Steve n Jen's UK adventures

UK and European adventures. Read on my pretties, and discover what two stray Aussies can get up to on their travels.......

15 February 2007

Feb 2007 a

Fri 02 Feb 2007
Beer tasting at the British Museum! We watched a free presentation on what Egyptian beer might have been like, then sauntered over to the bar to purchase from a variety of commercial beers. All in all a good fun social gathering at a great venue!



Sat 03 - Sun 04 Feb 2007
A simple weekend at home. Steve diligently works on fixing his armour, including re-dying the leather and new straps & buckles etc. Jen cuts out and starts to sew two new fighting shirts for him.

Mon 05 Feb 2007
We spend much of this next week sorting out holidays, plane flights and other details. We've now booked our tickets to Aust for September - for Steve's big 40th birthday party!

Thu 08 Feb 2007
SNOW!!!!! Got rugged up and went out into the snow at 7am!
Today it snowed right up until midday.

Our first ever snowman. Snow does roll marvellously well - reminding us of rolled turf but white, wet, and cold of course! Played with the snow for an hour.





Sat 10 Feb 2007
Drove up to York with Dan and Elizabeth. A goodly four hour drive.
The SCA event was "a haunted evening", which included a ghost tour around the pedestrian streets of old York town. After getting settled into costume we helped entertain the paying public, until the doors closed at 3:30pm, after which the place was ours (about 17 of us). Anyway, the event site (Barley Hall) looked like this:


Above: the fabulous musicians entertained us for hours!

We were honoured to sit at the high table for the feast. Interestingly, there were no cooking facilities and the feast was largely pre-prepared, except for a mushroom stew and mulled wine which were heated on a pair of small portable hotplates. A wonderful event! At about 10:30pm we trundled off to our B&B (10 minute walk through town), although most of our troupe slept overnight on-site.

Sun 11 Feb 2007
Came back the next morning and took some photos in the improved light.


Then we pitched in with the cleaning up. The caretakers seemed quite impressed that we did any cleaning at all.... apparently other groups don't bother wiping down the tables, cleaning the propoerty's cutlery and crockery, and scraping up candlewax and so on. With the cleaning mostly done, we then spent several hours wandering about the old city.



We decided to skip the Jorvik 'viking experience' since the queue looked 30 minutes long and the staff weren't letting us by-pass the crappy ride at the beginning... nor letting us slip in through the gift shop. Damn!
Instead we greatly enjoyed the museum (near the Minster) with some very worthwhile displays of Roman through to Medieval stuff. Best of all, we got to handle actual viking-era shoes, combs, and bone ice-skates!

Above: Jen handles an actual viking-era shoe!

Tue 13 Feb 2007
Steve kills a mouse in our house! He threw a shoe at it to scare it off, but somehow he didn't miss and instead broke its back. The only other mice we've seen in London have been down on the tracks in the underground. We've seen several foxes about the place - mostly in other suburbs.
Later in the evening Jen buys a sofabed on ebay, and we busily rearrange the lounge room in anticipation, but later find that we can pick it up either Friday or Saturday.

Wed 14 Feb 2007
Valentine's day. Jen walks in to work to find a lovely display of heart shaped balloons saying "we're passionate about customer service"....

Above: view from Jen's desk.

After work Steve cooks Jen dinner: salmon steak in lime juice, with honeyed rice and cashews. A delicious concoction of flavours, yum! Then Steve goes to fight practice to open up the hall.
In the next exciting installment of our blog, we'll have a couple of visitors staying with us......