My mom will be happy to know that I've been attempting to cook my own Indian food (the operative word is attempting). The supermarkets here have Indian sauces that you can add to your vegetables, which I've never seen in the States. If you cook potatoes or green beans (my vegetables of choice) and add the Indian sauce, it makes for a halfway decent meal.
However, whenever you mention Indian food in London, Brick Lane comes to mind. I went about a month ago to a restaurant whose name I can't remember (all the restaurants seem interchangeable anyway). Despite the reputation, the food paled relative to the experience.
When you walk down Brick Lane (off the Aldgate East station), the Indian restaurants are right next to each other, with nearly no break in between. All of them have a promoter (as if they're a club) standing outside who will flag your group down and proceed to negotiate on prices listed on the menu outside. We had a group of eight guys so on principle alone, we decided not to eat at the first two restaurants to which we were solicited.
By our third restaurant, we'd negotiated a 10 pound meal covering a starter, an entree, rice or naan, and three pints of beer. After five minutes of negotiations, we stepped into the empty restaurant. For a Thursday, we were surprised by how deserted Brick Lane seemed (which contributed to the aggressive negotiations with the promoters). However, our waiter started pouring small glasses, not pints, of beers. Someone in my group confronted him, and, for the first time in my life, we stood up from our chairs and walked out before ordering our meals. Obviously, the waiter and owner weren't happy so they sent a trail of profanities sailing our way as we left the restaurant. What a start to the night!
The promoter across the street saw this drama occurring so he offered to give us anything that the last promoter hadn't. Being the spiteful customers we were, with the upper hand, we went inside so that the promoter of the last restaurant could clearly see us through the window. The rest of the night proceeded normally, with us settling on a 10 pound meal covering two starters, an entree, rice or naan, and two pints of beer. The Indian food was good but not excellent.
However, for excellent Indian food, go to Tayyabs (I think it's the same as New Tayyabs if you search online) in Whitechapel, which is the next stop over from Aldgate East. Supposedly Whitechapel has the quality Indian food that Brick Lane used to have ten years ago. Going with Panton's uncle and his friends last week, this place was packed on a Tuesday night. We even had to get a reservation to avoid the line outside.
There's no set menu and no alcohol. Most entrees are five pounds with the naan costing an additional one or two pounds. Most people bring their own beers. I can't even put into words the glory of that first bite. Let me just say that all of us left the restaurant barely able to walk because of how much we'd eaten even though we wished we could've eaten more. I had chana and mixed vegetables for my entrees, but the others said their meat entrees were excellent as well. So far, Tayyabs has been my favorite meal in London, even if Panton's uncle hadn't paid for it.
So the point of this post is to point you to Whitechapel, especially Tayyabs, over Brick Lane for good Indian food. Obviously, the experience of Brick Lane, of walking out of a restaurant to a trail of profanities, of negotiating prices is a story to tell. Once you've done that, head over to Whitechapel.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Royal Air Force Museum
Yesterday Panton and I trekked out to Zone 4 to the Royal Air Force Museum. It was fascinating. Similar to the National Air and Space Museum in DC, but it is larger and has more displays. Also there's a complete timeline of flight. Of course, I didn't need to read any of the plaques or timeline; more or less, Panton walked around for two hours looking at the displays, and I followed him asking questions, learning ten times more than I would have otherwise.
This is the first large room we entered. Obviously, I can't name all these models, but there were computers on the sides that told you about each one.
This is a close-up of one of the planes above. Each plane had its pilot's name inscribed on it (I assume it's the same today), and the symbols tally how many planes the fighter has shot down in battle. I learned there are several variations of war planes - fighters which shoot each other mid-air (Top Gun style), interceptors which are a subgroup of fighters that shoot bombers, bombers which drop bombs from the bay area onto ground targets, attack planes which shoot ground targets, etc. You can often discern a plane's type from its name - F22 is a fighter, A something is an attack plane, etc.
A Rolls Royce Merlin 23 engine. Planes and their engines are named similarly to cars with the company name, the model name, and the version of the model. As you know, BMW started out building plane engines but was forced to stop after WWI as part of the Versailles Treaty. What I didn't know was that its logo is supposedly a white propeller in a blue sky. However, Wikipedia says that it may have been only been justification twelve years after the logo was created
Panton resting in front of a plane that had been brought up from the bottom of the Atlantic. It was incredibly intact considering everything it had gone through.
A bomb that's intended to create a crater and detonate in order to create an earthquake-like situation. It creates a 24 m by 9 m crater (I forgot which dimension corresponds to the surface diameter and which corresponds to the depth). Needless to say, this bomb was huge, but I forget who owned it. Hopefully, only us defense-manic Americans
Slightly ironic from the Nazi commander of the Luftwaffe. As you can see from the cut-off tally, this plane underwent loads of successful missions (I think it was a bomber so those must be the number of locations it hit, not the number of planes it shot down).
Overall, the Royal Air Force Museum was a great way to spend a couple hours on a Saturday. Admission is free, but it's a bit out of the way from central London. And it definitely helps if you have an airplane/science whiz like Panton with you.
This is the first large room we entered. Obviously, I can't name all these models, but there were computers on the sides that told you about each one.
This is a close-up of one of the planes above. Each plane had its pilot's name inscribed on it (I assume it's the same today), and the symbols tally how many planes the fighter has shot down in battle. I learned there are several variations of war planes - fighters which shoot each other mid-air (Top Gun style), interceptors which are a subgroup of fighters that shoot bombers, bombers which drop bombs from the bay area onto ground targets, attack planes which shoot ground targets, etc. You can often discern a plane's type from its name - F22 is a fighter, A something is an attack plane, etc.
A Rolls Royce Merlin 23 engine. Planes and their engines are named similarly to cars with the company name, the model name, and the version of the model. As you know, BMW started out building plane engines but was forced to stop after WWI as part of the Versailles Treaty. What I didn't know was that its logo is supposedly a white propeller in a blue sky. However, Wikipedia says that it may have been only been justification twelve years after the logo was created
Panton resting in front of a plane that had been brought up from the bottom of the Atlantic. It was incredibly intact considering everything it had gone through.
A bomb that's intended to create a crater and detonate in order to create an earthquake-like situation. It creates a 24 m by 9 m crater (I forgot which dimension corresponds to the surface diameter and which corresponds to the depth). Needless to say, this bomb was huge, but I forget who owned it. Hopefully, only us defense-manic Americans
Slightly ironic from the Nazi commander of the Luftwaffe. As you can see from the cut-off tally, this plane underwent loads of successful missions (I think it was a bomber so those must be the number of locations it hit, not the number of planes it shot down).Overall, the Royal Air Force Museum was a great way to spend a couple hours on a Saturday. Admission is free, but it's a bit out of the way from central London. And it definitely helps if you have an airplane/science whiz like Panton with you.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Oxford
I went to Oxford to listen to a speaker for our International Issues and European Perspectives class. We took a tour of the city as we did in Cambridge, but I forgot my camera!
You can't blame me. Matt Panton, a high school friend, is visiting me for a week since this Thursday. We weren't sure what he was going to do while I went on the class trip, but James and Kevin came up with a good idea. Matt pretended to be Alex Tracy, who was supposed to go on the trip but is in Berlin for the weekend. All these names are probably confusing, but gist of the story, Matt told the administrator that he was someone else and both professors (two professors teach separate sections) taught he was in the other class so he slipped by scot free. Before the trip, we were scheming and hoping no one would notice so I obviously forget my camera. However, for the rest of the trip, everyone in my class called Matt Alex Tracy, and he was the butt of many jokes.
Despite this side story, Oxford was pretty. We didn't see any chapels that matched the one by King's College in Cambridge, but plenty of architecture and history existed. Apparently, in 1167, students first came to Oxford. They were kicked out by the schools in Paris so the king sent them to Oxford, a relatively close location but one intended to keep them away from London. In fact, Oxford was found in medieval times as the intersection of the (slightly north)western road from London and the northern road from Portsmouth and Southampton.
Like Cambridge, there are 38 separate colleges that amount to 20,000 students. Unlike Cambridge, it seemed like some of the colleges had specialties worthy of distinction, but it seemed like you could still study anything you liked at any college. That's a bit irrelevant since by the mere fact of making it to Oxford, I guess you've proven your intellectual worth.
Our tour guide, knowing we were NYU students, tried to make American connections throughout the trip, a thoughtful but overdone gesture. Apparently, the founders of seven colonies went to Oxford, and yes, he pointed out the college that each one attended. We saw Bill Clinton's lodgings for his first year as a Rhodes Scholar. America is apparently one of the biggest delegations (I suppose Oxford resembles the UN). 32 of 96 Rhodes Scholars are allotted to the States, and we make up 1,400 of the 20,000 students, second only to the UK.
For lunch, we had pie with mash(ed potatoes), gravy, and peas at the Covered Market. For the faint-hearted, there are whole rabbits and pigs hanging in the market. I got a whiff, and I scurried away, saying "I'm a vegetarian, I can't take this." My friend responded, "I'm a meat eater, I can't take this."
Also, we rushed into the Museum of Science before our talk. On the basement level, there's a blackboard with Albert Einstein's writing as part of his second lecture of three on the theory of relativity in Oxford in 1930. It's only about seven lines of equations, but obviously, we couldn't understand it. Ten of us rushed in, took pictures, got told that no flash was allowed, stood around for five minutes trying to decipher the variables, and left just as quickly for our talk without seeing more than three other things in the museum. I wonder why the British are perplexed by our mannerisms.
You can't blame me. Matt Panton, a high school friend, is visiting me for a week since this Thursday. We weren't sure what he was going to do while I went on the class trip, but James and Kevin came up with a good idea. Matt pretended to be Alex Tracy, who was supposed to go on the trip but is in Berlin for the weekend. All these names are probably confusing, but gist of the story, Matt told the administrator that he was someone else and both professors (two professors teach separate sections) taught he was in the other class so he slipped by scot free. Before the trip, we were scheming and hoping no one would notice so I obviously forget my camera. However, for the rest of the trip, everyone in my class called Matt Alex Tracy, and he was the butt of many jokes.
Despite this side story, Oxford was pretty. We didn't see any chapels that matched the one by King's College in Cambridge, but plenty of architecture and history existed. Apparently, in 1167, students first came to Oxford. They were kicked out by the schools in Paris so the king sent them to Oxford, a relatively close location but one intended to keep them away from London. In fact, Oxford was found in medieval times as the intersection of the (slightly north)western road from London and the northern road from Portsmouth and Southampton.
Like Cambridge, there are 38 separate colleges that amount to 20,000 students. Unlike Cambridge, it seemed like some of the colleges had specialties worthy of distinction, but it seemed like you could still study anything you liked at any college. That's a bit irrelevant since by the mere fact of making it to Oxford, I guess you've proven your intellectual worth.
Our tour guide, knowing we were NYU students, tried to make American connections throughout the trip, a thoughtful but overdone gesture. Apparently, the founders of seven colonies went to Oxford, and yes, he pointed out the college that each one attended. We saw Bill Clinton's lodgings for his first year as a Rhodes Scholar. America is apparently one of the biggest delegations (I suppose Oxford resembles the UN). 32 of 96 Rhodes Scholars are allotted to the States, and we make up 1,400 of the 20,000 students, second only to the UK.
For lunch, we had pie with mash(ed potatoes), gravy, and peas at the Covered Market. For the faint-hearted, there are whole rabbits and pigs hanging in the market. I got a whiff, and I scurried away, saying "I'm a vegetarian, I can't take this." My friend responded, "I'm a meat eater, I can't take this."
Also, we rushed into the Museum of Science before our talk. On the basement level, there's a blackboard with Albert Einstein's writing as part of his second lecture of three on the theory of relativity in Oxford in 1930. It's only about seven lines of equations, but obviously, we couldn't understand it. Ten of us rushed in, took pictures, got told that no flash was allowed, stood around for five minutes trying to decipher the variables, and left just as quickly for our talk without seeing more than three other things in the museum. I wonder why the British are perplexed by our mannerisms.
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Midterms
Yup, it's that time of the semester again. Three full weeks of school before spring break, and they're going to be jam-packed. Not only do I have my fair share of exams and papers for class, but Panton is visiting for a week and I have my second actuarial exam the Friday before spring break. I doubt this will leave much time for travel or posts.
For spring break, I'll be spending a week in Italy, four days in Istanbul, and two days in Switzerland. I read that statistically the best part of a vacation is planning it. I guess that should be something to cheer me up as I study.
However, the weather is actually becoming nice. Still nippy but the sun actually comes out and you don't need to carry an umbrella every time you step outside. I wonder what London is like in the summer and if the UK has any beaches. Within a week of arriving, I was convinced that it rained year-round, but it doesn't seem to be the case.
For spring break, I'll be spending a week in Italy, four days in Istanbul, and two days in Switzerland. I read that statistically the best part of a vacation is planning it. I guess that should be something to cheer me up as I study.
However, the weather is actually becoming nice. Still nippy but the sun actually comes out and you don't need to carry an umbrella every time you step outside. I wonder what London is like in the summer and if the UK has any beaches. Within a week of arriving, I was convinced that it rained year-round, but it doesn't seem to be the case.
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