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livWow, the past three weeks have been quite the roller-coaster! After the wedding, there was the week of un-honeymoon, hanging out in a big old house with 15 friends and trying to have multiple conversations at once. Followed by the weekend of more traditional honeymoon after everyone had left, just spending time with jack and basking in the glorious sunshine and doing a bit of fairly minor hiking and playing a lot of Dominion: Hinterlands.
Then it was straight back into a very intense week of exams, marking 600 scripts in 4 days, with a change in the middle for the first lot of practical exams, which involves a whole of 5 minutes of furious marking with 20 second (!) breaks in three sessions. By hometime on Thursday we were pretty shattered, so a couple of colleagues and I decided to go into town and get something to eat so we wouldn't have to cook. Since it was kind of too early for most places to be open, we tried a tapas place called Hector Garcia; I suspect it's probably a chain, but pleasant enough for a mid-week evening out. The tapas selection is ok, if (as I do) you like generic anglo-Mexican food. The cocktails are something pretty special, though, and we ended up spending less than £20 each for a substantial meal with really quite a lot of drinks. And we crashed out at the embarrassingly early time of 8 pm, with a firm resolution to make that a tradition for celebrating the end of practical exams.
And then the Jubilee weekend. I studiously ignored the weird nationalist pomp and state-orchestrated parties, which was particularly easy to do as I had the wonderfulrysmiel visiting. So we spent the four-day weekend trying to make up for all the time we spend on separate continents, and it was absolutely wonderful and very, very relaxing. I did manage to show my guest the Potteries museum including the Staffordshire Hoard, and go out for a couple of meals in restaurants I like, Noah's Ark and Hanging Mangoes, but mostly we just appreciated eachother's company.
One of the waiters in Hanging Mangoes had a nasty black eye, and told us a quite horrific story of how he'd been mugged on the five minute walk home from his restaurant to his home. The area is really pretty insalubrious, but I feel desperately sad that I can't somehow make my city more welcoming to these sweet, hard-working immigrants.
After that, the three-day week, one of which was a second round of practical exams, but the other two were very calm, with the students having finished for the year, and a chance to get started on all the planning for next term that I had been putting off til after the wedding.
And then this weekend, which couldn't have been more different from last! Thuggish Poet turned 30 on Saturday, and I was able to join him for a kind of 16-hour party, lots of fun though considerably exhausting. Basically Mrs Poet had arranged a surprise party involving hiring a narrowboat, filling it with his friends and supplies of cheese, ale, cake and party things. She then inveigled TP down to Camden lock on some flimsy pretext, and then the boat arrived and we all jumped up to sing happy birthday! I don't necessarily approve of surprise parties, but this one was really sweet and it was great fun to be part of it.
After the canal trip the party moved on to a pub in Camden to watch cricket. As people drifted in and out I ended up in interesting conversations with my two excellent brothers, continued as we headed back to Thuggish Poet's place in Hackney for vast amounts of tea. Then out to Rasa, a south Indian vegetarian restaurant in Stoke Newington. That was one of the best cheap meals out I've experienced in a long time; Thuggish Poet cautioned us not to over-order, and we still ended up with more than a party of a dozen could eat, all kinds of flavours that were totally unfamiliar to me, for £13 a head including drinks. I had a really nice sour-spicy thing with yoghurt, mangoes and green bananas, but everything I sampled was exciting, including even the poppadoms and chutneys.
That gave us enough energy to move on to a bar where Thuggish Poet has enough connections to get us the basement on a Saturday night. It was the kind of loud, slightly claustrophobic, hot, crowded, smelly, boozy event that I usually avoid, but Thuggish Poet's friends are such a great crowd that I actually had an excellent time. He's still in touch with a lot of people he met as a teenager, so I knew a far higher proportion of the crowd than I expected, and there was quite a lot of shouting over the beats "so what have you been up to in the last 15 years, then?" Plus I met a whole bunch of cool, diverse new folk. We stumbled home some time around 2:30 am, and my brother found me a place to sleep a couple of floors above the continuing party.
And Sunday was the perfect recovery, really. We started with enough tea to make facing daylight bearable, had brunch in a rather unprepossessing Turkish caff called Cafe Bohemia, which in fact makes absolutely delicious food. Although the arrangements were a bit touch and go, I eventually managed to meet up withdoseybat and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pplfichi, and we decamped to the Pembury for a snack lunch and further tea. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the Pembury doesn't really do the Sunday Lunch pub thing, so it was very quiet and we were able to get some quality time with timeplease.
Moving gradually up the social scale in that uniquely London way, I headed to Kensington to meet up withmonanotlisa; it was really lucky to be able to catch her at the tail end of her visit to London. We found a fairly random hotel and ordered an Afternoon Tea, which honestly was overpriced and of mediocre quality, but it was completely lovely to sit for a couple of hours in a comfortable lounge and chat about all kinds of interesting stuff. We both expressed appreciation of the internet both for giving us a chance to get to know eachother in the first place, and for providing enough background of eachother's lives that we could skip the smalltalk and go straight to the meaningful conversation.
So yay, I'm feeling very satisfied with a few weeks of very varied but very positive and social experiences.
jack and basking in the glorious sunshine and doing a bit of fairly minor hiking and playing a lot of Dominion: Hinterlands. Then it was straight back into a very intense week of exams, marking 600 scripts in 4 days, with a change in the middle for the first lot of practical exams, which involves a whole of 5 minutes of furious marking with 20 second (!) breaks in three sessions. By hometime on Thursday we were pretty shattered, so a couple of colleagues and I decided to go into town and get something to eat so we wouldn't have to cook. Since it was kind of too early for most places to be open, we tried a tapas place called Hector Garcia; I suspect it's probably a chain, but pleasant enough for a mid-week evening out. The tapas selection is ok, if (as I do) you like generic anglo-Mexican food. The cocktails are something pretty special, though, and we ended up spending less than £20 each for a substantial meal with really quite a lot of drinks. And we crashed out at the embarrassingly early time of 8 pm, with a firm resolution to make that a tradition for celebrating the end of practical exams.
And then the Jubilee weekend. I studiously ignored the weird nationalist pomp and state-orchestrated parties, which was particularly easy to do as I had the wonderful
rysmiel visiting. So we spent the four-day weekend trying to make up for all the time we spend on separate continents, and it was absolutely wonderful and very, very relaxing. I did manage to show my guest the Potteries museum including the Staffordshire Hoard, and go out for a couple of meals in restaurants I like, Noah's Ark and Hanging Mangoes, but mostly we just appreciated eachother's company. One of the waiters in Hanging Mangoes had a nasty black eye, and told us a quite horrific story of how he'd been mugged on the five minute walk home from his restaurant to his home. The area is really pretty insalubrious, but I feel desperately sad that I can't somehow make my city more welcoming to these sweet, hard-working immigrants.
After that, the three-day week, one of which was a second round of practical exams, but the other two were very calm, with the students having finished for the year, and a chance to get started on all the planning for next term that I had been putting off til after the wedding.
And then this weekend, which couldn't have been more different from last! Thuggish Poet turned 30 on Saturday, and I was able to join him for a kind of 16-hour party, lots of fun though considerably exhausting. Basically Mrs Poet had arranged a surprise party involving hiring a narrowboat, filling it with his friends and supplies of cheese, ale, cake and party things. She then inveigled TP down to Camden lock on some flimsy pretext, and then the boat arrived and we all jumped up to sing happy birthday! I don't necessarily approve of surprise parties, but this one was really sweet and it was great fun to be part of it.
After the canal trip the party moved on to a pub in Camden to watch cricket. As people drifted in and out I ended up in interesting conversations with my two excellent brothers, continued as we headed back to Thuggish Poet's place in Hackney for vast amounts of tea. Then out to Rasa, a south Indian vegetarian restaurant in Stoke Newington. That was one of the best cheap meals out I've experienced in a long time; Thuggish Poet cautioned us not to over-order, and we still ended up with more than a party of a dozen could eat, all kinds of flavours that were totally unfamiliar to me, for £13 a head including drinks. I had a really nice sour-spicy thing with yoghurt, mangoes and green bananas, but everything I sampled was exciting, including even the poppadoms and chutneys.
That gave us enough energy to move on to a bar where Thuggish Poet has enough connections to get us the basement on a Saturday night. It was the kind of loud, slightly claustrophobic, hot, crowded, smelly, boozy event that I usually avoid, but Thuggish Poet's friends are such a great crowd that I actually had an excellent time. He's still in touch with a lot of people he met as a teenager, so I knew a far higher proportion of the crowd than I expected, and there was quite a lot of shouting over the beats "so what have you been up to in the last 15 years, then?" Plus I met a whole bunch of cool, diverse new folk. We stumbled home some time around 2:30 am, and my brother found me a place to sleep a couple of floors above the continuing party.
And Sunday was the perfect recovery, really. We started with enough tea to make facing daylight bearable, had brunch in a rather unprepossessing Turkish caff called Cafe Bohemia, which in fact makes absolutely delicious food. Although the arrangements were a bit touch and go, I eventually managed to meet up with
doseybat and pplfichi, and we decamped to the Pembury for a snack lunch and further tea. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the Pembury doesn't really do the Sunday Lunch pub thing, so it was very quiet and we were able to get some quality time with timeplease.Moving gradually up the social scale in that uniquely London way, I headed to Kensington to meet up with
monanotlisa; it was really lucky to be able to catch her at the tail end of her visit to London. We found a fairly random hotel and ordered an Afternoon Tea, which honestly was overpriced and of mediocre quality, but it was completely lovely to sit for a couple of hours in a comfortable lounge and chat about all kinds of interesting stuff. We both expressed appreciation of the internet both for giving us a chance to get to know eachother in the first place, and for providing enough background of eachother's lives that we could skip the smalltalk and go straight to the meaningful conversation.So yay, I'm feeling very satisfied with a few weeks of very varied but very positive and social experiences.
