Once again long time since I have written again but life has been a bit hectic. Anyway here is a belated description of our Easter weekend. We headed to London on Good Friday and attended Good Friday service at Westminster Cathedral (not to be confused with Westminster Abbey) where there was standing room only. We spent the night at a friend's mother's flat with several other people from my college.
Holy Saturday we managed the tube in order to arrive in time for the big boat race between the top men's rowers in Oxford and Cambridge. Both teams are known as the 'Blues' since Oxford's main colour is navy blue and Cambridge's is a light blue. Both the men's 1st (top boat) and 2nd boats raced against each other, the Oxford 2nd boat won their race. At 2:15pm the top boats pushed off--this is a grueling race that is over 4 miles long and takes about 17 minutes! A little over half way through the race it was interrupted by a swimmer in the water. He was nearly hit by the Oxford oars (which could have injured him quite severely). Later it was discovered this 'swimmer' was protesting elitism. Here is an article:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/olympics/rowing/9193826/University-Boat-Race-2012-a-futile-protest-that-was-dead-in-the-water.html
The race was restarted at the half way point but the Oxford boat moved a little too close to the Cambridge boat causing their oars to hit each other and resulting in the blade of one of Oxford's oars to snap off. Needless to say it was one of the most exciting boat races!
Easter Sunday we had a potluck dinner at our friend Jen's flat. We had volunteered to make a ham but discovered much to our dismay that we could not find a ham big enough for the number of people coming to dinner. We turned to the internet to find out where we could get a bigger ham. Much to our surprise we discovered that the British cook gammon more often than ham. The truth is, however, that gammon is the generally the same cut of meat as ham and comes cured and smoked or unsmoked. The big difference is that in the States when we buy a ham it is cooked and we only need to reheat it for dinner. Gammon is always uncooked and therefore needs to be cooked all the way through before eating. It was a fun and interesting adventure and the gammon turned out very well with a homemade honey-wholegrain mustard-brown sugar glaze. Its a bit saltier than the ham we are use to. Apparently this can be taken care by soaking the gammon in water prior to cooking it. We didn't have time to soak it before hand, however, because of our adventures in London for the boat race. Now we know for next time!
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| What gammon looks like when you buy it |
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| What ham looks like when you buy it |
Hope you learned something new along with us!
Cheers!
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