Old fashioned fun

Have any of you seen UHF, the Weird Al movie? I've tried to get other people into this film, with mixed success; it may just be love out of nostalgia from when I fell in love with it as a kid, but I find that movie chortle-inducing. In it is a sequence where they run a commercial for "Spatula City: We sell spatulas, and that's all!" Yesterday I went on a school trip to the Bengali section of East Central London, where Brick Lane, famous for its curry and Bengali restaurants, is. While there we found a large grocery store called "Bengla City", and for the life of me I couldn't saying "Spatula City!!"

They had some of the most wonderful things inside, including a massive 22 lb. bucket of yogurt, and entire bags of spices like paprika and curry powder that were the size of those bags of dirt you buy at the K-Mart gardening centre. I wonder if I can plant some tomatoes in them and get them to end up tasting spicy when I pick them later?

I ended up buying a bag of spicy Bombay Mix (kind of a crunchy, orange-colored snack mix), and some feta and herbs in a jar, which I selected in a narrow decision over a tin of goat's milk cheese from Spain. Tough call. They actually had a lot of really good looking spices and foods, and I'm going to go back when I have a little more money on me. I really like making curry these days, and made a great chicken coconut curry a few days ago and put it over a bed of Basmati rice. I let my Azerbajaini friend Elkhan try some, and he was abosolutely blown away by it, which is a good compliment since this guy cooks even more than I do (although is known to occasionally have something go terribly awry on him, and he ends up with, as he likes to term it, "poison").

The main reason we were in the area was for a school trip for "Religion and Society", and part of our trip was spent in an old builiding that doubles as a Mosque on Brick Lane. I don't know if any of you are familiar with the exit signs in Europe, but they all look like this:

I have to admit that my first day back when I lived in Helsinki, I mistook this for the sign for the bathroom (cuz, you know, he looks like he is in a hurry to get through that door, and I thought he was having a bathroom emergency and was worried that the "hostages were about to be released" in his pants, if you savvy my meaning). The end result of this was that I nearly locked myself into the boiler room of our apartment complex when I kept going through door and door looking for the bathroom down near the laundry room, and almost ended up in a room I didn't have a key to get back out of. But that isn't the point of this; the point of this is that all the exit signs, at least those in the central prayer room, had a piece of paper taped over the image of the guy running. I asked my Morrocan friend what this meant, and she said it was pretty unusual, but was likely a result of an ancient practice that forbids making images of people. Oh, and the head of the mosque asked her why she wasn't wearing a scarf when he found out she was Muslim, something she didn't take kindly to.

After doing a little bit of shopping at Spatu...er BenglaCity, I ended up at this old time candy shop a few blocks away, and the whole time we were walking there I couldn't get my mind of buying some "old timey" candy, as I like to call it. Or maybe it is olde english enough to be "Ye Olde Thymey Candy". Either way, I picked up some licorice and blackcurrant hard sweets, along with a handful of other tasties, and then I looked for a hoop to roll along the ground with a stick, or perhaps a game of either kick the can or stickball to play.

Finally, we stopped at Montezuma's chocolate shop , a place that advertised itself as having award-winning chocolates. Before spending any money in their establishment, I made sure to ask the girl behind the counter exactly which awards they have won, and whether or not they are legitimate bodies capable of ensuring quality. She showed me the awards listed on some bar of chocolate, but I must not have looked wholly reassured because she brought me a sample of one of their truffles. I hemmed and hawed for a minute, and after some toing and froing, I finally settled on a hunk of white chocolate mixed with strawberries out of their jar. So fairly thee be warned, says I, to any business that advertises themselves as award winning. You had better have proof to back that up when I'm in town.