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Tag Archives: My Friend Jaime

Southwold Seaside

12 Wednesday Sep 2012

Posted by frannyritchie in Uncategorized

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beach huts, holiday, My Friend Jaime, photography, Southwold, travel, vacation

Southwold was both very typical and very idiosyncratic.  It was a purpose-built Victorian seaside town, and in that respect it was pretty similar to a lot of other seaside towns around Britain.  I was particularly charmed by the rows of beachfront changing cabins, but those are kind of iconic and certainly not unique to Southwold; if anything, I think they’re more often associated with the South coast, where the weather is warmer.

The thing that was totally specific to Southwold was the arcade.  There was a room at one end of the pier that resembled any old arcade: screaming children, screaming machines, epilepsy-inducing flashing lights.  That is not the arcade I’m talking about.  Further down the pier, there is a single room of homemade arcade games.  Actually, “games” might be overstating it – in one, you put a strand of hair in a small petri dish and then watch while it does a “DNA analysis” (for example, it confirms that you’re human, then gives you the likelihood that you’ll eat toast on the morning of 11 June 2038, and then says in 2142, its 98% sure you’ll be dead.  Spot on, I’d say).

Another game involves inflatable rubber gloves “patting you down” – Jaime tried that one.

The hands-down favorite was a really rickety looking photo booth – The Expressive Photo Booth, it was called (see below). The whole thing was made out of plywood. We sat down and moments later, the seat started rocking back and forth.  That was when the machine took the first photo.  Then there was a bright light.  Then a long pause.  Then the seat dropped out from under us (I screamed).  And a few moments later, we got our photo (top right) and I yelled “Let’s do it again!”

I would’ve kept going, too, but I don’t think Jaime was as into it as I was.

You can read more about Southwold’s special somethings, which include a brewery, a new housing development and a water clock, at my other blog.

 

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Southwold

10 Monday Sep 2012

Posted by frannyritchie in Uncategorized

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holiday, My Friend Jaime, Southwold, summer, Typical British Seaside Holiday, UK, vacation

I’ve written about Tibby’s Triangle, an award-winning housing development in Southwold, on my other blog, (see upper-right corner of collage) but I also wanted to tell you about the rest of the town, which is utterly charming.  The beach is lined with those quintessentially British seaside huts, which apparently cost obscene amounts of money. There is a giant pier with a famous sculpture, a famous arcade, and some schlock.  I was absolutely charmed by the whole place.

It was wonderful to be there with another urban planner – Jaime and I camped a few miles away, and then had the better part of a day to spend in town.  We walked up and down the main drag, got a sub-par latte in a hilariously awful cafe, visited the Adnam’s shop (we meant to do the brewery tour, but we ran out of day); hung out in a playground and toured the housing development referenced above; went to the pier; took lots of photos; went swimming, and called it a day.

I had originally intended to take Jaime to Lavenham, a really sweet Suffolk town that I’ve mentioned on the blog before, but as we hopped back in the car, I turned to Jaime and gave her the options: we could go look at Lavenham – walk around the main drag of a very cute little town – OR we could race back to Cambridge with plenty of time to hit up the Waitrose on Trumpington Road, the yuppie supermarket that I’d never gone to because of my car-free situation.

Jaime intuited that I really, really wanted to hit up the yuppie grocery, and so that’s what we did.  For the results of the shopping trip, see below.

Plum Pie!

05 Wednesday Sep 2012

Posted by frannyritchie in Snacks

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cream tea, Grantchester Meadows, My Friend Jaime, pie

My friend Jaime came to visit a couple weeks ago, on the heels of our trip to Wales.  We took a trip to Southwold, strolled through Cambridge, ate a lot of delicious food, and filled each other in on the last ten months of our life. Jaime’s been living in Israel and has been caught up in a whirlwind cross-cultural romance, which I was SO EXCITED to hear about.

Because we painted this country red, I have a few posts to share with you.  But I thought I’d start with the quintessentially Cantabriggian thing that we did: we walked through the Meadows to Grantchester.  Walking to Grantchester is a Thing: you walk through the Meadows along the Cam to the Orchard Tea Room, where you can get cream tea (tea, clotted cream, jam, scones) and sit in green cloth deck chairs in a leafy setting.

Because I am an idiot, I didn’t realise the first couple times I was there that the leafy setting where you take your cream tea is an ORCHARD – thus, Orchard Tea Rooms.  I realised this as Jaime and I were sitting under a tree and I realised that there were tiny little fruits hanging off – yellow things the size of large cherries.  Closer inspection: it was a plum.  Jaime and I ate a few before running all over the place gathering plums.  On our way our, we saw plums, pears, and apples – a whole cornucopia of fruit – but Jaime and I brought a crap-ton of plums back to the house, half of which we turned into a pie.  A very, very tart pie, but a delicious pie nonetheless.

(for those more interested in the snack than the adventure: we used pre-made pie crust; we filled it up with cut-up plums and added cinnamon and sugar and a little bit of nutmeg; and then we stuck it in the oven at 350F/180C and took it out when it looked done)

Snacks in Tel Aviv

24 Friday Feb 2012

Posted by frannyritchie in Snacks

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adventure, food, Israel, My Friend Jaime, pita, Tel Aviv, travel, Yemenite Quarter

I took 676 photos in four days in Belgium – its a picturesque place.  But I’m having trouble distilling my photos, so I turned to my file of images from Tel Aviv in November.  I don’t love olives and I didn’t eat hummous until I was 22, so Tel Aviv is not the culinary paradise for me that it is for many.  Even so, I ate incredibly well.  The pita bread at the corner store made me understand why people eat pita bread.  The pomegranates were literally the size of my face (see below).

Furthermore, a lot of the more memorable things I did in Israel centered on food.  I went to the Yemenite Quarter on my last day, and decided that I would walk up and down the market until I ran out of things to look at.  Three hours later I emerged with a lamb pita and a pomegranate and a bunch of mediocre photos.  On my last night, Jaime and I went to the fast food place on the corner to look for halloumi.  Except it turned out the place we went was a meat-only place (how could we have known? It was all in Hebrew), and the guy who translated for us looked at us warily before leaving and said “Are you guys ok?” – not as in, can you complete the transaction, but as in, are you okay in the fundamental sense? His concern was heart-warming but also depressing, because I like people to feel that I’m not completely incompetent.

We also spent a comical amount of time thinking about food while we were at the Dead Sea, because there wasn’t any food there (despite it being, you know, one of the world’s biggest tourist attractions).  And, as is a theme, I spent a lot of time poking around grocery stores and corner stores.  I brought back a packet of chocolate chips that I had every intention of putting into cookies but, now that I have them, I don’t want to open the bag with the ugly teddy bear logo and all the Hebrew writing.

I love food.

From Beacon Hill to Addis Abbaba and Back

23 Wednesday Nov 2011

Posted by frannyritchie in Uncategorized

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best trip ever, cosmopolitan city, developing world, My Friend Jaime, Tel Aviv

See that in the background? That's Jordan.

Because I am a Woman of Leisure, I took a 6-day trip to Israel last week to visit my friend Jaime (funemployment taken to the extreme).  We ran all over the city, and the country, during my time there; I was flat-out for most of my trip and still feel kind of wired from it.

The thing that struck me most about the country – more than the incredible Bauhaus architecture in Tel Aviv or the insanely good pita you could get in the local bodegas (whatever they’re called in Hebrew…) is how damn foreign the country is, and what a weird mix of cultures it is.  I don’t mean that it was populated by Americans and Germans and Ethiopians so its a weird melange of cultures, though I assume that’s part of it.  It’s that in some ways it seems like an incredibly cosmopolitan, sophisticated, Westernized city.  Sometimes it seems like a backward, crumbling third-world country. And the truth, of course, is that its a bit of both, and that there’s a lot more to it than I was able to see in four days.

Here is a list of some of the contradictions we saw in Tel Aviv:

Photo collages of Tel Aviv, the Dead Sea and Middle Eastern snacks to follow.

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