Chips and houmous...
...have been replaced.
I've got a friend coming to visit and I'm really excited. For a while I was planning on hiring a car, driving around Abruzzo for the weekend she's here but then I decided not to. The main reason, apart from my usual lack of money, is that what has become "normal" to me is going to be...interesting...for her, I just feel it in me bones!
For example. I lived "in" London for roughly three years. In those three years I stayed in the same area, going out in the same zone, visiting the same bars/pubs etc on the regular nights out. Of course I did go further afield for the odd special occasion, but the places I'm talking about here are the Friday night haunts the, "Hooray it's the weekend but I'm too tired after the week to really go too far from my house..." kind of nights.
In Battersea, sometimes a Friday night would consist of dinner at one of the local pubs. Or if we were feeling adventurous it might even have been cocktails at Clapham Common, although I think that was more likely on a Saturday. If, on the rare occasion I was feeling particularly...erm...drunk...there was, and still is, Infernos. Open til 3am for a bit of dancing...and drinking...if one didn't mind the sticky floor and £10 entrance fee. I used to hate the nights someone would say "Let's go to Infernos..." but by the end of the evening I would be loving it and as a result I have many fond memories of that place: toilet dogs, and fancy dress cows, Jagerbombs, and bog trolls, and that one time a man drank the drink I'd just paid for so I took his wallet and used his money to pay for another one, I could go on...but basically it was a place to "let go" of the hell of a week that had unfurled, or celebrate something, or just because there was no where else to go when the bars shut...
Anyways, my point is that on deciding to return home we would get food. My favourite late night feast being chips and houmous from the kebab shop by the bus stop. Nothing beat chips and houmous-literally a takeaway box of chips with a good two or three dollops of houmous, amazing! It was my bid to fight off the effects of the amount of alcohol I had consumed the next day...sometimes it worked.
For me here the concept is roughly the same: Friday night I meet friends at the same place in the centre before moving somewhere else for dinner/drinks however, instead of the pub or average cocktail bar, we're talking beach bars as Summer's here...or at least was until yesterday. No sticky floors but sand. Then, when it comes to the end of the night, and we're not just talking Fridays and Saturdays but whenever (the joy of starting work at 1.30pm)...after having drank one pint of beer and...perhaps...one cocktail, having danced under the moon and the stars in a much more reserved manner to what I really am capable of (to music I've never heard before, that I don't know the words to and that's just not cheese...no Bryan Adams, no Journey, no Baywatch...*sigh*), it's all about a cornetto: a cornetto being a croissant, not the ice-cream!
My favourite late night cornetto is with white chocolate even though the chocolate usually ends up on my chin, top, scarf, trousers, nose, basically everywhere. Last night was no exception...I ate two from two different places! At the first place we went to we literally stood in the back doorway of a bakery, with delivery boxes around us, whilst we watched a guy prepare the cornettos. Totally random but totally fitting with the other unpredictable and sometimes down-right ridiculous things that I find myself doing in Pescara. Who'd have thought there could be a black-market for cornetto, hilarious! Sometimes there are no words...
I've got a friend coming to visit and I'm really excited. For a while I was planning on hiring a car, driving around Abruzzo for the weekend she's here but then I decided not to. The main reason, apart from my usual lack of money, is that what has become "normal" to me is going to be...interesting...for her, I just feel it in me bones!
For example. I lived "in" London for roughly three years. In those three years I stayed in the same area, going out in the same zone, visiting the same bars/pubs etc on the regular nights out. Of course I did go further afield for the odd special occasion, but the places I'm talking about here are the Friday night haunts the, "Hooray it's the weekend but I'm too tired after the week to really go too far from my house..." kind of nights.
In Battersea, sometimes a Friday night would consist of dinner at one of the local pubs. Or if we were feeling adventurous it might even have been cocktails at Clapham Common, although I think that was more likely on a Saturday. If, on the rare occasion I was feeling particularly...erm...drunk...there was, and still is, Infernos. Open til 3am for a bit of dancing...and drinking...if one didn't mind the sticky floor and £10 entrance fee. I used to hate the nights someone would say "Let's go to Infernos..." but by the end of the evening I would be loving it and as a result I have many fond memories of that place: toilet dogs, and fancy dress cows, Jagerbombs, and bog trolls, and that one time a man drank the drink I'd just paid for so I took his wallet and used his money to pay for another one, I could go on...but basically it was a place to "let go" of the hell of a week that had unfurled, or celebrate something, or just because there was no where else to go when the bars shut...
Anyways, my point is that on deciding to return home we would get food. My favourite late night feast being chips and houmous from the kebab shop by the bus stop. Nothing beat chips and houmous-literally a takeaway box of chips with a good two or three dollops of houmous, amazing! It was my bid to fight off the effects of the amount of alcohol I had consumed the next day...sometimes it worked.
For me here the concept is roughly the same: Friday night I meet friends at the same place in the centre before moving somewhere else for dinner/drinks however, instead of the pub or average cocktail bar, we're talking beach bars as Summer's here...or at least was until yesterday. No sticky floors but sand. Then, when it comes to the end of the night, and we're not just talking Fridays and Saturdays but whenever (the joy of starting work at 1.30pm)...after having drank one pint of beer and...perhaps...one cocktail, having danced under the moon and the stars in a much more reserved manner to what I really am capable of (to music I've never heard before, that I don't know the words to and that's just not cheese...no Bryan Adams, no Journey, no Baywatch...*sigh*), it's all about a cornetto: a cornetto being a croissant, not the ice-cream!
My favourite late night cornetto is with white chocolate even though the chocolate usually ends up on my chin, top, scarf, trousers, nose, basically everywhere. Last night was no exception...I ate two from two different places! At the first place we went to we literally stood in the back doorway of a bakery, with delivery boxes around us, whilst we watched a guy prepare the cornettos. Totally random but totally fitting with the other unpredictable and sometimes down-right ridiculous things that I find myself doing in Pescara. Who'd have thought there could be a black-market for cornetto, hilarious! Sometimes there are no words...
Comments
Post a Comment