Street Performance and Pub Quiz

We began our day by going for afternoon tea in the nearby Covent Garden Market, a partially indoor and partially outdoor marketplace.

We had our tea in a downstairs courtyard while listening to a lovely string quartet.

We ate a few sandwiches before I thought to take a photo. Everything was very tasty!
The highlight for me was the smoked salmon and cream cheese finger sandwiches and the eclair.

String quartet (and a baby, presumably belonging to one of the quartet.)

After the quartet was done with their set, a single man took their place and began singing “On the Street Where You Live,” which is one of my absolute favorite songs from a musical (My Fair Lady, which is actually a pretty garbage story, but it has wonderful music and I watched the VHS a ton as a child, so it has a special place in my heart). He followed up with “Singin’ in the Rain” and pulled in a passerby to perform some impromptu choreography with him.

Normally I find performers that reel in unsuspecting audience members super obnoxious, but this guy was a really good sport, and I found the whole thing charming, somehow.

After “Singing’ in the Rain” was “Hallelujah,” and by this point I was really engrossed in his performance. The rest of his set was entirely opera, and it became clear that this was his primary artistry. His performance got pretty schticky, pulling even more audience members into the act, playfully heckling passersby, performing short magic tricks, and engaging with the children in the area--all while singing opera (quite brilliantly).

I thought he was especially good at interacting with children; they’re the ones most likely to want to participate, but they are also least likely to pick up on the non-verbal cues that indicate how they should be interacting with the show. There was one little girl who was completely entranced with the singer for the entire set. At one point he created two balloon swords and handed her one, and she held it by the wrong end. He tried to correct her grip, but she continued to hold it by the “blade.” So he just went with it, holding his balloon the same way, and they used the balloons as clubs rather than swords.

Similarly, he set up a matador routine with a young boy; the young boy didn’t quite get the movement of the bull, so the singer switched it up and gave the boy the easier role of bullfighter.

On paper, this performer embodied many of the things I can’t stand in a show--street performance, excessive schtick, audience participation. But I was completely engrossed in this act. I thought of many reasons to justify it--he was good with kids, he was a talented singer, you don’t usually see opera singers busking. But I think that ultimately, I don’t actually hate hammy street performers, I just don’t enjoy them when I encounter them in New York because in that context I’m just trying to live my life. Here, I’m a tourist, and always looking for entertainment or things of note. I had come here with the mentality that we didn’t want to do a lot of touristy things; we wanted to do the interesting things in London that locals do. That’s still a reasonable goal, but I also think that just letting yourself behave like a tourist is an important element of vacation.

This might be an obvious realization, but I had never quite thought of it that way before.

We ultimately decided to save the British Library for another day, as it is also quite close to the House of Illustration, which is closed on Mondays. We instead walked around the market, checking out shops.

Lady umbrella! I would love a dress with that silhouette.

 Liz and corgi bobblehead!
I know the video's not working. We are trying to fix it.

This...is just an Apple store. We went in because I needed a charger for my laptop, but they're quite expensive.
It was a lovely space though.

These shoes are the exact correct amount of ridiculous.

New apartment goal: have enough space for an enormous shoe tree.

Lobsters!

That evening we went to a pub called Hat and Tun for pub quiz. We had a supremely British dinner there:

Cottage pie--at the end of the meal our waitress scolded Jon for not eating his vegetables.

Sausages, mashed potato, and caramelized red onion gravy. Delicious!

We started out with "Bacon mac 'n' cheese" off of the "Toasties" section of the menu. I had pictured the mac and cheese on small pieces of toast, kind of like bruschetta, whereas Jon completely disregarded the Toasties heading and expected a bowl. It turns out a toastie is a grilled sandwich. Not really an appetizer. The more you know!

This pub quiz turned out to be the exact same format as the one we went to (in a completely different pub) two years ago (except the prize structure was different). The quizmaster was outgoing and fun; he set a great tone. We ended up in second to last place; last place was another American playing on his own--had we realized the situation earlier we would have teamed up with him! Again, most of the things we got wrong were in the category of British pop culture. The quizmaster told us that we did pretty well for a team of two people not from the UK.

If trivia is your thing, below are some of the questions we can remember (there were 40 total; some involved pictures):

1. What type of animal is a flounder?
2. What former zed is now the DRC? (It took a minute for us to decipher this question--what is the former Z-name of the country now known as DRC?)
3. Fill in the blanks: John Howard, Paul Kingsley, and Robert Hall were all __________ of _____________ (hint: they're political figures)
4. What principality is located in the eastern Pyrenees?
5. If you have aphonia, what are you unable to do?
6. Before becoming president, for what state was Barack Obama a senator?
7. In Greek mythology, Hera put the hundred eyes of Argos into the tail of what bird?
8. Pencil, Fu Manchu, and walrus are all types of what?
9. In what decade did Disney Land open in Anaheim?
10. What eight letter word can be formed using the letters of "ball" and "rise"?
11. What m-word do our US cousins use for a buck's fizz? (This took us a while as we had no idea what a buck's fizz was--it could have been any "m" noun!!)
12. What year was the Cuban missile crisis?
13. In what state is Death Valley?
14. Before changing to the euro, what was the national currency of Portugal?
15. What is the motto of The Scout Association [Boy Scouts]?
16. Where would you find hammers, dampers, and strings?
17. Schooners, sloops, and a third thing I can't remember are all examples of what? (Be specific)
18. Rex Harrison won Best Actor for what 1964 Lerner and Loewe movie musical?
19. What is the smallest country in Africa, with initials TG? (I was suspicious of this and confirmed when I looked it up later--it's the smallest mainland country. As a hint, you don't really need the "T.")
20. What actor has just been cast as the first female Doctor in Doctor Who?

Answers below!

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1. What type of animal is a flounder?
• Fish
2. What former zed is now the DRC? (It took a minute for us to decipher this question--what is the former Z-name of the country now known as DRC?)
• Zaire
3. Fill in the blanks: John Howard, Paul Kingsley, and Robert Hall were all __________ of _____________ (hint: they're political figures)
• Prime Ministers of Australia
4. What principality is located in the eastern Pyrenees?
• Andorra
5. If you have aphonia, what are you unable to do?
• Speak
6. Before becoming president, for what state was Barack Obama a senator?
• Illinois
7. In Greek mythology, Hera put the hundred eyes of Argos into the tail of what bird?
• Peacock
8. Pencil, Fu Manchu, and walrus are all types of what?
• Moustache
9. In what decade did Disney Land open in Anaheim?
• 1950s
10. What eight letter word can be formed using the letters of "ball" and "rise"?
• Liberals
11. What m-word do our US cousins use for a buck's fizz? (This took us a while as we had no idea what a buck's fizz was--it could have been any "m" noun!!)
• Mimosa
12. What year was the Cuban missile crisis?
• 1962
13. In what state is Death Valley?
• California
14. Before changing to the euro, what was the national currency of Portugal?
• Escudo
15. What is the motto of The Scout Association [Boy Scouts]?
• Be Prepared
16. Where would you find hammers, dampers, and strings?
• Piano
17. Schooners, sloops, and a third thing I can't remember are all examples of what? (Be specific)
• Sailboats
18. Rex Harrison won Best Actor for what 1964 Lerner and Loewe movie musical?
• My Fair Lady (the second time in one day that movie came up!)
19. What is the smallest country in Africa, with initials TG? (I was suspicious of this and confirmed when I looked it up later--it's the smallest mainland country. As a hint, you don't really need the "T.")
• (The) Gambia
20. What actor has just been cast as the first female Doctor in Doctor Who?
• Jodie Whittaker

We wanted to come up with a team name that was topical in some way; the announcement of the first female Doctor on Doctor Who has predictably garnered a lot of backlash from whiny men who are perfectly accepting of the fact that the Doctor is an alien who can bend the time-space continuum to their will and regenerates in a completely new body periodically (12 different actors have played The Doctor) but find it beyond the realm of disbelief that this character could be a woman. One of the most ridiculous remarks we read was "Nobody wants a Tardis full of bras" (the Tardis is the magical phone box the Doctor uses to travel), so we called our team "Tardis Full of Bras." The quizmaster apparently did not realize how popular Doctor Who is in America and didn't even realize we were American until the end of the night--we are blending in so seamlessly! :)

After the game we chatted with the other American (Ryan from Iowa; he was there mostly for work). The quizmaster remarked on how friendly we were with each other, explaining that English people would not be nearly as chatty in a parallel situation. After Ryan left we went back to our table and chatted a bit with members of the winning team who were at the table next to us. The team was a group of older gentlemen who were regulars of the pub (and apparently regular winners of pub quiz). One of the things I wish we'd done more of during our last trip was chatting with strangers in pubs, so I was very happy to be able to do that!

Trump came up, of course, and then one of the men asked if Hillary Clinton really would have been much better. We know that American liberals are still pretty conservative by European standards, and I assumed that's where they were coming from--but when we confidently declared Hillary the obvious better choice one man COMPLETELY UNIRONICALLY asked "But what about her e-mails?" The conversation stayed friendly but Jon and I of course had a strong reaction to this. I certainly did not expect to hear this ridiculous argument while abroad!

We also spent some time trying to convince them that the woman who sued McDonald's when she was burned by their coffee (read: suffered three degree burns and had to have extensive reconstructive surgery and skin grafts) was in the right--I won't go into all the details here, but the main points are that McDonald's had been warned multiple times that their coffee was too hot, the woman wasn't doing anything reckless when she spilled it (she was sitting in the passenger seat of a car in a parking lot), and all she wanted was her medical bills covered. She won, but McDonald's won the PR war, as most people think of this case as a prime example of frivolous lawsuits. I finally pointed out that because Americans don't have the NHS, medical bills can be quite high, which they may not have been considering.

Overall it was a very fun day, filled with delicious English food, great entertainment, and fun conversations with locals and fellow Americans. We're planning on going back to pub quiz next week!

Today we went to the House of Illustration and the British Library; I'll share the details in tomorrow's post!

xo

Hannah