History in the Harbour

Jodi and I aren't big on holidays. Well, I'm not big on holidays so Jodi is only big on a few. Mainly Christmas. Anyway, Valentine's Day, being a holiday, was all but ignored. We made (Jodi made) eggs Benedict which apparently has to be capitalized that way and it was delicious. End of blog-safe celebration. Most of the Boundless 8 came over for dinner and desserts which turned into mostly dessert and watching Hercules. No selfie came of this party, though.

Last week was fairly normal until Friday, when Jodi and I took the day off. We spent the morning cleaning and packing for a weekend holiday to Fareham and Portsmouth with Alexa. We have mutual friends, the Malletts who live in the Portsmouth and they had offered for us to stay at their house while we were living in England so this weekend we took advantage of the offer. We went to the UK's TYB/TYC (Territorial Youth Band & Choir) concert in Bournemouth which was very good but made me miss performing with the territorial groups from the West. It made for a late night but we were on holiday so we didn't really care.

On Saturday we went on a Portsmouth tourism extravaganza. We started with local sights near Fareham- Titchfield Abbey, St. Peter's Church, and the coast. The first walls of the church were built in 680. I didn't forget a digit there. 680. As in a millennium before our country's founders were born. It has since been expanded and modified several times over the last 1335 years but I was still severely impressed. Even Titchfield Abbey, the newer of the two structures, was built almost 800 years ago!

After a quick lunch at the Malletts we headed to Portsmouth for more history. I'm usually a selective and somewhat ambiguous history buff- there are random things I'm interested in like medieval architecture, pirates,  and renaissance era ships but I don't actually know much about any of them. We first visited the Mary Rose museum, which is a huge black structure with bits of a ship inside it. At least, that's what I was expecting. The Mary Rose was brought to the surface in 1982 and was a pivotal discovery in the realm of naval artifacts and culture. There was a lot discovered from what was under the ship that I always thought has been common knowledge since the 1700s but has actually only been known for the last 30 years. The way the museum is set up is also quite impressive. The inside is shaped and formatted like the decks of the original ship and parallel the parts that were brought up from the excavation. There are windows on one side showing the ship and artifacts on the other in places they would likely be placed when the ship was in use. There were also recreations of crew members based on bones and clothes found inside which gives a unique perspective into life on a 16th century warship. Check out the wikipedia page. It's legit.

On Sunday we went to Portsmouth Citadel and had a lovely roast dinner with the Malletts and one of their daughter's family. We're always down for roast dinner. As if our Sunday couldn't be any more British, we watched two football games and lazily lounged until it was time to head back to the train station. We learned that Sunday trains back to London are ridiculously busy and may not even have seats available. Usually on commuter trains this is fine but we were 90 minutes from London so we ended up walking pretty far down the train before we found suitable seats. We took the tube from Waterloo to Elephant & Castle only to discover there was no rail service from that station and the bus was our only alternative. After an annoyingly long bus ride we finally made it home happily enough.

 Eggs Benedict.

Titchfield Abbey and beautiful coastal weather.

Spinnaker Tower in Portsmouth.

Us in front of the HMS Warrior.

The skull of the Mary Rose's purser. 

Biweekly Blogging is Best

This every other week blogging seems to be working well with our schedule. It seems like we always have an uninteresting weekend followed by an interesting one. The last fortnight was no different. Last weekend we stayed home and the week was spent working. Nothing exciting to report aside from a delicious dinner with Mark Nelson (whom I know from Pasadena) who is here for ICO. The most recent weekend, however, was full of excitement in the most normal sense of the word. Because of a bus strike on Thursday I wasn't able to make it to Wood Green for worship practice. I was texting our worship leader a live report of the unfortunate news and she invited us (Jodi, Alexa, and me) to their youth music night, which is on every Friday before the second Sunday of the month. I know this seems oddly specific, but "Second Sunday" is a special day at our church where the youth stay in the whole meeting and the service is done slightly differently.

Friday we stayed in town after work so we wouldn't have to deal with Southern London trains to get back up to Wood Green. We went to a Mexican place behind the Top Shop in Oxford Street that had the second best burrito I've ever had in my life. It was good. It might just be because we are so far removed from burrito country that my standards are dwindling... the only downside was the price- nearly £10 for a burrito! That's like $15! I'm a volunteer! Anyway, we continued on to Wood Green only to discover that one of the sinks had flooded into the main corridor. We assembled an emergency flood response team out of moms and one kid and after an hour of mopping, dabbing, and wiping, the floor was mostly dry. Our corps officer Jonny actually had to climb through a tunnel or something to stop the flood. I wasn't there for that part so it might be a little exaggerated. The music night itself was loads of fun. We hadn't done much with the youths of our church before then but they were all open to hanging out with us which was nice. We played a Taylor Swift song together which I had never heard and Alexa got two of the boys to do some choreography with their cornet contribution. After the jam, we played a game of around-the-world table tennis but the corps only has maybe 8 or 9 ping pong paddles and there were definitely more of us than that. The rest of us used song books which, surprisingly, worked rather well.

On Saturday Jodi went to the corps again for a women's breakfast while I stayed home and played Civilization V. If you like Risk and/or Settlers of Catan, don't play Civilization. You will get addicted. When Jodi returned from her event that afternoon, we went grocery shopping which was the one unexciting thing that happened that weekend. On Saturday night we went out to dinner with Gabriel Carrión, a friend from the Chicago Area who is on a surgery rotation in London for Med School.

Sunday was long but undeniably fun. Church was the usual second Sunday craziness and I was still able to play bass with the worship team despite skipping practice. After church we took 11 of the youths down to Elephant & Castle in Southern London to wait for a tour bus with about 80 other teens from the Central London Division. The tour wasn't actually the exciting part of the trip- it was spending 3 hours in bus with our teens. Any Salvationist will tell you if you want to get to know someone, spend an extended period of time with them in a cramped vehicle headed to an Army function. Loud laughter, sweets sharing, and jeering jokes were spread in overwhelming abundance throughout our old school double decker buses. We turned into a bit of a tourist attraction as well, waving regularly at other tour buses and and yelling friendly hellos to walking tourists. We are on a lot of Europeans' Facebook pages this week.

Monday was a mostly uneventful work day until we decided to make cookies that night. We decided taking whoopie pies to THQ the next day (Jodi and I now work from UK & Ireland THQ on Tuesdays) would be a good ice breaker for our new colleagues. The oven was a little warm from when Jodi had made dinner so I put the butter in there to soften it up. We started the rest of the prep work but soon discovered we were lacking one ingredient. Rather than walking all the way to the grocery store (about a half mile) we walked to the corner store which conveniently carries powdered sugar (or icing sugar as it's called here). When we got back we finished the prep and preheated the oven. We were ready to start baking when Jodi smelled something burning and opened the oven to discover the butter melting onto the bottom crumb tray in the oven. My bad. What didn't melt was nicely softened but unfortunately we didn't think to take a picture of the mishap for our blog...

Around the world.

Jodi and Gabriel.