New experiences

One of the things I enjoy most about travelling is having new experiences. Of course, I'm technically not travelling to the UK as I am living here for a few years, but whether travelling to or living in a new country, you can be guaranteed to have experiences you couldn't have at home. That includes exploring new flavours. Some flavours I'm not interested in exploring are blood sausages, nor cow tongue "luncheon" meat, which is what we call lunch or deli meat. But other flavours I'm game to try. Yogurt tends to be a product that has varied flavours in different countries. In Mexico, I really enjoyed coconut and pineapple coconut yogurts because the ingredients seemed to fresh, and you'd get satisfying shreds of coconut and chunks of pineapple in your mouth. In Indonesia, I tried aloe yogurt, which I found boring. You could barely taste the flavour at all, which made me wonder why it was even used. Perhaps because aloe has certain nutritional value, that was the main attraction. Here, it was rhubarb yogurt. I love rhubarb, and having moved in with my husband last year, I didn't have a garden to harvest rhubarb from. I really enjoyed the yogurt! It was not tart and actually very mildly sweet. It was quite enjoyable, and a flavour that I anticipate getting time and time again!

Another experience was discovering the tides of the Thames. It wasn't until I few days after we had been here that I realised that the little beaches on the side of the river were covered up with water. I searched Google to find out that the river has these tide tables. London is inland enough that I would never have expected it to have tides, but apparently it does. And my husband researched more on tides and found that pretty much all water has tides, but that depending on the type of body of water it is, the tide might be so slight as to be imperceptible. The tides don't really affect me that much, personally, but I realised that certain boats would need to know this information to know if they could clear their cargo under a bridge, as many bridges here aren't that high to begin with. In addition, it really affects how work is done around the river. As you might have seen in the photo from my last post, we do have some bridge construction happening outside our place right now. On Tuesday morning, I noticed that the tide was really low, and as a result, the construction crew were able to place digging machines on the ground (using cranes to lift them), and they could dig into the soil to lay down whatever it is they're laying down there. I can't see what they're doing with the rods and posts they're sending down from my window because there walls and platforms in the way, but evidently it's something they can only do for certain times of the day. It teaches me about how construction on the water can be done, and if you know me, I love learning new things!

What other new things have we discovered in the week we've been here? Bacon has to be bought with the label "streaked" to get any amount of fat on it. Ours stuck to a good quality non-stick pan because we assumed the bacon would cook in its own fat--and it was really thin as well, just slightly thicker than prosciutto. We had another grocery delivery yesterday, and 2/2 times, our cream has leaked. It comes in containers like we get individual yogurts at home, a plastic cup with a foil lid that you peel off. The cream containers are larger, but the tops work the same, and they easily get punctured and broken when bagged with other groceries. It's something we'll be careful of when we are finally able to go out and get our own groceries at the store.