England

A couple of weeks ago I went to England to visit my friends Sophy and Dan. They lived in Madrid at the same time we did but moved back to England shortly after we moved to Barcelona.

I'd never been anywhere in the UK before which is a bit strange considering the fact that I've always been fairly obsessed with it. As a child I even tried to get people to believe that I was kind of sort of English. Here was my strategy- When someone asked me where I was born, I would answer with the name of the Salt Lake City suburb in which the hospital I was born in was located. Then when they asked where that was, I would nonchalantly say, "It's in the direction of England." I remember thinking this was very subtle of me.

So I finally made it to England and it was all and more than I'd expected. A damp land of charming terraced houses, gray skies, pubs, cake stands and imposing Victorian edifices that all look like either insane asylums or orphanages. At least that was my impression.

And seriously, about the cake stands, in all my 35 years on this planet, I have never seen so many cake stands as I did in approximately one and a half hours of browsing in the shops of Bristol. It appears that English people really like displaying their stuff on floral tiers of porcelain. They are quite charming and I must admit that I've always longed to have one (being from the direction of England and all). But I was overwhelmed, and after seeing my 50th cake stand in 45 minutes, I began to feel as though buying one would be about as original as  buying a novelty canister of biscuits in the shape of a double decker bus or a Union Jack key chain.

Instead I went to Tesco (big supermarket) and bought the following items (you'd think that after all these years of living abroad, I'd remember the ban on carry-on liquids of over 100 ml but clearly I need to learn my lesson many times in order for it to stick):

-4 cans of condensed cream of chicken soup (all confiscated at airport)

-one plastic bucket of soldiers

-2 jars of caraway seeds

-one bottle of black food coloring

-one bottle of almond extract

-one jar of enchilada sauce (confiscated at airport)

-one toothbrush

-one jar of damson jam (because I've always wanted to try it. Unfortunately I still haven't. Because guess what? CONFISCATED.

We then went to a Christmas fair and although I can't prove it, I think that Sophy and Dan may have hired actors to make my English experience as stereotypical as possible. The old cheese maker, for example, who asked me about John Wayne and told me it was his dream to travel to Chicago and play in a jazz band. There was even group of ladies who gathered around a piano to sing Christmas carols just like in Jane Austen! Except that most of them were wearing glasses, tasteful sweaters and had identical short sporty haircuts.

There were also things that I didn't understand until they were explained to me. T-shirts that had "I'm hung like parliament" written across them and knit items in which people could dress up their tea pots.

More adventures in England coming up!