By the sea, for a minute

I took the day off on Friday and went to a lovely seaside town called Whitstable in the county of Kent. It was really nice and relaxing, but after about an hour I think I saw the whole place. So on Saturday morning I took the 1/2 hour bus ride to Canterbury (of the Tales) and had a look at the cathedral and some of the other area views.

I made this short video slideshow of some pictures I took on my phone as I went along.



Click this link if you'd like to see a larger version on YouTube instead.

Fruit: Good; Cake: Great; Fruitcake: Nasty Crap

The English love their cake. They loooove it. Where American grocery stores might have aisles of, say, toothpaste, English grocery stores have aisles of different types of cakes.

Christmas has its own cakes, confusingly referred to as "Christmas pudding". A lot of these appear to be of the fruitcake variety, which also confusingly, the English seem to love. I was amazed to see that the Christmas cakes were out already when I did my shopping last week. I thought they must expire before Christmas, so I checked.... September 2010.

For the few of you who haven't seen Jim Gaffigan's humorous thoughts on cake, watch the video below. The classic and applicable fruitcake bit starts around 4.20.

They just have no idea

At this conference I went to recently, the hotel served a snack of cold pancakes cut in half with jelly to put on top. And my friend Sarah likes to order pancakes for dessert at this restaurant we've gone to. They're not on the breakfast menu - they're on the dessert menu.

Weird England.

Welcome back to my honey

Last week Pete and his buddies went on vacation to San Francisco. They had a great time! I took some pictures of them when they got back to Heathrow but none came out. Anyway I had to put up this cute one of Pete making a face at me, and the only other one is this blurry one of us on the tube ride home. He's tired but still so cute at 3am California time after 15 hours of traveling.