Monday, December 20, 2010

press for champagne

i have a friend who i only see every few months due to both of our hectic schedules, and we decided we should celebrate Christmas by having a really fabulous brunch. my idea of fabulous brunch definitely involves champagne, so my friend suggested this place:


i loved the pink and gold for some reason

maybe a bit over the top but Christmas only comes once a year and i liked the general idea of being a bit frivolous for once. i got to the restaurant a few minutes early and perused the menu while i waited. frivolous indeed! it was £3.25 for a small cup of coffee! gah. it made more sense to get a cocktail, really. i wanted champagne badly, especially since they had one of these at the table:



you have no idea how much i wanted to press that button. but alas, the cheapest glass of champagne was £11.50 so i "settled" for a hot toddy since my throat was acting funny. it was the best beverage i have ever had, absolute heaven. i was lucky to find eggs benedict on the menu for only a little more than the price of champagne and ended up ok budget wise thanks to the fact that i nursed my cocktail and resisted the urge to ask for any more water. :-)

it is worth noting here that living with four roommates is what affords me the opportunity to see how the other half lives, even it is only for hour-long intervals!

p.s. they also had a power outlet at the table where they apparently plug in a TOASTER so that you can have freshly made hot toast, but it seemed boring to take a picture of a plug socket...

Saturday, December 18, 2010

white friday

so, i was scheduled to go to vevey, switzerland yesterday for a holiday lunch, which i was quite looking forward to. however, the day before we were supposed to got, the weather forecast predicted snow for london AND the rest of europe. the alarm went off at 3:55 am on friday morning and london was clear, so our team headed out to heathrow to await our 7 am flight to geneva. there was no sign of delay, but 7 am came and went and the airport staff announced that geneva airport was closed until 9 am (8 am UK time). we called the people we were supposed to meet for lunch, who assured us that while it was indeed snowing in switzerland it wasn't a "disaster" and that we should plan to fly in whenever the airport opened. our team had a spirited debate about whether we should go or not, since we had to fly BACK to london that night, and in the end decided to roll the dice and fly out for lunch as planned.

we landed in geneva to a white-out situation and found ourselves wondering if we were crazy for flying out of a perfectly snow-free city into a winter wonderland. but, the trains were still running fine so on we went to vevey! once we started to get around lake geneva, the weather cleared a little and it was a really pretty ride. vevey was very snowy and it made it look like a little postcard town:



however, as we ate lunch, it started snowing again. hard. by the time we came out of the restaurant, it was hard to see the lake that was only a few feet away:





yikies. we piled BACK onto the train to geneva and i got a text with this picture of london from adam:



london absolutely cannot deal with snow, so this was more alarming than the snow in geneva. luckily we were flying to heathrow and not city, which closes at the first sign of heavy rain. however, our flight was slightly delayed anyway because heathrow had a backlog from having to clear its runways! but, i think we were lucky to get out of geneva at all because a lot of flights were either really severely delayed or cancelled. we were only an hour late, which is pretty good given the weather on both sides.

fifteen hours after my 3:55 am wakeup call, two planes, two trains, and two cab rides later, i was back in my warm and cozy room snuggled up next to my little christmas tree. adam brought curry takeaway over, which i ate...in bed. :-) not a bad day overall albeit exhausting!



merry Christmas from london!

Monday, December 13, 2010

naked in the office

no, i wasn't drinking! we have this thing in our office called naked lunch where, several times each year, three people get chosen to give a 20-minute presentation about themselves and essentially "bare all". if there's anything scarier than standing in front of your co-workers preparing to tell your life story, i don't know what it is (except maybe teaching English to very excited adolescents OR paragliding, but i digress :-).

i was one of the lucky few this year who got picked to go naked, and i've spent the last few weeks plotting, scheming, and stressing about what to say. who am i, really? how did i get here? it turned out that some of my story was quite easy to tell and some of it was actually unbeknownst to me until i started putting this thing together:



(Current and/or ex-members of the good ship Klamath will recognise the format!)

essentially this 9-up = brand Jennifer and even though it is not the prettiest thing, it felt like an accurate representation of ME. what is all this stuff? from left to right, starting with the top row:

top left
the big fish in a small bowl stands for who i thought i was in cincinnati, loving my job and my life but knowing i wasn't being challenged enough. the little fish was who i aspired to be, even though she is smaller, she has a bigger bowl to swim around in.

top middle
the fab deca logo. andy rodgers got me into this and it was the one extracurricular that taught me how to write a speech, give presentations to thousands of people, and got me on the right path. i know you were all thinking it was my part time job with the Colonel that got me where i am today, but i really think it was deca that acted as the springboard.

top right
the track stands for how much i love running, even though i am STILL burned out from the flying pig marathon and not sure if i ever want to do 26.2 again. running is something i enjoy with my dad, something that gives me a sense of place no matter where i am, and something that keeps my crazies in tact. the smell of that track in the late afternoon sunshine takes me right back to 7th grade and the milford eagles racing crew...

middle left
my passport = a girl's guide to freedom. i have to thank my parents on this one for letting me go to spain when i was 17. that travel bug bit me right in the ass at a young age and has never let go!

middle middle
i love reading, writing, and everything in between. i adore bill bryson and secretly (or not) long to be a travel writer.

middle right
this wall in cusco is red, just like the little piece of my heart that will always remain in the amazing sacred valley of peru. the trip that changed my way of looking at the world...

bottom left
if i was going to be a muppet, it would totally be beaker. i love to make stuff, which is always an experiment and makes me feel like a mad scientist sometimes (especially in the kitchen). coupled with the fact that i get really high-pitched sometimes, well, can't you just see the correlation? meep, meep!

bottom middle
my eternal mental age. i had the wisdom of my twenties (parents stop laughing at me) but the ENERGY of a twenty-something. it's orange because i have synesthesia...

bottom right
EC1...the postcode...stands for being that little fish in the big bowl now, traveling to random places for £24.99 on easyJet, drinking random beers just because i can, and most importantly, where i met my Ads.

so there you have it. if you ever needed written explanation of my nuttiness, look no further.

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

birthday celebrations

the lovely adam celebrated his 32nd birthday on thanksgiving day last week!


wednesday night we had dinner with friends at our favourite italian place, ciao bella


the group got a bit rowdy after too many bottles of value-priced house wine


friday afternoon it was off to a seaside town called brighton, about an hour away on the train. we stayed in a wonderful little b&b called the cavalaire, which was in a restored victorian mansion. breakfast in the mornings was amazing, everything from a Full English to salmon and scrambled eggs! i didn't want to leave.


our first stop in brighton was the fish bowl pub, where we feasted on giant fish finger sandwiches and seasonal ales.


since it was really, really cold in brighton, our second stop was at a cosy pub called the bath arms, where we sat by the fire and enjoyed more seasonal ales and a lovely woodford reserve.


saturday morning we braved the cold for a walk on the beach and down to the famous pier. the ocean was beautiful...too bad we were wearing ski hats!


that blurry thing in the corner is my MITTEN, which i wore to the BEACH


heh, heh. the brits call cotton candy "candy floss" which makes absolutely no sense to me


cheeky illustrations on the side of the women's bathing house


i tried my hand at some skee ball in the arcade, although the game was actually (appropriately) called "ice ball"


after a very cold morning on the pier we walked back down the beach to a place called mdtea, which i didn't take a picture of because the staff wasn't very friendly and they scared me. that aside, i had the BEST cup of tea there ever. it was a peppermint and chili infusion, absolutely amazing.


adam's friends mike and amelia drove in from kent to have dinner with us saturday night! we went to a great seafood restaurant called english's, where we dined on oysters, scallops, and fresh lemon sole. the meal took 3.5 hours, so we really got to enjoy every course and not feel too rushed.


i would smile here but my face is actually frozen

snowed in

in case you haven't caught the london weather lately, it's bloody freezing here and snowing to boot. it snowed all day yesterday but it didn't stick much within central london. however, in kent where adam lives, they have over a foot! needless to say the trains aren't running and he is stuck in greenhithe for the foreseeable future...



Adam's monster truck, covered in a mountain of snow

thanksgiving in london, year two

for the second year in a row, my american friend beth hosted a lovely thanksgiving meal for us turkey fans who are far from home. beth's friend michael also joined us, along with adam, who was also celebrating his birthday!


a wonderful spread to be thankful for


good company to share the meal with


eating my veggies...mama would be proud!


birthday candles for my sweet boy (guess who made the pie!)


happy thanksgiving everyone!

london weekend

two weekends ago, i decided to spend some time getting to know my little city a bit better. i started by having dinner at a chic-chic pan asian fusion restaurant called cocoon in piccadilly circus. normally i wouldn't go near piccadilly unless i have guests in town OR if i needed to visit the anthropologie store, but it's Christmas and there are nice lights up, so i braved the crowds for a friday evening out with the girls:



saturday night adam came over and we embarked on a mini ec1 pub crawl. we realised that there are about 50 pubs in my postcode (or more. no joke.) and that we only go to three of them, even though there are a bunch we have always wanted to try. we found that a few of them were closed (ec1 is next to the city, which is primarily a mon-fri community) but we did enjoy delicious beer at some new local haunts:

the rising sun, a samuel smith pub with a fireplace - score!

the castle - not bad, but smelled like a club and was playing bad music

betsey trotwood - they let me try the beers on draught before making me commit

the wilmington arms - oh my. this one smelled like bleach, which makes you wonder WHAT they had to clean up that required the involvement of chemicals. we didn't linger in this one.


the reigning champion of the evening, the rising sun






enjoying the sights along the mini pub crawl

on sunday we headed up to chapel market where we hit our favourite butcher shop, the fresh meat market, for a leg of lamb and some pork chops. we also braved the horror that is sunday afternoon at the islington waitrose, so that i could get cans of pumpkin for thanksgiving! finally a local store is stocking canned pumpkin and i don't have to go all the way to stoke newington!

with the groceries purchased, we embarked on what i hope will be the first of many "monthly cultural outings". this month we went to the museum of london, which is a 10-minute walk from my flat and is also FREE. we only had an hour to spend but got too see some really cool displays on what london was like millions of years ago.


exploring the museum

all in all it was a fun weekend and a great reminder of the variety of things london has to offer! if i ever get bored here, it is my own fault...