cooking, yay!

Yup, it's been a pretty good day today, and yesterday. Yesterday the Internet broke, so I wasn't able to post. Sorry!
Yesterday was a shopping day... Kyle, Amanda and I went to this place called Primark, which is like England's Target, but with even cooler clothes. And everything's ridiculously cheap, especially after London prices. I bought a pair of boots for £4. That's $8 - a steal even in the States. Boots are the big thing in London. Boots and scarves. Literally everyone has one or the other, or both. So I conformed.
Then we were famished so we went to a Tex-Mex restaurant. I've been craving Mexican food since I got here two weeks ago, so I was pretty excited to get some. This was not real Mexican food though. Not even close. Kyle got a burrito or something, and it came with baked beans. Not refried beans. Baked beans. Hmm. The decor left something to be desired, too: there were African masks and weird American Indian blankets on the walls. And they played polka music. So that was a disappointment.
But the day was not all a loss, though...
Yesterday we also went to something called the London Ice Bar. It was, as the name suggests, a bar made of ice. It was basically awesome. The walls were ice. The bar was ice. Even the glasses were ice. It was definitely an experience. The bar is owned by the same company who made the Ice Hotel in Sweeden. There, even the beds are ice. I'm not sure how much I would like that. They keep the bar at -4º F, so they make people leave after 45 minutes. Apparently you get hypothermia if you stay at that temperature for too long. I'm kind of glad they made us leave; my drink was gone and my fingers and toes were starting to go numb. Anyway, I'm glad I went.
That's basically all we did yesterday. Classes were pretty boring; I had J325 and Brit Lit, which are both not that interesting. Whoever made the schedule wasn't very bright; they scheduled the first class to end at 11, and the second one to start at 11. They didn't figure that we'd have to walk 20 minutes to get to the next class. So when the first prof (Popo) lets us out at 11:10, we get to Brit Lit half an hour late. It's really frustrating, and there's not really anything we can do about it; there's only about five out of the 25 kids in the class that have this problem.
Other than that, classes are fine.
Today was Wednesday, so we didn't have classes. Instead, we did a cooking exercise, where they made each flat go to different markets or grocery stores and try to make the same dish. My flat had to go to Tesco, one of the major grocery stores here. There's one right around the corner, but we had to go to one in Islington Greens. We were sort of upset about it at first, since we had to take two trains to get there, but once we got to the neighborhood we were glad we came. It's a beautiful neighborhood, with all kinds of shops and antique stores. I really enjoyed just walking around, and I look forward to going back when we don't have to carry bags of groceries.
We had to make something called Toad in the Hole. It sounds disgusting, but really it's not a bad dish. Lyndon says it's a working class dish aiming to use the least expensive food possible but still making it taste OK. It's sausages in a batter made of just milk and flour and eggs. Ours would have been delicious, but we kind of burned it. The oven in our flat is kind of weird. The door opens sideways, instead of down like in America, and then there's a glass panel after you open the door. I'm assuming it's because there isn't a window in the oven door, but it still makes regulating temperature sort of hard. In our competition, we got third out of 11, so I guess it didn't turn out that badly.
That's about all I did today. Yawn.
Cheers!