Shelves in the closet? There'd better be...
Friday, March 21, 2008
Halla joined us last night - she got to the city during Avenue Q. We stayed up so bloody late last night that we didn't get going until around noon today, but ended up spending most of the day wandering around Oxford Street. After a very disappointing lunch at a bar, and several wasted pounds on “apple cider” that proved to be 6.5% alcoholic, I completely shot the wad at Foyles and HMV. My shopping list reads as follows:
Foyles:
Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
The Decameron - Giovanni Boccaccio
Gothic Tales - Elizabeth Gaskell
The Master of Petersburg - J.M. Coetzee
The Alchemist - Paolo Coelho
Lieder ohne Worte - Felix Mendelssohn
HMV (which stands for His Master's Voice! I lurrves it!):
Audrey Hepburn Collection: Breakfast at Tiffany's, Roman Holiday, Sabrina, Funny Face, and Paris when it Sizzles
Humphrey Bogart Collection: Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, Key Largo, and The Big Sleep
Robin Hood, Series 1
Stardust
Debussy: The Complete Piano Works
Tóti almost fell over when he saw the British History section at Foyles. Not only was the sheer size of it overwhelming, but the first book he saw on display was "A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain." Who else but his favorite monarch, eh? As for myself, I could have emptied my pockets much, much faster if I'd only had more time, but ay well. I don't have the luggage space anyway. I also can't quite hold water over the fact that they have a SHEET MUSIC section. If only all bookstores in the US were this civilized. I shall have to come back, both for that and the seemingly lovely jazz café...
I have decided that I absolutely love cooking, and was delighted to have willing victims for two whole meals. When we finally returned back to the apartment for dinner, Sólrún, Haukur, and I went on a grocery mission to Tesco, a (semi) local 24-hour store, where we were marginally successful at finding ingredients for my planned home cooking this evening and tomorrow morning. I found the selection to be quite lacking - no pecans and no baking powder, for heaven’s sake! - but I suppose as much is to be expected at an El Cheapo 24-hr joint at 9 pm on a Friday night.
The response tonight was quite positive, so I hope that my second showing at the stove tomorrow morning doesn’t disappoint. I adapted my dad's classic fried trout and pecans recipe to the available raw materials - individually packaged bites of salmon, which were surprisingly good, and pecans hand-picked from bags of mixed nuts. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that Halla is allergic to nuts. We thankfully realized the snafu in time not to kill her, but it was a wee bit of a bummer to have cooked a dinner that one of us couldn’t eat. Ah well.
Having eaten, we all curled up on the sofa and watched Enchanted, which nobody except Halla and myself had seen. It was an immediate success, and we had a good bit of fun trying to spot all the Disney references. I suspect it will be a lot of fun to rewatch the Disney classics having committed Enchanted to memory, and see how many references I can “mine” by myself.
I’m planning on throwing a proper pancake breakfast tomorrow morning, provided I can get my hands on the elusive baking powder that couldn’t be found at Tesco despite our best efforts. May luck be on my side. Our ambition to visit Dover has been given up do to inclement weather and a general desire to take it easy, so I suspect we’ll loiter around town and spend money on Oxford Street again tomorrow. Also, I had bloody better find a confirmation present for my sister and something for my brothers, otherwise I’ll feel like a prize idiot.
Halla joined us last night - she got to the city during Avenue Q. We stayed up so bloody late last night that we didn't get going until around noon today, but ended up spending most of the day wandering around Oxford Street. After a very disappointing lunch at a bar, and several wasted pounds on “apple cider” that proved to be 6.5% alcoholic, I completely shot the wad at Foyles and HMV. My shopping list reads as follows:
Foyles:
Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
The Decameron - Giovanni Boccaccio
Gothic Tales - Elizabeth Gaskell
The Master of Petersburg - J.M. Coetzee
The Alchemist - Paolo Coelho
Lieder ohne Worte - Felix Mendelssohn
HMV (which stands for His Master's Voice! I lurrves it!):
Audrey Hepburn Collection: Breakfast at Tiffany's, Roman Holiday, Sabrina, Funny Face, and Paris when it Sizzles
Humphrey Bogart Collection: Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, Key Largo, and The Big Sleep
Robin Hood, Series 1
Stardust
Debussy: The Complete Piano Works
Tóti almost fell over when he saw the British History section at Foyles. Not only was the sheer size of it overwhelming, but the first book he saw on display was "A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain." Who else but his favorite monarch, eh? As for myself, I could have emptied my pockets much, much faster if I'd only had more time, but ay well. I don't have the luggage space anyway. I also can't quite hold water over the fact that they have a SHEET MUSIC section. If only all bookstores in the US were this civilized. I shall have to come back, both for that and the seemingly lovely jazz café...
I have decided that I absolutely love cooking, and was delighted to have willing victims for two whole meals. When we finally returned back to the apartment for dinner, Sólrún, Haukur, and I went on a grocery mission to Tesco, a (semi) local 24-hour store, where we were marginally successful at finding ingredients for my planned home cooking this evening and tomorrow morning. I found the selection to be quite lacking - no pecans and no baking powder, for heaven’s sake! - but I suppose as much is to be expected at an El Cheapo 24-hr joint at 9 pm on a Friday night.
The response tonight was quite positive, so I hope that my second showing at the stove tomorrow morning doesn’t disappoint. I adapted my dad's classic fried trout and pecans recipe to the available raw materials - individually packaged bites of salmon, which were surprisingly good, and pecans hand-picked from bags of mixed nuts. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that Halla is allergic to nuts. We thankfully realized the snafu in time not to kill her, but it was a wee bit of a bummer to have cooked a dinner that one of us couldn’t eat. Ah well.
Having eaten, we all curled up on the sofa and watched Enchanted, which nobody except Halla and myself had seen. It was an immediate success, and we had a good bit of fun trying to spot all the Disney references. I suspect it will be a lot of fun to rewatch the Disney classics having committed Enchanted to memory, and see how many references I can “mine” by myself.
I’m planning on throwing a proper pancake breakfast tomorrow morning, provided I can get my hands on the elusive baking powder that couldn’t be found at Tesco despite our best efforts. May luck be on my side. Our ambition to visit Dover has been given up do to inclement weather and a general desire to take it easy, so I suspect we’ll loiter around town and spend money on Oxford Street again tomorrow. Also, I had bloody better find a confirmation present for my sister and something for my brothers, otherwise I’ll feel like a prize idiot.