At Last, A New Post!

We haven't written a long time, because we've been really busy. Let me start at the beginning.

June 25 - There's this mobile phone company in England called Orange Mobile, and if you have an Orange mobile phone, you get 2 for 1 movie tickets on Wednesdays. Grace and I bought a £10 pay as you go mobile phone last week just to take advantage of this deal. We saw Ironman on June 25, and it was great.

June 26 - We went to see 'King Lear' at Shakespeare's Globe theatre this night. The theatre is set up to look just like it did in Shakespeare's day, meaning they have a huge standing area that's really cheap and then more expensive seated areas. Naturally, we bought one of the 700 cheap standing only tickets.

So, on Thursday we met after work at the theatre. This was the third time we had tried to get tickets to the theatre. We had always assumed we could just walk up and get standing tickets - who in their right mind would want to stand for three hours and watch Shakespeare? Anyway, it turned out that tickets sold out quite early, even for standing only tickets. That meant we had to buy tickets in advance and put ourselves at the mercy of the notoriously volatile English weather. You see, like Shakespeare's day, the theatre is open air and the show goes on, rain or snow (in England if they stopped a show for something like rain, they would only put shows on one third of the time).

Anyway, the theatre. It's really nice with a thatched roof. The stage is raised up about five feet so even very short people can usually see the action if they're standing. Here's a picture of the place (I didn't take it though).



So the show started and for the entire first half (2.5 hours) I had only one thought. "What the heck is going on?" You see, I've never read King Lear. I know Shakespeare is tough stuff, but I figured I would be able to get the plot, even if I missed most of the clever wordplay. Nope. I missed some vital information in the first four or five minutes of the play and then had no idea what was going on for the rest of the play. Lots of Shakespearian raging and yelling and clever fools, but I was at a loss.

So I was easily distracted by other things. Like planes and helicopters. It was an open air theatre and they roar by overhead from time to time. There's not really anything you can do about that if you want to have a show like this anywhere in London. Secondly, the theatre was chockfull of teenagers, probably there on some mandatory English class field trip. They were not interested in the play at all and they just talked to each other and drank beers the whole time. One thing that the Globe is famous for is its really informal and you can come and go as you please, or bring in beer. And people do.

There was this part of the play where suddenly all these people in rags, covered in blood and mud, jump out into the audience and then act like nightmares or something, crawling around on all fours, growling, reaching out towards people and generally being like Gollum. I was like, 'what is this? A dream sequence?'

There was another part when one of the main characters had his eyes ripped out of his head by some other characters. That was pretty gross. They actually pulled some kind of bloody thing out on stage. Again, I had no idea why.

Well, when the intermission came I had Grace explain to me the plot. She had read (most of) King Lear and was vital in making the second half of the play explicable. She was even able to explain the crazy gollum people (they were insane asylum people) and the removal of the eyes (punishment for betrayal). The second half made a lot more sense. But, this being England, it started raining really hard. Lots of people left, but Grace and I managed to hunker down under an overhang of the roof. I was a bit protected, Grace not so much. She had to be in front of me or she couldn't see and that exposed her a bit to the elements. All in all, a great night at the Globe. Grace was wearing flats and walking home in the rain her shoes filled with water and she said it was like walking around in boats.

King Lear is good, but I think I would have liked it more if I understood it.

Also, the 26th was Mike's Birthday. Happy 22 Mike.

June 27 - We met up with one of Grace's classmates and his friends and went out to a club called Koko's. There was this guy who cornered us and talked with Grace and I. He was from the country and he was like a stereotype of the country boy in the big city. He kept saying this was his first time in London and boyee, it sure was different!

At the club a band was playing called Die! Die! Die!. They weren't that great.

June 28 - We spent from 1pm to 8pm at Regent's park having an extended picnic with a bunch of Grace's classmates. The weather was fantastic, sunny and cool. Grace and I have bought an essential piece of equipment, namely a picnic blanket (it's sort of like a normal blanket except its made of a canvas material so the wet grass doesn't bleed through and it folds up and has handles to carry). Anyway, the English kids brought Pimms, a classic British summer drink. It's this alcoholic thing you mix with sparkling water, mint, cucumber and orange rind. Grace really liked it, me not so much. We had beer too, of course.

But it wasn't really sitting around boozing. Grace and I brought our cricket set we bought in India and we all played a game. Grace and I's team got last. I am a really bad bowler. Still, the set was really nice and everyone was impressed by the equipment, if not the game. The German and American classmates all thought the game was a little weird, which I guess it is.

Anyway, it was a perfect day for me. I've wanted to relax in a park on a nice summer day for a long time this summer.

June 29 - I had to spend all day writing a freelance report for work. Lame. But that evening we went to a pub, again with some of Grace's friends, to watch the final game of the Eurocup 2008. Unsurprisingly, Eurocup is a European Soccer Championshihp. The two teams in the finals were Spain and Germany. Spain won. England did not qualify for the contest (only 16 teams do), so the entire championship has had a strange feeling to it. Nobody here feels like they have anything at stake, and they don't. Still, they love to watch football, so they do.

June 30 - We were scheduled to meet with this American guy whose been accepted into both Cambridge and the London School of Economics (LSE)'s economics diploma program. He's looking for advice about which one to choose. We decided to meet at a public lecture at the LSE, by Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International edition (or something), and author of a new book called "The Post American World." Basically he says we're entering a world where countries like India and China will be able to call more of the shots, alongside us. It's not the fall of America and the rise of China and India, we're all going to be up there, it's a world where no one country or two dominates things. He was a very good speaker and it was an interesting lecture.

He had this one really interesting fact. He was talking about how all the countries in the world now have their own media and 24 news networks, and can now form their own narratives, rather than relying on the one CNN and MSNBC gives them. Makes sense. Anyway, he was talking about how different countries see history differently. For example, in America, we look at WWII as a story where we heroically came in and, with help from our British allies, saved the free nations of Europe from fascism. But in Russia, they see things differently. Apparently 75% of Germany's forces were actually on the Eastern, not the Western front, and that is where Germany suffered 75% of its casualties. He talked about how, in the West, Stephen Ambrose wrote a book about the most decisive battle in 1943, which in his view was in Sicily and involved 65,000 troops. The same year though, in Kursk, there was a battle of over 1 million Russian and German troops. Long story short, to Russian eyes, the main story of WWII is the eastern front and the whole western front, including the Normandy invasions, is just a sideshow to the main event.

Another good thing about this lecture was the moderator. He was a Knight, a Lord. Anyway, when it was question time, he would cut people off and tell them to hurry up and ask their question if they started to, even a little, give speeches. Like this one guy started, "now, if I understand Chaos theory correctly..." and the moderator was like, "nope! That's too long! What's your question?!" Normally at these events you get people with crazy rambling questions, but not this time. Everyone was scared of the moderator.

After the lecture we took the American guy out for pizza and had a good time talking with him about England, America and everything. So good that, after that, we went to my favorite Belgian beer place, Bierodrome, and stayed the rest of the night (not that long when things close at 11) drinking Belgian beers.

July 1 - This was Grace and I's two year anniversary. We went out for dinner at L'escargot, a restaurant owned by the British chef Marco Pierre White, the chef who trained Gordon Ramsey. For the restaurant of a famous chef, it was really cheap (although expensive for a normal restaurant).

Grace had escargot, snails. She was pretty proud of herself for figuring out how to eat them without needing to call over a waiter, like the people at the table next to us did. Anyway, the restaurant was really nice and we had a good time. Apparently, if you go to the upstairs (we were seated downstairs) there is a genuine Picasso on the wall. And a Matisse.

July 2 - One of Grace's classmates was going back home to Germany this night, so we all went out again and had a bunch of drinks. By now I had been drinking a lot, for five out of the last six nights. I was starting to dread the Beer Festival which I had agreed to go to with a work colleague the next day.

July 3 - I secretly hoped my work buddy would be too busy to make it to the beer festival, because I felt like I needed a night in. Au contrair (spelling?). He had stayed till 7:30 pm at work last night and come in at 5:30 am to get everything done in time to go to the beer festival. So it was definitely on.

Grace stayed out of this one. We took the tube down to Ealing after work. Ealing is at the very end of the line, so it took 45 minutes to get there. Then we got lost and were given a million incorrect set of directions to the festival. Finally, at 7pm, we found the park. The festival was basically a cordoned off section of the park with two enormous tents, each one with hundreds of barrels of different kinds of (English) beer. Mostly Ale. Ale is a uniquely british drink. It's like beer, but its served uncarbonated at room temperature. Sounds awful, but I think it's quite good. One advantage is it doesn't get worse as you drink it. Beer is served cold, but by the time you get to the last drink, its not so cold and not so carbonated. With Ale, it starts out warm and flat, so no worries, it'll still be warm and flat at the end.

The beer's we tried had names like Blonde Witch, Snowdonia Ale, Wren's Nest etc.

I'm a bit amazed at how these beer festivals manage to work. I think if you had them in the US, people would get absolutely destroyed. But here, everyone is actually there to try the different kinds of beers, and, while they get drunk, nobody loses control, throws up, stumbles or generally causes any trouble. Anyway, I think my tolerance for beer is getting better all the time, because the next day I woke up without a hangover and went to work early.

July 4 - Happy Independence Day! is what lots of people at work said to me. They wanted to know how Americans celebrated the day and they all thought it sounded very nice. These holidays are one of those times you really miss home. Grace and I have missed the fourth of July in Iowa for three years now. We were in Chicago for our honeymoon in 2006, we were in India in 2007 and we're in England in 2008. Anyway, I very much miss it.

To celebrate we went to the absolutely strangest 4th of July festival I've ever seen.

After so much drinking, I desperately wanted something relatively peaceful. We live near the British Museum and they were having an Independence day, American themed celebration, so that seemed the obvious choice.

It was so weird. Now I know what people from other countries must feel like when they go to celebrations of their country in America. This America celebration crammed together the most bizarre set of American culture I have ever seen. Apparently the British museum's idea of an American themed party includes (I am not joking):

-Tap Dancing
-Lindy Hop
-Native American Craft Making
-Demonstrations of Basketball and American Football
-Jazz
-Quilt Making
-Swing Bands
-Print Making

To top it all off, we had "American Style" food. To the Brits that apparently means:

-Footlong hotdogs
-Cotton Candy
-Popcorn
-Cheesecake
-Beer

Originally they had Budweiser beer, but they ran out and started serving Becks (which is German I think), instead.

That's all. We will try to post again soon!