Good Weekend

We've had really glorious weather! For 13 days in a row now we've seen sun every day. And this past weekend there was not a cloud in the sky (except for apparently a cloud of volcanic ash that we can't see) and temps have been in the 60's. Friday, I walked into town and stopped at the baker, the fishmonger and the cheese guy (what do you call the cheese guy?) and bought the makings of a lovely haddock dinner.

Saturday, after sleeping in and watching a few episodes of "Friends" Chris & I finally went to the gym and worked out. Very well equipped facility. After returning to the flat, Chris & Kyle walked in to town to check out the butcher while I did a little cleaning, then we all took our first walk up to Hampstead Heath, which you can reach at several different points not more than a 10 minute walk from where we live. It's some place. 800 acres of woodlands & pastures and loads of history. It's sort of the Central Park of London but much more wooded and rural feeling. TONS of people stolling, picnicking and enjoying the sun. Kyle meandered on his own then met us back at home later; Chris & I walked north through the park, then on the way back stopped at the Spaniard, a well known inn/pub and waited quite some time for a pint. We are getting accustomed to the fact that customer service means something very different here. Servers don't seem in a huge hurry, and customers seem perfectly willing to wait. (For Chris, you can imagine, this is an especially difficult concept to embrace.)

After unwinding back home, Chris grilled the locally raised sirloin steaks that he'd purchased earlier on our indoor grill pan that we'd (thankfully) brought with us from NY. He is really missing his grill, but with him, where there's a will, there's a way and before our time here is done I know he will have mastered cooking an excellent steak indoors on a stovetop. In the meantime, they are still pretty darn tasty! We ate them with "jacket" (aka "baked") potatoes and locally grown snap peas and a lovely bottle of wine and ended the very nice day watching 2 episodes of the excellent HBO series "The Pacific" that popped up on Sky, next biggest TV network after the BBC. Then Chris found "Die Another Day" while channel surfing and I went to bed.

Sunday, after again taking our time getting up and around, we knew we needed to continue to take advantage of the beautiful weather and decided to explore a bit more of our adopted home-city. There's a great little shopping are called "Flask Walk" that we strolled through, then visited the Burgh House, a 300-year old historic home that also contains a little museum of Hampstead which was kind of neat. Then we continued on and found another well-known pub (seems all of the pubs are well-known in some way or another) called The Wells and had a very nice lunch, then found ourselves right back at the Heath, tho' at a different part. Again - LOADS of people hanging out and enjoying the really spectacular weather. Then, more stolling down Hampstead streets, finally finding the Keats House where the poet John Keats lived for awhile, then finally back home.

Sunday night, Chris attempted to follow what had been something of a routine back home and make his signature linguine with clam sauce. We haven't been able to find canned clams here yet, so he tried to substitute cockles, which apparently are in the clam family; however these were jarred pickled cockles and as much as Chris tried, he could not make them work. He still made a fantastic pasta sauce; the cockles just didn't make the cut. Adjustments, adjustments.