Dan Alcantara

Today was quite a busy day and there are still a few hours left in it. It started off with my first full English breakfast, which lived up to its name. It’s a big meal, but it’s a meal full of protein. Mind you, the form of protein isn’t the healthiest by any measure. For those that don’t know, a full breakfast consists of the following:

• Eggs, fried or scrambled.
• Bacon - not streaky bacon that most Americans are used to, it’s a lot closer to Canadian bacon.
• Sausages - like the bacon, they aren’t the same as the sausages most are used to in America. They’re even better.
• Baked beans - Imagine if Bush’s baked beans weren’t so sweet. That’s a good approximation as far as I can say.
• Tomatoes -  Either fresh slices that have been fried or whole tomatoes from a tin.
• Toast - The eggs and tomatoes go on top.
• Black pudding - For those that don’t know, black pudding is blood sausage. It’s delicious and not nearly as scary as it sounds. The flavour is amazing.

After breakfast, we had to get some stuff gathered and placed in storage.

We were very kindly given a three-piece living room suite, television with a stand and a chest of drawers. All of that, along with some other furniture, was put into a storage unit. So we’ve already got furniture, just no home to put it in.

We had about an hour’s break before we headed out to have tea with a woman that my father-in-law does computer work for. She’s a distant cousin of The Queen. Tea consisted of tea, biscuits (cookies), scones with jam and clotted cream, and a lemon-drizzle cake that had lemon curd between the layers. Absolutely delicious. Anne, that’s her name and I think she spells it with an ‘e’, lives in a house that was a barn in a past life. Her back-garden is a true English garden and was absolutely full of flowering plants and some vegetables. She has grapes, tomatoes, raspberries, strawberries, string beans, potatoes, courgettes (zucchini) and flowers that I don’t know the names of.

Very close to her home is a church from the 11th century. I didn’t have my camera and it isn’t open on days other than Sunday so I’ll have to go back to get pictures.

On our way there and back, we drove through a village called Burton Lazars that was home to a leper hospital. The hospital is still there, but it isn’t used as such any more. And I may be wrong, so it might still be a hospital, just not for lepers.

prayfordaisy:

Daisy prayer request: she is shockingly thin and not eating. Ate a little today and puked it up. Needs appetite.

I still don’t understand the point or even the appeal of Foursquare. In other news, I am working on a story. I don’t know how long it is going to be but am hoping that it will be around the length of a novella. It feels like it needs more than a short-story to say but it isn’t quite massive.

I’m not working on any music at the moment because I don’t have a guitar right now. I’ve got a ukulele but not a guitar and I’m having a lot of trouble transferring the songs that I’ve written since releasing the Moving EP to the new medium. They just rely so much on the lower notes that a guitar allows. I really miss playing the guitar. My callouses are starting to go away already. As soon as I’ve got a job, I’m going to be purchasing a guitar over here.

That’s pretty much all that’s been happening beyond working on getting settled and working on learning the culture here.

This is just stunningly amazing.

ohyeahalcantaras:

We went out today to see a place called Rutland Water and on the way we passed a local fishing place and afterwards, we stopped for tea.