I am traveling this year, and I am volunteering hours upon hours at the church, and I'm working as a long-distance reporter. But I'm also spending tons of time just getting to know people, building relationships and hanging out with my new friends, who now feel like old friends after 10 months of serving alongside one another.
One night a few weeks ago a group of us met up at the local. "The local" refers to the local pub, but the truth is there are several locals around my neighborhood. The most local and authentic of them all, however, is the Victoria Hotel, which serves a fine selection of real ales, as well as quality wines and fantastic food. On this night, we decided to forgo the pint of bitter and instead enjoy wine and cheese. It came like this.
The cheese platter included homemade bread, "biscuits" (crackers), some sort of chutney and English cheddar, Somerset brie, Nottinghamshire Stilton, and English goat cheese. For some odd reason, it also included butter, which I thought was strange. Was someone going to make a butter-chutney-cheese sandwich? I must admit that butter is a very popular condiment here, though.
Another fun surprise is that the pub was filled with Morris Dancers. These English country dancers were all on the ... er ... mature side, but they could kick their heels up with the best of them. They also brought their own costumed band. I have to say that these Morris Dancers were much pleasanter than the crowd who used to come in every Thursday night to the Bakers Square restaurant I worked at while going to college in St. Paul, Minnesota. That group was headed by a very cranky gentleman who wore a purple vest (over here it'd be called a waistcoat) and was impossible to please. I'm glad the real Morris Dancers were able to change my perception of the sport.
My friends were so excited that we had accidentally happened upon genuine Morris Dancers that they insisted on taking photos for me to put up on the blog.
Every Friday I spend with other members of the Discipleship Year, the young adults who are in this church's service program with me. The 15 of us spend our days receiving teaching, doing activities and projects together (like litter picking or giving flowers away to people on the streets), cleaning the church, eating lunch together and just hanging out. Last Friday we were given some rare free time, but instead of all heading home, we decided we want to be together. In fact, I popped in the cassette tape that recorded my hour of live radio that week, and all of the girls listened carefully while the guys listened as they played table football (or foosball). At the end, everyone cheered and applauded, and told me I'd done a good job introducing Brits to American culture on the radio.
After all of our hard work together, we definitely feel like a family, as evidenced by this photo when several of us ladies piled together on the couch.
(I'm the one who's upside down, and am with my pals Jo, Kristen, Rachel and Jen).
Yet don't let the photo fool you. We really do work hard. Here Ruth and Jo get creative with their glass polishing
while I clean inside the lift and manage to get an interesting self-portrait in the mirror.
I've received more than a few jibes over the past year about the constant presence of my camera, but now everyone expects me to take photos of us.
The butter is for the bread. And the crackers. It's perfectly normal to always put butter on bread or crackers in Britain, no matter what else you put on there! My mother even puts it on her Weetabix.
And the chutney is Branston Pickle, which you can find in most Dominicks stores when you return. But it will cost you $5 a jar, rather than the pound or so it costs at that end!
The butter stops the cheese falling off the crackers!