4th of July

Happy 4th everyone! While all you stateside folk are off relaxing and generally bumming the day away, I’m at work, researching car clubs. Please try to contain your jealousy. Anyways, I’m assuming no one will read blog as you’re all out having barbecues and watching blockbuster summer releases in overly air-conditioned theatres, and otherwise wiling the hours away until darkness falls and you can blow things up, but I’m doing one anyways.

First a brief recap on last night’s pub quiz! We showed up about ten minutes before it was supposed to start and there were two other people in the pub so we were quite worried! Apparently, the 7:30 start time is just a ruse and it actually started closer to 8:30, with about 8 teams participating. It turned out to be quite a good quiz and we tied for first but lost the tie-breaker, meaning we really came in second. Either way, it was an enjoyable experience and I hope to either go back to that one or go to another pub quiz elsewhere in town soon.

Believe it or not, London is not a particularly festive place to be on the 4th of July. To try and make things a bit more interesting I baked two kinds of cookies the night before last – snickerdoodles and chocolate peanut butter chip – that I have brought in to serve to the few people on my floor that have actually shown up today (I should have called in sick it seems!). For the evening, I’ve gotten a little bit lucky as a pub very near my house is having an ‘American Beer Festival’ this weekend. According to the posters, this involves not just American beers but also line dancing and other festivities. The pub, properly named the White Horse but infamously known as the Sloaney Pony, is right on Parsons Green and has a large beer garden out front facing said green and always have some giant barbecues going, offering up sausages and hamburgers alongside their fresh-faced collar-popped yuppies. Again given the limitations of my locale, I think a hamburger fresh off a bbq with some sort of American beer is all I’m really after. But I might pass on the line dancing…

Side note: by American beer, they do not mean Budweiser. The pub has at least Sierra Nevada on tap regularly, so I’m assuming they’ll have at least a few quality beers, probably from east coast breweries. I’ll provide an update at a later date.