This weekend Leo and I did some exploring of our neighbourhood as well as the area a bit south of us. Sorry for not posting pictures, but this blogging thing gets a bit difficult when I have to do it from work or from a cafe (still no internet at home yet). Saturday we walked down Bethnal Green road, scoping out the largest supermarket in our area, as well as the local pawn shop (which felt more like a Best Buy than a pawn shop). We sampled some local cuisine at G. Kelly's Pie And Mash Shop, which is one of the oldest pie shops in the city. Unfortunately, they no longer serve jellied eel at the shop in Bethnal Green, which we really wanted to try.
On our way back to the apartment, we stopped into another local pub. Let me preface this story with that fact that it was 1:30 in the afternoon. The place was quite boisterous for a Saturday afternoon. All around the pub were red-nosed folks, most of the men in either sweat pants or some form of trousers that had elastic at the waist and the bottom. There were only two women I saw...one drinking wine out of the small bottle it came in, and the other looking like she had just gotten off of a long tour with a heavy metal hair-band from the eighties. Everyone was drunk, or at least many more sheets to the wind than us. So, I felt out of place, which Leo thought was amusing.
Then a gentleman wearing blue hospital pants, still with his hospital bracelet on, walked into the bar selling bootlegged DVDs. One patron of the bar, either a film buff or someone interesting in seeing the escaped hospital patient leave quickly, bought the entire stack off of them. Not two minutes later, another man walked into the bar (this is getting to be a bad joke) shouting that he had cheap meat to sell, pulling out of his plastic bag sealed packages of sliced meat from the Tesco across the street. He was selling them at a deep discount, since they were either stolen or old and had been thrown away, and no one seemed interested. It was at this point that I convinced Leo to drink the rest of my beer so we could be on our way. It's not that the place didn't have charm, in fact, I think there was just too much charm going on there for 1:30 in the afternoon. Leo, of course, can't wait to go back.
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2 comments:
Haven't had the pie and mash from G. Kelly yet. It was recommended to us. Did you have the "liquor" with the pie? As for jellied eels- I thought the eel part was fine, but didn't care too much for the jellied part (FYI- can't stand JELLO). Actually had them at Billingsgate Fish Market from the shop that supplies them to G. Kelly. Worth a try to say you have had them. You guys seem adventurous enough since you have eaten at St. John's
we did have the liquor on the pie which is a gravy-like, parsley sauce. people seem to eat the pie with a spoon and fork so they can fill up the spoon with the liquor for each bite.
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