The red-meat vegetarian and the slaughterhouse meet.

Our assignment this week for my British Life and Culture class was for each flat group to go grocery shopping at different assigned grocery stores and buy a list of items. On this list were very “English” foods, such as black pudding (you’ve have to Google that – it’s disgusting), a jar of marmite (basically a jelly made of beer residue), stilton cheese, Earl Grey tea, a pasty (yes, a pasty – not to be confused with a pastry), and other various things. Well, my group as assigned to go to the Ginger Pig and La Fromagerie. And that’s where the adventure began.

To begin with, I was dressed like a soccer mom, so it just started off bad. It was surprising warm on Saturday, so I felt like wearing capris. But of course I didn’t have any summer shoes… therefore, I had to wear tennis shoes. Believe me, it just wasn’t a good look. And, as if you couldn’t tell from the name of our stores, they were in the more upscale part of town, so yeah, I definitely did not blend.

We get to La Fromagerie and aren’t really even sure if we’re allowed to shop there because it’s sort of like a restaurant and sort of like a store, but not really. The closest thing to compare it to is probably Panera Bread. Most people go there to eat, but then you still have the people who go there to buy bread and bagels. So anyways, we’re trying to find everything on our list, but for some reason we didn’t Google everything before we left – so, we really didn’t know what everything was. I finally asked a lady working there and she turned out to be really, really nice and helped us a lot! They didn’t have a lot of the things we needed, but that’s okay because our professor, Lyndon, said we probably wouldn’t be able to find everything at our stores. However, La Fromagerie definitely had stilton cheese. In fact, they had a whole refrigerated room of cheese. I can’t even describe the smell – a mix between stinky gym socks and spoiled milk. Unpleasant to say the least. But we got our cheese, so we were good to go.

Next came the Ginger Pig. Oh my, this one almost killed me for several reasons. First of all, I didn’t know it was a butcher’s shop, and anyone who knows me knows I’m not really a fan of killing animals or eating red meat. And right when you walk into the Ginger Pig, you are surrounded by bright red, raw meat of every shape and size. Definitely about lost my lunch on that one. We walk over to the counter and ask a man if we can buy some black pudding. He happened to be from Brazil and very nice as well. (We were very lucky that we encountered nice people that day.) He asked, “Umm… are you sure you want that?” And we said, “Yes, we’re supposed to buy it. Soo… what exactly is black pudding?” So he told us. All I can say is gross. It looks like a sausage and is made with blood and some sort of other material. We were lucky enough to get one with blood and pig’s head. Fantastic. But apparently, it’s quite the popular item in England. There was a whole bowl of it and our little Brazilian man said it would all be gone by tomorrow. Oh, and it also cost 13.50 pounds per kilogram. I can think of about 9,874 things I’d rather spend that much money on, besides a roll of bloody pig’s head. We bought the smallest piece possible and got out of the slaughterhouse as fast as possible.

And now the stinky cheese and black pudding are sitting in our refrigerator at our flat. I can’t wait to find out in class what we’re supposed to do with all that. I’m usually pretty good about making myself try different things, but after seeing pounds and pounds of raw red meat AND learning exactly what black pudding is, I think I’ll skip out on this one.

Oh, and today was another crazy adventure. All of my London books (and the Internet) recommended going to Brick Lane Market, so we thought we’d give it a try. Oh my. That was seriously the first time since I’ve been here that I did not feel safe. This market was supposedly in North London near the tube stop for Liverpool Street. After walking quite a while, passing a man drinking a large can of beer at 10:30 AM, another man trying to “woo” us, and a crack whore (seriously, she was for real – no exaggeration), we decided we were pretty much lost. So we turned down a random street and somehow ran into what was supposedly Brick Lane Market. There wasn’t much there, so I’m not exactly sure if we ever did find it… but let’s just say we didn’t stay long. We walked back to the tube stop as fast as we could and went to Camden Market instead. That market is so much better and makes me so happy. :)

I had some fabulous Chinese food again, and split a triple chocolate donut from the lovely donut cart with Mel. It was wonderful. And a much friendlier place than where we were before. I bought a few things for some people and myself, so it was a definitely a good time.

But of course, that’s not the end of the story. For some reason, they closed the Camden Town tube stop from 1:00 to 5:30 PM on Sundays to cut down on the crowds. (?) I don’t really understand the theory behind that, but whatever. So we had to try to figure out the bus system, which is slightly more confusing than the tube system. We were tired of waiting, so we sort of just jumped on the first bus that came by us. And unfortunately it was headed north and we really needed to be going south. I didn’t actually realize this until we were sitting on the bus and I pulled out my map. We were off my map of central London, so I figured it would be a good time to get off before we ended up in Scotland. Luckily, we weren’t too far from a different tube stop and rode that back to an area we knew without any problems.

Oh my, the adventures of London. Always a good time. :)

Until next time,
Rachel