy with the present. Thanks, Patti & Michael!

Look at that face! Supportive wife!

 Keeping with tradition, I snapped a few FaceTime pictures throughout the week as well:

Long distance uncle-ing. My favorite part: Garrett is attending college in Vermont, yet he has a massive Texas flag hanging on his wall. I call that 'keeping it real'. 

More long distance uncle-ing! Lucy's growing rapidly and wearing out her parents just as quickly.

I'm already doling out advice...

And, of course, making MOMA laugh is my favorite pastime. 

I went back to the drawing board with the juicer this morning, trying to follow a recipe my friend, Ryan, sent me yesterday. I added too many beets and forgot the cucumber. Needless to say it wasn't as good as he promised. Chalk it up to operator's error. Next time!

4 green apples, 1 inch ginger, 2 beets, 1/2 sweet potato, 4 carrots, 5 celery stalks, 1 lemon, and a forgotten cucumber.

Thanks for reading. Have a good weekend!

Americans had a busier week

I've done a fairly good job of keeping this blog apolitical. That's by design. However, it appears those of you who read this blog from the States have had a much 'busier' week than we have in the UK. I wound up staying awake really late on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning in order to watch the returns live online. I'm still catching up on those lost hours of sleep. 

I'll say that it's challenging, at best, to try and stay engaged in the 24-hour American news cycle. In all reality, it's nearly impossible. I'm not sure that's a bad thing, per se - I didn't really watch cable news before I moved. But, even though I didn't watch cable news before I left, I still had a relatively good finger on the pulse of the day's talking points. Over here, I miss a lot of the nuance. I still get the stories, but I don't get to see them interpreted through the five or seven (or fifty) angles that various media outlets provide. 

It's an interesting dilemma. On the one hand, I still want to be engaged in everything 'merca. It's still my 'home', where I have citizenship, where I plan on returning whenever it is we're finished here - therefore, I want to know 'what's happening' over there while I'm over here. On the other hand, though, I fear that my desire to stay involved, a 'high information voter', prevents me from fully engaging in the political and cultural exchange here in the UK. 

It's not like I'm over here being that guy - the one who still compares everything to America. I don't. But, it parallels a lot of other things I wrestle with while living here:

I want to be able to refer to our little flat in southeast London as home. I want to make the cliche, 'home is where the heart is', true in real time. And I do - we do. Yet, there is still a sense of struggle with respect to how much UK culture we take on board. It's a balancing act I assume most people living abroad wrestle with. How much do we retain; how much do we assimilate?

There are symptoms of it in most aspects of our life. Naturally, I believe our language has the biggest identity/personal weight. Whereas we're not changing our vowel space, not getting British 'accents', we are using different lexical items. Out of habit, I refer to the NFL as American football. Kenz is 'attending university', not 'going to college'. I use bog roll, not toilet paper. I don't feel rude or crass asking for directions to the 'toilet' rather than the 'restroom'. So on and so forth.

I don't even feel wonky referring to America as the States (talk about highlighting an unknown, subconscious assumption that America could only refer to the America!) anymore. 

That's not to say it's not conflicting, though. When we arrived, I used my language as an indexical item; my desire to assimilate was in direct proportion to how much I adopted the new 'language'. I cringed when I heard Kenz say she was 'knackered', because I feared we'd come back to America using all sorts of 'marked' language and our friends and family would roll their eyes, thinking Madonna or they're just trying to remind everyone that they lived in London. I'd think she's changing her language too quickly - we can't just start using all those words, we'll be phony on both sides of the pond! Needless to say, it sounded strange coming out of her mouth. Even stranger coming out of my own. 

But it began to happen...

However, if I was having a bad day (and I've had a lot of those), I'd immediately blame it on the country (which I could laugh at later, but never in the moment). As a result, I'd speak extra 'American' that day. 

But, as you know, I/we/everyone has an innate desire to 'fit in' on some base level. Changing a few words here and there goes a long way to keep up the ruse that, whereas I may have different vowels (or, sometimes, even a different grammatical structure, different semantic domain, different tone, different volume, etc.), I'm still just another guy on the street. 

Most notably, probably, is that I'm not impressed by the 'accent' anymore. Just because someone 'speaks British' doesn't mean they're smart. Or polite. Believe me. 

There's the food, too. I'm a fan of brown sauce. I've gotten used to a lesser, tomato-based canned bean. I've even begun to prefer canned beans as a breakfast food. I've come to expect food to be organically grown, grass fed, and free range - and I don't have to seek that out; it's just a given, no matter what grocery store I'm in. And speaking of grocery stores, I'm not thrown by the layout of them anymore. I'm so used to the brands and products that I don't notice the differences. Weetabix is just breakfast cereal, not some strange brick of wheat and grains that dissolves too quickly in milk. I drink tea every day. Lots of tea. Different types of tea. And I know what makes a 'good' cuppa now, too, and don't fear making a 'bad' one when someone visits. Hell, I use a kettle. 

I've yet to succumb to wearing a scarf, but I'm dangerously close. 

There's no novelty to street signs, babies with British 'accents', open air markets on the weekends, electrical plugs, black cabs, and I'm beginning to get ashamed when I don't know the geography of the island - especially when someone names a town with a population smaller than 2 million. It's been over a year, I think, how can I still not know where places like Loughborough are? At the very least, I should be able to spell Loughborough without Google Maps. 

I know the British political parties, some of the leaders, the structure of government, councils, boroughs, etc. I've debated the ins and outs, pros and cons, assets and liabilities of the UK government (sometimes on its own, sometimes in comparison with the US's) with ex-elected officials and citizens alike. 

Probably biggest of all, I don't walk around thinking I look like a tourist. And I walk faster now.

But, I say all this to make a point: 

No matter how much I've decided to assimilate (some of it on purpose, some of it just unconscious/familiarity/osmosis), no matter how much this place has become 'home', no matter how many days I can string together without feeling homesick (my track record has significantly improved), I was still super homesick for the good old US of A on Tuesday. I wanted to be able to sit on a big  couch in a big American house watching a big American television as the returns began to trickle in. I wanted to be able to change the channel between the five million television stations that were covering the election. I wanted to be able to call and text anyone I wanted, whether it was to debate or congratulate. Odds are, I wouldn't've actually called or texted too many people (I've learned my lesson about that...I think), but I still wanted that option. 

Instead, I lied half-awake in bed with headphones on and the glow of a computer screen lighting up my face. 

I missed getting to don an 'I voted' sticker all day. Hell, I missed getting to see other people wear one as well. I missed the energy of election day. 

I missed the thrill of standing in a voting booth, feeling like I was honoring the generations of men and women who have shed blood, sweat, and tears to ensure that I have the freedom to cast a vote.

I missed being there while everyone was taking an active part in our representative republic. 

It's one thing to have to run around town in search of a turkey, having pumpkin pie ingredients shipped to us, and inviting a bunch of Brits over for Thanksgiving day. It's altogether a different thing to be isolated from America as she decides her own future. 

So, three days after the election, I think I'm ready to start counting homesick-less days again. Like a factory keeps record of days without a 'lost-time accident'. Tomorrow, hopefully, I'll take chalk to my mental blackboard and mark 'one' ... again. 

In the meantime, here's a few pictures from the previous week:

Kenz went to a Halloween party the Friday after Halloween. It struck me as strange that they'd be throwing a party two days afterward, but whatever. Kenz's friend, Ragna, came by to get dressed up beforehand. She was Mia Farrow from Rosemary's Baby...

I got to facetime with the world's best facetimer, NancRuck.

Last Saturday, Kenz and I went out for her birthday dinner before we went to see Owen's band at their album launch party. We went to one of the two hundred awesome Vietnamese restaurants in this city.

Obviously it was romantic

The Great Malarkey's album launch party/show was a hit (you can get the album on iTunes). The venue, Passing Clouds, was packed, there was a line out the door, and the band brought the funk. In fact, it was so crowded in there that Kenz had to bail - she got too claustrophobic. I stayed, though, and quietly judged everyone in attendance. Half the crowd was wearing a Halloween costume. Four days after the day. And I thought a Halloween party on the Friday night was lame...

Owen was rocking his new haircut, given by me in our kitchen

Lemme tell you something right now, and it's no exaggeration: the Brits love James Bond. They love him.

We went to see the latest Bond film on Sunday afternoon. We hadn't been to the cinema (see! I used to call it the movies!) in about two months, and were pretty excited to go see the newest 007. We figured, since the movie was released over here on October 26th, that there wouldn't be that big a crowd at the theatre. We showed up 10 minutes before the movie was supposed to start. We were met with a line out the door. On a Sunday afternoon. A full week after the movie had been released. At a theatre with 1200+ seats. The afternoon show was sold out. We only just barely got tickets for the evening show. When we returned in the evening, there was another line out the door, and by the time we had arrived that show was sold out as well! Luckily we had purchased our tickets earlier.

This guy probably considered himself lucky what with the line for Skyfall and all. He got to preach to lots of people waiting to go into the movie. I don't think he convinced anyone to repent, though. Probably due to the fact that he was saying the movie everyone had already purchased a ticket for was made by devil worshipers and that we were all going to hell for seeing it. I don't know about anyone else, but those tickets were expensive - I was willing to risk eternal damnation having already paid 20 pounds for a ticket - he should've been preaching to those who hadn't yet bought a ticket...

This is how we killed time waiting for the evening screening of Skyfall. Again, romance.

Reminded me of Kara & Jerry's dog, Pepper

MOMA and I wagering money (and pride) on the election

Owen's evening hobby - amateur gymnastics

Kenz's 'snack'

Yesterday, Kenz and I were out separately. I was running errands and she was at school. We both happened to return to the house at the same time. We didn't see each other until we had turned the corner to the same street - the one our flat is on. Out of nowhere, an uncoordinated perfectly timed return to the house!

She's quite the cure for the homesick blues.

Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!