Showing posts with label Entertainment on a Fiver. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Entertainment on a Fiver. Show all posts
This one is cheating a bit, because I was able to swing a free pass, but there were people selling tickets for £5 so I'm counting it.

On Saturday, I went to the Foodies Festival in Clapham Commons. What is a Foodies Festival? Wasn't entirely sure myself, but basically its a bunch of food vendors, food trucks, local food companies where you can sample and buy deliciousness. Here are my top five favourites things from the festival.

1. The minute I entered it quickly became that foodie festival involved about 50% food and 50% alcohol. I think this tells us a lot about the British approach to food. As I'm rapidly learning sunny skies and event a hint of summer weather = Pimm's.

2. A booth all about french goat cheese? Score! Not only did you get to taste a lot of different goat cheese, they gave you wine to taste it with. These are my kind of people. I may have an unholy quantity of goat cheese in my fridge right now.

 3. Sausages... another British staple and star of the Foodie Festival. Sure I could have gone with a fried potatoes on a stick (yes this was a thing), but the amazing 'gourmet hot-dogs' was my option for lunch. I also had the rather shocking experience of finding out the bright yellow mustard container was full of Colman's mustard, not ball-park. This requires very different mustard rationing!


























4. For pure visual points, I would like to acknowledge the amazing racks of roasted meat, whole lambs, hogs and vast quatitites pulled porks. We seem to have gone meat crazy. But given it was sunday afternoon it does make for a rather appropriate Sunday roast lunch.

5. And finally, I can't believe the sheer number of people who are willing to queue up to get into a food festival. Seriously by the time we left the line went half way around the entire enclosure. Talk about enthusiasm.

 There are other foodie events going on this summer, soo if you're in the London area check out their webpage.
I'm so glad I found this! Digging around in the London edition of Time Out I saw this promotion for a murder mystery at the University College of London  (UCL) Museums and there were costumes involved. Sold! Lucky for me, my friends are as crazy as I am and also were all on board for dressing up for an evening of crime solving.

The costume portion required much debate, mainly caused by me getting overexcited with multiple costume ideas. The final decision was the characters of Clue (or Cluedo for the British Audience). I went with Mrs. Peacock and since the event was free so I was able to put the five pounds to my thrift store costume.

The event itself was really well done. The mystery was spread out across all the different museum within the UCL. After collecting clue from the different museum, you scrambled them to form a phone number and whoever called in the answer first won. Pretty clever. In fact, more clever than us since we didn't figure it out.

But we did win best costume! In fact, I don't think I've ever been so popular as when I was walking around with a whole group of people dressed like Clue.

And what was our prize? A preserved head of a coypu head adopted in our teams name. We have future plans to go visit it and see what our hard-work has earned it.
One thing London is good for is cheap theatre. There are all of the Broadway style shows but there are also a lot of really good smaller theatre productions as well. After seeing a write-up in the Guardian I talked my co-worker into venturing into Dalston Junction for a 'pay what you can' theatre night.

Play: My name is...
Arcola Theatre, Dalston Junction

Venue:
It was a very cool vibe. The cafe attached to the theatre has tea, coffee, wine, beer, and food. We sampled things in a variety of those categories. The consensus was good and cheap. We also found this cool garden cafe around the corner from the theatre which is worth hanging out in.

The play itself was in the basement of the theatre it was a very cosy set up and worked well with the intimacy of the play itself.

Play:
I'm not familiar with the story, but its based on a true story about a mixed background family in Scotland.  

"When 12-year-old Gaby disappeared from her home in Scotland, the media announced that her Pakistani father, Farhan, had kidnapped her. The spiralling headlines were only momentarily silenced when it emerged that Gaby may have fled of her own accord, choosing to spend her life in Pakistan. To her Scottish mother Suzy’s great distress, Gaby declared, “my name is Ghazala” and turned her back on ‘Gaby’ and, seemingly, the West…"

The play-write worked with the family to true and capture the complexity of their story. I'm not a theatre critic but I think captured beautifully the clash of culture, religion, belief and the family ties and love in the story.

If you're in London, its on until May 24th and even on regular days tickets are only £12-14 which you can purchase on their website HERE. Try and see it if you can!
I have discovered that living in London is expensive...

(Shock! Horror! You don't say!? Why doesn't anyone tell you this!)

However, there are also a lot of entertaining things to do for pretty cheap. I've given myself about 5 pounds a week to do something entertaining/cultural.

This week's activity was a coffee tasting at Milk in Balham.

Despite coming late to the coffee drinking game (I managed university without it, but regular work was my downfall), I actually know a bit about coffee due to my father's coffee obsession. A few years ago my father decided that grinding his own coffee wasn't enough and moved to roasting his own coffee so I've witnessed a fair bit of the process. So when I was a brunch last weekend and saw a coffee tasting organized I figured hey why not.

How a Coffee Tasting Works (based on my limited experience)
  1. Coffee grounds are put in glass cups for you to smell
  2. Hot water is poured over the grounds and you smell it again
  3. At a very precisely timed moment the staff skim off the coffee
  4. You slurp a spoonful of coffee, swish it around in you mouth and (no joke) spit it out into a paper cup
  5. Repeat slurping at various intervals as the coffee cools
In conclusion, coffee tasting, interesting thing but perhaps requires an interpreter for the less coffee knowledge. What I have taken away from this experience is:
  1. I know very very very little about coffee growing, processing and buying
  2. Coffee for tasting is not remotely brewed like you would for drinking which I find confusing
  3. Picked the 'most unusual' coffee as my favourite, but not the 'best one'... meaning I better at finding unique than quality? (a bit hipster of me?)