We actually learned a lot from the museum… especially about the differences between how the Georgians treated prisoners and how the Victorians treated prisoners. The main difference being that the Georgians were ruthless with the treatment of their prisoners, whereas the Victorians came along with all sorts of reform, like productive and unproductive work and separating the women from the men. There was also an exhibit on Her Majesty’s (HM) Prison, but we were allowed to take pictures in that exhibit.

Anyway… Minh and I had a free weekend, so we spent Saturday doing some touristy things in Nottingham. One of the stops was The City of Caves, which is  a small portion of the caves beneath Broadmarsh Shopping Centre. It was pretty neat, because we could see the  how the caves were used for a multitude of purposes throughout the centuries. There were sections that were used as ancient and medieval water wells. We walked through an old tannery. We sat in a replica WWII bomb shelter. We saw the foundation of the shopping center. See pictures in the gallery below (click to enlarge):

Spring rolls for dinner! (shrimp only)

I still remember how to roll these things..

He also used the Zoku for the first time since we got it. Pretty much with whatever fruit juices we had in the fridge.. orange, cranberry and tropical..with pineapple chunks.

Good for an after-run snack.. . not matter how cold it is outside..

Imagine his excitement when we got this new Ferrari in the mail! In red, too!

Our first FERRARI!!

Now we’re going to have pizza all the time! Or something like that.

“Rolling” out the dough

Toppings ready

Before going into the “oven”

The oven is ready..

Pizza in

Pizza out! Margherita

Second pizza out! Pepperoni and onions

Third pizza out! Mushrooms and onions and basil

This is how we eat pizza.. standing in the kitchen…

Nottingham – Land of Robin Hood

This past weekend (11-12 May) was a disasterous waste. We didn’t make any plans for Saturday, so we ended up sleeping in like we usually do. By the time we decided to go out and do something, it was already 12pm.. too late to go anywhere far.. so we just headed into Nottingham to hang out. Walked by the Castle and had lunch at the oldest pub in the UK…

Taking a long trip back in time..

.. to the oldest pub in the UK

Couldn’t go to a pub without getting a drink.. or two..

Descent sliders..

nom nom nom

Walked around the shops in town.. finally went into Primark (which was like going into Nordstrom Rack on the weekend during Christmas season.. craziness).. grabbed a snack at Homemade… stumbled upon an awesome stag party in the rain (if you can see… they’re all dressed up like Disney characters).. and then headed home.

Homemade Cafe – voted Nottingham’s best cheap eats (2012?)

Interior of Homemade.. pretty basic cafe

SMILE!

Latte .. not so awesome… but they did have free issues of Vice magazine

Boozy smoothie for Minh

Pulled pork quesadilla

the rain won’t bring down this stag party

Sunday we actually had a plan.. but it was an epic fail. I was supposed to meet up with a group of ladies for the Rapha Women’s 100 training ride through the Peak District. Minh was coming along too.. either to ride with me or to do his own ride. And since Minh refuses to drive.. he was playing navigator.

Real life puzzle.. how to fit two bikes in a small sedan..

seats down. wheels off.. tight fit…

We ended up at the right restaurant, more or less on time, but in the wrong city… We ended up heading back to where the meet-up was supposed to be, then driving a bit of the route to try to find a place to park. After much driving and frustration later.. we just decided to give up and head home. The weather was rainy (as usual) and by this time (over an hour after we were supposed to start riding), I was just over it. Instead of heading home, we hit up the East Midlands Designer Outlets, which was on the way home.

lunch at the outlets.. where’s the green?

Outlet here are nothing like outlets at home… much smaller and not as many good stores. I did come home with a new Superdry jacket and some chocolate from the Cadbury outlet.. but that was pretty much the weekend. This coming weekend will hopefully be better.

Hard to miss when you walk up from the Underground..

Welcome to the Tower

At least it was a t-shirt kinda day..

Here I am attempting to take a panoramic shot with my phone..

.. still taking it…

The Tower of London – A Panoramic View

Pretty ominous looking from the outside

A grassy moat

Ferocious lions

People actually live here…

The Tower of London is actually comprised of several towers

Tower Bridge

Collection of canons

Medieval Crossbow

Archer windows

Where’s my bow and arrow?

White Tower

Many many steps at the Tower

Medieval armor.. including parts of King Henry VIII’s

Children’s armor

Beware the dragons!

It’s actually made from weapons and armor and things like that..

Pistols for claws.

Tunnel vision

The Armory

Golden winged lion..

Lots of weapons in this room..

Also.. make sure you plan your visit to the Tower when the Crown Jewels are there. This is the only exhibit in the Tower that does not allow photography, so I can’t really show you how cool it is, but I thought it was definitely worth seeing.

Off to see the Crown Jewels

Devil’s Food Cupcake with Marshmallow Cream Filling, Chocolate Ganache Frosting and Rainbow Jimmies

Yesterday was my 29th birthday! As is customary in the UK on your birthday, I brought in cupcakes for my coworkers. I had originally wanted to bake the entire batch from scratch, but I couldn’t find all the necessary ingredients quickly enough at the market (baking soda, baking powder, buttermilk, vanilla extract), and didn’t want to spend a lot of time trying to find everything.. so I went with a box mix for the cake – Devil’s food cake (from Betty Crocker – substituted 250 mL of water with 250 mL of Aeropress coffee), marshmallow cream filling (from Todd&Lindsey, but without the vanilla extract), chocolate ganache frosting (from Real Simple).

Birthday festivities were pretty low key, since it really is just me and Minh here. I went to work as usual, sporting a new sweater I got from my April GoldenTote (came just in time!). My phone got a new outfit too, courtesy of Minh.

Golden Tote – Arrived just in time for the birthday!

New outfit for the phone!

Once I got out of work, I picked up Minh for dinner at Jamie’s Italian in Nottingham. We had fried gnocchi, start bay crab mac’n'cheese, wild rabbit tagliolini, and epic brownie!

Welcome to Jamie’s Italian – Nottingham!

Milano (Campari, orange juice & Prosecco) and Bramble (Gin, elderflower & blackberry liqueur with lemon & sugar)

Fried Three-Cheese Gnocchi

Wild Rabbit Tagliolini

Start Bay Crab Mac’n'Cheese

Epic Brownie!

Not a bad way to spend my birthday.. Minh even got me a cake with CANDLES!!!

Make a wish…

Since we had some time on our hands, we decided to figure out these Barclay Cyclehire bikes that are dotted all over London. Basically, you pay £2 to use the service for 24 hours. Everytime you want to rent a bike, you get the first 30 minutes for free, and then you get charged for increments of time over that. This is actually pretty cool.. because as long as you plan your stops to be 30 minutes apart, you can get around all of London for just £2! And you’ll see a lot more than hopping around on the Underground (fast, not scenic) or on foot (scenic but very slow). It’s also less expensive than the Underground (each trip within Zone 1 is £2.10). Throughout the rest of the day, we were able to find cyclehire stations pretty much every block, except around Buckingham Palace, so it was definitely a good idea.

Back to breakfast.. we got back to Ottolenghi right when it opened. We got a latte, a croissant, a small brioche, and a slice of ham & leek quiche. I would definitely recommend dropping in if you’re in the area.. we couldn’t try it all, but everything looked really good, and what we did get to taste was top notch. Bonus, the latte was also very well made.. super smooth, not too hot, nice latte art..

After breakfast, we grabbed some bikes and headed to Kensington Garden. We had a nice stroll through the park, and checked out the outside of Kensington Palace. Something that Minh and I have noticed while being here in the UK.. the dogs are so well behaved! I don’t know what it is, but English dogs have no issues playing off-leash, coming back to their owners, and not harassing other dogs. It’s AMAZING!

Once we got to the other side of Kensington Garden, we hopped back on two wheels and headed over to the Natural History Museum. The line at the front entrance of the NHM was INSANE!!! Sure.. holiday weekend and free and all that, but it was ridiculous. Luckily, a nice museum worker told us that the side entrance was much faster. He wasn’t kidding.. the queue at the side entrance only took 5 minutes to get into the museum. But the museum was packed!

We found out about half way through the museum that the hour-long queue at the front entrance was also the only way to see the dinosaur exhibit.. so we had to skip that. Oh wells.. instead we worked our way through nearly all the other exhibits, including the Cocoon.. which would be really cool and interesting if you were into biology and natural history and collections and things like that.. which Minh and I aren’t really.. so noted for future museum exhibits.

By the time we got out of the NHM, we were pretty hungry.. so we strolled down the street to see what we could find for lunch. Actually.. we were headed to Fernandez & Wells, but I wasn’t really interested in having lunch there once we got there, so we ended up having lunch at Le Pain Quotidien instead. I had a nice cheese board with some carrot/apple/mango juice and Minh had an open-faced sandwich. I could probably eat a cheese board at every meal… if good cheese wasn’t so expensive.

After lunch, we had to plan our ride to the Rapha store. To get there, we would need to pass by Buckingham Palace, around which there are NO cyclehire stations. So we would either need to book it, or find a cyclehire station in between so that we wouldn’t go over the 30 minutes. Unfortunately, I think we missed the time by about five minutes (not realizing it until we had already docked out bikes)… But we did have a nice ride through Green Park, around the Victoria Memorial, and through St. James Park.

The Rapha Cycle Club is a different kind of bike shop.. in that.. it doesn’t sell bicycles. I guess that’s fine? The shop is actually really nice.. clean and well laid out. There’s a little cafe attached, and they were showing Stage 2 of the Giro d’Italia, which was a nice bonus. We looked around the store a bit.. then ordered a latte (yes, another one) and pulled up a couple chairs to watch the rest of the team time trials. If you can believe it, the latte at Rapha was actually (slightly) better than the one from Ottolenghi.. not but a lot, but just by a little.

We spent a few hours walking around Soho, back and forth a few times, here and there through crowds of tourists, in and out of shops, past some shady looking Thai massage parlors next to gentlemen’s clubs and pornography stores… it was something different. We also walked over to Golden Square for some Nordic cuisine. I don’t think I knew what that would entail until we got to Nordic Bakery… and what it DOES entail is open faced sandwiches with some sort of smoked or cured fish.. and other baked goods. We got a smoked salmon sandwich and a rustic oatmeal cookie (which was wafer thin, but surprisingly delicious).

By this time, it was probably about 6PM. Stores were closing down (oh Sunday!), so we decided to head back to the hotel. We had a (very) late dinner reservations that we wanted to rest up for. Since our dinner reservations wasn’t until 10:30PM.. we picked up a takeaway order of pad thai from the Thai Terrace and brought it back to the hotel. Then we just rested up for our big dinner at… DINNER BY HESTON BLUMENTHAL!

The only reservation we could get was for 10:30PM on a Sunday night.. and the restaurant was still packed when we got there. We actually had to wait for 15 minutes for our table to be ready (the restaurant was also impossible to find because it’s inside a hotel and we passed it without even realizing). In any case.. the concept behind the menu is actually really cool. All of the dishes are based on historic “traditional” English cuisine.. but re-imagined with a modern twist. Here’s what we ordered..

Starter:
Roast Marrowbone (c. 1720) – with snails, parsley, anchovy, mace, and pickled vegetables

Mains:
Powdered Duck (c. 1670) – with smoked confit fennel and umbles
Spiced Pigeon (c. 1780) – with ale and artichokes

Deserts:
Tipsy Cake (c. 1810) – with spit-roasted pineapple
Bohemian Cake (c. 1890) – with chocolate, citrus & London summertime honey ice cream

So delicious! Minh wants to have pigeon all the time now!

And that was Sunday.. a very long Sunday..

SATURDAY – Brooklands Museum and Tate Modern

So technically speaking, the Brooklands Museum is not in London… not even really that close to London. But since we were heading down to the area, we thought we’d swing by to check it out. Plus, they were having one of their biggest events of the year on Saturday… AUTOITALIA!

I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many Italian cars in one place. Sure, there was a good sampling of Ferraris and Lamborghinis, but what really caught my eye were the cute little Fiats. Just strengthened my desire to own one, even if it might be a little impractical.

In addition to the plethora of Italian cars around, the regular museum was also open. We were actually able to checkout three “museums” in one go.. the Brooklands Museum – which includes aviation and motoring history, the London Bus Museum, the Mercedes-Benz World.

The Brooklands Museum is actually really cool, even if there wasn’t an event going on. In the motoring exhibits, it covers the history of motor racing at Brooklands, including cycling. Some of the exhibits are diplayed like you’re looking into someone’s garage. They also do car restoration at Brooklands, and you can see the current project in their garage (they weren’t working on it at the time). You can also walk a portion of the old track.

Normally, the London Bus Museum requires a separate admission fee, but it was open during the event. I’m not sure if it normally has a guided tour, but on Saturday we could just walk through at our leisure. The busses are arranged in a way that you see them in chronological order. For the most part, they were all fully restored, which was pretty neat. There were also a few that we could go in and check out the interiors.

Mercedes-Benz World was really the primary reason for us to visit Brooklands. I have to say, that we were rather disappointed in MBW, and we were glad that there was something else going on at the time. Granted, if we were going on the test track, then maybe it would be more fun, but getting on the test track is EXPENSIVE. There were some other cool things around.. like the Formula1 racecar that was completely disassembled, even down to the bolts.. and a replica of the first ever motorcar.. and a little 4D simulation video of the SLK assemblyline.. but all in all.. it really was just a glorified dealership. Plus side… we got out of the rain and we got to sit in some nice cars.

We walked around the entire AutoItalia event a few times. Got to see some really nice cars, and took lots of pictures. They had some of the cars do a little parade around the Mercedes-Benz Test Track and try their luck on the Test Hill. Overall it was pretty fun.

After we left Brooklands, we headed into London to check into our hotel and then off to the Tate Modern.

If you’re ever in London, you can beat the crowds at the Tate Modern by heading in late at night. On Fridays and Saturdays, the Tate Modern is open until 10PM. We grabbed dinner at the Tate Cafe.. then off to see the art!

We opted to skip the exhibitions that cost money.. mostly because we were trying to save where we could.. so no Lichtenstein exhibit for us. But the remaining art exhibits were well worth it. And I was able to see works by my favorite artists (Pablo Picasso and Alexander Calder).

After we left the Tate Modern, we walked a bit along the River Thames before heading back to the hotel and calling it a night.

GRAZE BOX

I signed up for biweekly Graze boxes, which come with four little containers of “healthy” snacks. You can also go online and rate the products so that they send you more of what you like and less of the things you don’t like. Pretty neat, right?

FIRST BOX!

Clockwise from Top Left: Florentine Mix, Carrot Cake with Afternoon Infusion, Bonnie Wee Oatbakes with Caramelized Onion Marmalade, Honeycomb Crunch

Also.. the packaging is pretty minimal and all of it is 100% recyclable (and I think also made from recycled materials). Good for you and the environment!

THIRD BOX! (technically my second box.. but I ate all of Minh’s first box too!)

Clockwise from top left: Mississipi BBQ Pistachios, Tropical Daiquiri, Chocolate Orange granola, Lightly Salted Pop Corn

I’m sure there are tons of other products like this, but I thought this was pretty cool and convenient, considering they get delivered right to your home (or office) and include all the nutrition facts for each of the snacks. They’re perfectly sized for a small snack, too… not too large or too small. They have them in the US too!!! If you use my code (9RDTKZ1D), you can get your first box for free (and I get £1 off my next box or £1 to charity!)

Because we stopped a bunch of times to make sure that we were going the right way, the ride to work took about 2 hours. Even if I knew the route pretty well, it would still probably take 1.5 hours… mostly because of having to ride through city centers in the first half and groomed (but not paved) paths on the second half. So probably not going to be riding my bike to work… Might consider it more if I had brought the cross bike.. but oh wells.

We got rained on on the way back, but we managed to get over it. When we got close to the house, I slipped on my pedals trying to clip-in, and hurt myself rather badly… so I used that as an excuse to be lazy the rest of the weekend. During which I caught up on all of my TV shows on Saturday and managed to watch the first five episodes of Game of Thrones Season 2 (yea.. I’m behind) on Sunday. And then I napped because all that TV gave me a massive headache.. go figure. For dinner, Minh and I walked into town for Chinese food.

Just a stroll to town…

Left to Beeston.. Right to ??? (home)

more of the path to town..

I choose you, PIKACHU!!!

I don’t even know…

Construction for a new tramline.. set to open at the END of 2014

The Bee Man, in Beeston

Bees are actually this huge here..

There are four Chinese restaurants in town… we tried Lucky Cantonese to start, just because it seemed to be the busiest at the time. We did a set meal for 2, which was £10 per person. It came with chicken and corn soup, sauteed beef in chili bean sauce, sweet and sour chicken, mixed vegetables in bean sauce, and egg fried rice. It wasn’t bad, but definitely not “authentic” as it claimed to be. Tasted very westernized, like any Chinese takeout place. We’ll have to try the other restaurants to see if they’re any better. Hopefully yes.. one of them is supposed to be so authentic, there isn’t even any English on the menu or on the signs inside the restaurant (The Pink Wing)! Next time…

Starter of prawn chips

Chicken and corn soup.. was better with a dash of pepper

LUCKY CATS GALORE!!

Sweet and Sour Chicken

Beef in Chili Bean Sauce

Mixed veggies in black bean sauce

All this (plus the soup) for £21

At least they have boxes so you can take your leftovers home at this place…

“Thank you for your custom”