Literary Brilliant Britain

I'm going to start this off by talking about one of my favourite things - cheese! Certainly it is one of the things I miss the most about Britain, When I come home one thing I have to do is buy a block of cheddar (unless my Mum has already got some for me :D)  and take a bite, that first bite is always heavenly good and leaves my mouth tingling from the taste before I turn round to Amanda with a glint in my eye saying 'Cor blimey, you have got to try this cheese!' Half of you (my American audience) will be confused by this, as cheese in the States really lacks any type of kick at all and it is certainly not something you'd race to the supermarket to eat, you probably think I am pretty weird for doing that. When I first moved to America I was gutted by the blandness of the cheese, it just tastes so rubbery and really lacks that bite that makes cheese cheese. Even the really expensive 'extra sharp' cheddar's here barely pass as a mild in my book. People often tell me that I am wrong, that if I go to Amish country or the market I can pick up a really great cheese and believe me I have tried. I have spent a fortune to try and find the equivalent of a 2 pound slab of value cheddar from Tesco yet to no avail. I was starting to think that maybe it had something to do with the cows out here? Well I now know that I am not wrong, you cannot get a good cheese in the States and the reason is pretty simple that the cheese in America has to be pasteurized. A process that kills all the enzymes that make a cheese taste like cheese and leaving behind this plasticky, rubbery substance that resembles and tastes more like an eraser as much as a decent slab of cheddar. At least now I don't need to waste my time hunting about hunting for cheese, in the States you are much better off sticking to something Americans are brilliant at - Peanut Butter and Chocolate! Yum :) 

New York

A Rainbow over Boston

As you may have guessed from the paragraph above I recently got to come home to Britain. This was because Amanda bagged herself a new job! In the daytime! with no night shifts! With tons of money! Congratulations :D We took a couple of weeks off before she started her job and had a fabulous trip,we gave it a bit of a literary twist by visiting a few places relating to British authors and started by going to London to visit Charles Dickens's house with my Dad. Charles Dickens lived in the heart of London, Oliver Twist territory where you have to be sure to hold on to your belongings for fear the Artful Dodger may spring out from behind the postbox and nick your snotty hanky! Only kidding - he lived in a large Georgian terraced home which is now surrounded by smart cars and hipsters and a rather wonderful pub on the corner 'The Calthorpe Arms' from the 16th century which I am sure Dickens himself would have loved to frequent. Inside the house it was neat to see the desk he wrote Oliver Twist on and I particularly enjoyed the letter (pictured below) he wrote to his Clock Smith to get his clock mended, It would be wonderful to be able to write with such wit on a whim.

Dickens letter to the Clock Smith.

The said clock.

Dickens used to keep a Hedgehog in the house to eat all the icky insects.

It is unusual for letters like this from one from Dickens to survive from this from Victorian times. The Victorians valued the speed and efficiency that corresponding by letter offered but generally hated the fact that their intentions were recorded on paper, So it was not unusual for people to burn their correspondence. Dickens himself sadly burnt 20 years worth of his correspondence up on Gads Hill, remarking afterwards that "It rained very heavily When I finished (burning the letters), I suspect my correspondence of having overcast the face of the Heavens."

Continuing the literary theme, this is the line to have your picture taken with the trolley at Platform 9 and three quarters! No Thanks!

Curry Time with Dad and Cousin Guy. They say the Curry in Brick Lane is better than in India itself!

I have been away from Britain for 5 years now and a lot has changed, I need a new map book of London as every other tube station seems to be new, there is a building even taller than Canary Wharf and the England football team are pretty good. Yet despite these changes some things always stay the same, I had a blast with my friend Tim for a couple of days and my most endearing memory has to be Tim losing his train ticket mid journey and having to buy a new one for $15 to travel about 20 miles! It made me chuckle, Tim was convinced he had left his ticket at the customer service counter at the station earlier in the day so before buying a new one he returned to the said counter to see if he could retrieve his ticket. Tim warned us that the guy he spoke with earlier at the desk was not the most genial and so it made me chuckle when we were 'greeted'  by way of a grunt by a gentleman who bore a uncanny resemblance to one of the Gringotts Goblins from Harry Potter. The Goblin informed Tim with a rather satisfied grin that he absolutely categorically had NOT left his ticket there, this was despite the fact that there was a stray train ticket with what, from a distance looked suspiciously like it had the word Edenbridge printed on it, teehehe! Exhorbitantly high train ticket prices is something else that has not changed in Britain.

Inside MarchPane - A wonderful Shop specialising in rare children's books right in the centre of London, they even have a copy of Alice in Wonderland in Farsi!

A Dorset Cream Tea, just look at that clotted cream! Mmmm!

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The delightful Abbotsbury Tea Rooms

Amanda and I have recently had the pleasure to discover Thomas Hardy, we read 'Far From the Madding Crowd' and loved it so much it left us with a hankering to visit his home country and the setting of Bathsheba's great adventures and misadventures - Wessex. What a county it is! From the most idyllic villages to the most traditional of pubs to some awe inspiring scenery Dorset really does have it all. One of Amanda's favourite things about Britain (except for me of course) is the legendary cream tea and the county of Dorset (Hardy's Wessex) does it better than most. For those not in the know a Cream Tea consists of the sweetest of sweet scones, some wonderful homemade jam and a healthy dollop of scrumptious clotted cream served with a steaming pot of tea.  Our first night in Dorset we stayed in the lovely Abbotsbury tea rooms where we got to enjoy a beautiful sunset walk along the beach as well as a cream tea for dinner AND breakfast :) Abbotsbury sits on the coast so we enjoyed a day hiking the astoundingly beautiful cliffs around West Bay, the setting of TVs Broadchurch where Amanda and I took a Broadchurchesque selfie which you get to check out below below. 

Broadchurch Selfie

The Cilffs at West Bay

Amanda enjoyed our clifftop hike so much she resorted to crawling :)

Hi!

We also took the opportunity to visit the Thomas Hardy cottage (a beautiful thatched cottage where he was born) and Max Gate which was the rather imposing house he built for himself and his family in Dorchester. I reckon the Ghost Adventures crew (infamous TV ghost hunters here in the States) would have a field day at Max Gate as this old house has it all - a wife who dies forgotten and alone in the attic, an old druid stone found in the garden and Thomas Hardy himself who had his heart removed in the living room. This came about because as he was considered a national treasure the powers at be wanted Thomas Hardy buried at poets corner in Westminster Abber, however Hardy himself had expressed a wish to be buried in his local graveyard so a compromise was reached and following Hardy's death his body was sent to Westminster Abbey after first having his heart removed and placed next to his wife in his beloved Wessex. Interestingly his heart is now nestled between both of his wives, I wonder how they feel about that! Hardy's second wife Florence went down in my estimations after it came to light that after the death of Hardy's first wife Florence had all of Hardy's first wife Emma's cats killed! Back to the ghosts I for one certainly wouldn't want to spend a night there!

Walking through the real Egdon Heath, do you like our matching bags!?

Hardy Cottage

Reading Thomas Hardy in his conservatory at Max Gate. Can you see a ghost?

A wonderful local brew 'Palmers Gold' enjoyed in the Acorn, Thomas Hardys favourite pub!

a rare 1st edition menu from The Leicester Arms pub in Wessex seen next to the 2nd edition, printed after Thomas Hardy had taught them how to spell!

Wessex also lays claim to the Cerne Abbas Giant. The giant is just that, a giant of a man with a giant.... boasting a rather impressive erection carrying a club and a shield who was 'erected' into the hillside behind the village of Cerne Abbas. No one really knows a whole lot about him, the first historical reference to him is from the 18th century when a local parish paid a little money for his upkeep but there is no mention of him earlier. Some people believe he has the ability to aid fertlity which made him rather popular with wannabe parents so now sadly they have restricted access to him by means of a barbed wire fence. Others believe he was 'erected' as a political mockery to Oliver Cromwell while others think he is a Celtic representation of the Greek God Hercules. Currently he is rather worn and quite hard to spot from a distance and even from up close, I personally thought the best view of the Cerne Abbas Giant (with sheep!) was found on this rather wonderful painting in a local tea room!

The farmer who owns this hallowed land always seems to have the best lambing season!

A great view of the Giant form up close!

Here he is in all his glory.

Back in Kent a couple of miles away from my mum's house and my hometown of Edenbridge you will find a little village nestled in the woods called Hartfield, it is not just nestled in just any wood but a very special wood, Winnie the Poohs One Hundred Acre Wood! Its a beautiful spot surrounded by stunning countryside and right in the middle of the wood you'll find the original pooh bridge, where you can spend many a happy hour attempting to play pooh sticks, I say attempting because there are now so many twigs stuck underneath the bridge that the chances of your twig making it out the other side at all are pretty slim! You have to be sure to take your own twigs to play with as none of the trees in the vicinity of the bridge have any twigs left to use! When you visit be sure to stop off at the tea rooms as well where you can partake in another cream tea :)

A Winnie-The-Pooh style cream tea with honey!

Pooh Sticks at Pooh Bridge!

Of course no trip back to Britain is complete without a trip to the hallowed turf of Loftus Road, home of the mighty Queens Park Rangers! Amanda loved watching her beloved Hoops bag a one nil win against Aston Villa on a cold and blustery night in West London. The tickets were quite expensive at $25 each but well worth it as the crowd reminded us with a chant of 'it is just like watching Brazil'!

One of Villas umpteenth corners that they couldn't capitalize on.

Even ducks are QPR fans!

Graham enjoyed watching some decent football for a change, he said it made a change from the usual drivel he gets to see (or would get to see, if the ticket prices at Upton Park weren't so astronomical!) at West Ham.

We returned to the States just in time for the holiday season which happens Luna the cat's most hated time of year, We haven't even passed Thanksgiving yet and already she has started on her relentless annual holiday season of destruction. It was the lamp that took the brunt of her last attack and I'm sure it won't be the last. She has been so good all year, does it have something to do with the cold or does she just hate Christmas this much?

Luna up to her usual holiday season antics!

Puebla, Mexico

My Mother has just departed after a 3 week trip and I miss her already! We treated Mum to a trip down to Savannah, GA where we spent our honeymoon ad she had a blast, we took on her on a ghost tour, to the beach and even for some real Southern Home Cooking! Yum!

I also treated mum to quite an eventful bicycle ride back from the CLE winery (a favourite from her last trip) right here in Cleveland Heights. It started well when it turned out we had arrived at the winery just in time for closing so after a couple of quick gulps it was back to the bicycles for the fun to begin! I hopped on the bike and started to peddle - straight into a bush. I had thrown the Lock around the handlebars which had managed to position itself in such a way as to jam the steering hard to the right sending me straight into the shrubbery. At least it was a comfy bush and not a holly bush or a car I cycled into this time! With this incident fresh in the memory I was taking it easy and was stunned to see a deer rear up un front of me, nearly taking me down before ot ran off over the road! It was happily munching on some tasty flowers in someones garden when I rudely interrupted it, startling it and sending it flying across the road! Mum must have been wondering what would happen next..... Well Mum didn't have much time to wonder as just around the next corner I got some branches tangled up in mum's rucksack which I was kindly carrying for her, I kept going hoping to yank the branches free which is exactly what happened, sending them pinging back straight into poor mum's face!!!! Just like a catapult!!! Needless to say we didn't cycle anywhere else after that, although we did get to go back to the winery to collect mum's sunglasses which had slipped out of the rucksack when I took my tumble! Not bad for a 2 mile ride!

A deer in our garden, I wonder if it is the same deer that I managed to scare?

Well enough of my antics with mum, this blog is about Puebla, Mexico - One of my favourite! 

Puebla is a wealthy provincial city with a huge historical quarter, the largest cathedral in the Americas, the finest food in all of Mexico and its famed colourful talavera pottery everywhere! Puebla is also full of old VW Beatles and Campers, literally every other car is a old VW, probably because Puebla is home to the worlds biggest VW car plant. It really adds to the charm of the place - Not the car plant but the old VWs!

VW Camper

VW Beatle and Puebla's pretty coloured streets.

We stayed at the Casa De La Palma, a fine colonial building constructed to house the Spaniards when they came over to Mexico but before they could find work, a little like a homeless shelter today I guess! It was a beautiful hotel with a little central courtyard, lots of flowers everywhere and really high ceilings in the rooms to keep it nice and cool. Not bad for 25 dollars a night!

Inside the Casa De Las Palmas

Puebla has a lot to offer the tourist and was a fantastic welcome to Mexico, you could spend days wondering the old cobbled streets, especially La Calle de los Dulces or 'the street of candies' for us English folk, It's wonderful, a whole road of nothing but sweet shops selling nothing but delicious homemade candies, my favourite was the fudge for sure! On the subject of food in Puebla you really cant go wrong. Puebla is the home of Mole Polblano, which is chicken served in a rich chili and chocolate sauce and is heavenly good!! 

Mole Poblano!

Contrary to my preconceptions the food in Central Mexico was really not overly spicy, with most dishes giving you a tickle of spice, enough for you to taste but not overwhelming by any means. Before we left Amanda and I had been getting in the mood for our trip by consuming unhealthy amounts of Cholula hot sauce as Cholula was one of the places we were to visit and we wanted to get out stomachs used to the spice. What a waste of time, we didn't see a single bottle of Cholula hot sauce the whole time we were gone!

A Pretty Kitchen

On the subject of Cholula we took a day trip there from Puebla and I have to say it didn't get off to the best of starts. Puebla may be 'small' compared to Mexico City but it still has a population of almost 6 million inhabitants meaning it is twice the size of Chicago, in fact in the US only New York would be bigger. All these people made navigating the city a bit of a challenge, We opted to take the local bus to Cholula and explore the famous pyramid there on our own as it was the only option for us except a Spanish language tour. The journey started out well enough as we found and boarded the right bus and discovered a ticket was about 10 cents, it went a bit downhill after that however as we somehow managed to miss the stop for Central Cholula and ended up at the end of the line at a bus stop in a not so desirable part of town with nothing but stray dogs and tumbleweed for company, the bus then chucked us off and left us there all alone. 

All Alone in Cholula Bus Station.

Dreadful thoughts of our impending doom were going through our minds when thank goodness another bus showed up heading back the way we had come. I have never been so happy to see a bus in all my life, even if the old thing made our school Metro-bus look like a Rolls Royce! Despite the fact the bus saved us from a grizzly fate I was still a bit grumpy that I had to pay another 10 cents for another ticket :(

Cholula is a suburb of Puebla that is home to the worlds largest pyramid, far larger than the pyramids in Giza. The pyramid in Cholula is just a huge mound of earth now, thanks to Cortez's wish to destroy anything Aztec, in fact after destroying the aztec pyramid he went ahead and built a Church on top of it! Some parts of the original pyramid have been excavated giving a sneak peak at what must have been an awe inspiring structure, Now you can walk up to the top of it where according to all the postcards you have a incredible view of the smoking Popocatapetyl volcano (remember from the Mexico City blog?) looming over you but what we saw was a lot of haze have with the volcano just barely visible in the distance!

Can you see 'El Popo'?

Spanish church atop the old Aztec Pyramid.

We were lucky that the next night our hotel receptionist pointed us in the direction of Arena Puebla, home of the Lucho Libre! It is Mexican masked wrestling and it is a lot of fun, they were quite a diverse group of wrestlers the night we went, we got to see Sauron from Lord of the Rings, A Policeman as well as a tiger and of course a jaguar all with costumes to match! They all wear fancy capes, skimpy shorts and masks to hide their faces, I really enjoyed it, there was a fun atmosphere in the arena with everyone howling with laughter as the policeman started spanking the jaguars ass before slamming him to the ground with such force the whole arena shook.

Nacho Libre!

Lucha Libre!

Of course no trip to a new city is complete without paying homage to the local football team. Amanda was really excited when we discovered that Lobos BUAP were drawn at home in the Copa MX against Juarez the weekend we just happened to be in Puebla. Puebla has two teams in the top tier of Mexican football with Puebla FC dominating the local and fan base and Lobos being by far the less prestigious of the two but with an incredible story to tell. Lobos are a small university team that last year came from nowhere to win promotion to the Primera division, taking everybody including themselves by surprise. It was so unexpected that the team had done no preparation for this possibility, had to bring in about 10 players on loan and were still searching for a tv deal when we watched them 7 games into the season. They started the season brilliantly and found themselves in 3rd place after a few games, they have tapered off a bit since but it is still a bit of a fairy tale story that we were delighted to witness.

Amanda enjoying a brew before the game.

In September 2017 the state of Puebla suffered a devastating earthquake, toppling buildings and killing scores of people. You can see the evidence of it all around, we got to visit Biblioteca Palafoxiana - The oldest library in the new world which had only just reopened after it had taken them 5 months to restore it after the earthquake. A lot of the old churches had also suffered as you can see from these pictures.

Damage from a devastating earthquake in 2017

The Oldest Library in the New World.

Puebla Cathederal - The tallest in Latin America

Artist showing off some of his incredible Talavera Pottery.

I don't think my blog or pictures really do Puebla justice, you'll just have to go there to see it for yourself :)

Music City USA

Hello from my front porch, the sun has finally arrived in Cleveland so I get to sit outside to type my blog!

Our trip down to Nashville, Tennessee started brilliantly! A couple of days before we left I proudly announced to Amanda that after a long spell out due to injury I was going to play football again! I was so excited and so was a little taken aback by Amanda's reaction "Are you sure you should, you better not hurt your knee again and end up limping so badly that we can't do anything in Nashville,  like when you played football before our trip to Pittsburgh". My Mum displayed a similar sentiment "you stupid child, you know it makes your knee swell up". Of course I played football anyway and was mortified the next morning when I noticed my knee had swollen up to the size of a beach ball and I could hardly walk. Amanda was not best pleased, thank goodness it healed quickly.

A Horrible storm we drove through outside Nashville.

Bright and early and knee permitting on Friday morning we left for Nashville and almost immediately hit bumper to bumper traffic in Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnatti and Louisville before a thunderstorm of epic proportions just outside Nashville nearly washed us away for good. This all contrived to turn a nice 8 hour road trip into a 12 hour marathon. I guess it could have been worse, At least I didnt have a boil on my bum! Road trips are romanticized in so many books and movies they really do seem exciting - Setting out onto the open road with all the world as your oyster, at least that is till you actually set off on one and realise the reality of it is you're going to be sitting in endless traffic jams on endless, monotonous highways harrassed by truck drivers and driven loopy by the speed limits....  If only I could have a dime for every Macdonalds we drove by. Or even every Trump and NRA bumper sticker for that matter :) 

Our cute little Air BnB!

Well we didn't give in and eventually arrived. We met up with Sheila and Ken (Amandas Mother and Step Father) who had found a great little house for us all on airbnb - It was in a place called Murfreesboro, a 'suburb' of Nashville that was actually a good hours drive from the city. Due to the huge, sprawling cities and massive amounts of space it is not unusual for somewhere an hour away from the city center to still be considered a part of it. Murfreesboro was lovely, with a quaint old fashioned high street and lots of little shops to get breakfast, coffee and ice cream, the latter being a neccessity with the mercury almost hitting 100 degrees and enough humidity in the air to drown a dolphin. We plumped for the city Cafe for our breakfast, a delightful little spot with Southern accents filling the air and some things on the menu I had never seen before including Grits, biscuits and gravy and Fried Bologna. The biscuits and gravy were the best of the bunch, it is nothing like an English biscuit, basically it is a scone with some gravy poured on top, Yum! The fried Bologna was interesting, it is not pronounced like the Italian city but as Bal-Oh-Knee and turned out to basically be a piece of fried spam which was nice when compared to the grit - best described as pieces of dirt picked up from the side of the road, mixed with some goo and thrown in a bowl, I have heard that it tastes nice with sugar but I am not so sure about that.

Grits on the left, Gravy at the top, Bologna on the right and the buscuits at the bottom!

 After a good breakfast you have to head into Nashville, the home of country music! There wasn't a lot of love for Nashville among our Cleveland contingent from the wedding, it was too hot, noisy, busy, and tacky. It may have had an element of all of these things but I personally loved it! They have a street nestled right in the center among the skyscrapers called the Honky Tonk, full of packed bars and restaurants with each one boasting a live band and as much country music as your ears can lap up. We visited on a saturday and combined with the 90 degree heat and all the people it was certainly an assault on the senses! The appeal to the Honky Tonk lies in it's history, For a while Nashville boasted one of the largest radio towers in the nation and the biggest by far in the South thus attracting Country Stars and wannabees to Nashville to enable them to reach the biggest audience possible on this new fangled thing - Radio! The radio may have been overtaken by more modern technologies such as Youtube and the like but Nashville has maintained it's place as the capital of Country Music.

Looking up the Honky Tonk. 

A kiss by the Cumberland River.

The Honky Tonk with all the Skyscrapers in the background.

In keeping with the Country spirit we visited the hatch show print company, A Nashville institution that has produced posters for almost all the country stars over the years. The shop has been going since 1879 and it was fun to hear some of the stories related to their posters. One that made me chuckle was a poster they made for Elvis which travelled around the world thanks to a photographer for life magazine and a conservative preacher. The pastor was holding up the poster while preaching about the evils of 'pop music' with the Elvis Poster in his hand, got snapped in the act by the photographer and made the front page of Life, reaching a global audience as a result. I wanted to include a picture of the Elvis poster here but sadly I neglected to take one!

A printing press at Hatch Show Print, the shelves in the background contain all the old carved letters they use to make the posters, some of them date back to 1879!

This is me making my own poster!

While in Nashville it is also very important that you visit the GooGoo chocolate shop, the original chocolate goo goo is the best, but if you are going to buy some to take home can I also suggest not leaving them in the car on a 100 degree day or you may return to a very sticky mess!

You must go to Goo Goos but do not leave the chocolate in the car!

In the evening we took a trip to see another Nashville institution - The Grand Ole Opry - This is the worlds longest running live radio show and showcases Country Music every Saturday night. I really enjoyed it and I think it is a must see for anyone, regardless of your opinion of country music. It is wonderful that all of the current stars of Country seem to respect and relish playing at the Opry, there seems to sense of prestige about playing on the same stage as the old greats such as Johnny Cash and Patsy Cline. Even Bob Dylan has performed on the famous stage! Something that is neat is that when the Opry moved into it's purpose built stage in the 70s they cut a circle out from the middle of the old stage and carried it to the new venue so the performers today get to stand on the same stage as the legends from the past. A highlight of the show for Amanda and I was Charlie Nagatomo, A Japanese country singer famous for bringing country music to Japan and even opening up a nightclub over there that plays nothing but Country Music, he had a Southern accent as well, it made me chuckle!

The stage at the Grand Ole Opry! Can you spot the circle?

The wedding was wonderful, it was a real Southern affair with Waffles and Chicken served for dinner, absolutely delicious! The temperature was 100 degrees and it was a outside ceremony so it was lucky we arrived fashionably 'almost' late so we didn't have to wait outside for long before the ceremony started, I got extremely sweaty in my suit! The reason we were 'almost' late was thanks to the horrendous Sunday traffic in Nashville, apparently the locals call it 'church traffic' as it is in the bible belt after all! I must wish Reid and Rachel all the best for your lives together, and enjoy your honeymoon in St Lucia! Maybe you'll get to cool off a bit there! Lucky Devils!

Congratulations Rachel and Reid!

Our journey home was much better than our journey there, we hit no traffic at all and even better we stopped off at the Jim Beam bourbon distillery for a tour! Neither Amanda or myself really drink spirits but it was really nice getting to know about bourbon and of course getting to try some nice bourbon at the end! Our distillery tour guide was really good and informative, He told us that the longest a barrel of bourbon can be stored for is 15 years because if you leave it any longer than that so much of the whiskey would have evaporated it wouldn't really be worth opening the barrel, they call the missing bourbon the 'Angels Share'! Something else which is quite interesting is that a lot of the buildings at the distillery are a black colour, this is because when the whiskey is being stored and the angels are taking their share a black fungus is created by the evaporation, covering the warehouses and even the tree bark with what looks like a think black paint!

The Jim Beam Distillery in Clermont, Kentucky.

It takes 14 Square feet of corn to make one bourbon bottle.

This picture epitomises the South,The Baptist Church surrounded by the Distillery warehouses! Note the black colour of the buildings and the tree bark.

A great breakfast on our last morning, you can't go wrong with pancakes!

Getting Chased by a storm on our way home, look at the contrast of the sky behind us and the sky ahead of us!

I must also put a shout out to our next door neighbour Mark who very kindly looked after Luna the Cat while we were gone! Thank You :)