Hamsterita's Ramblings and Photos

[Hamsterita]

Sorry, I forgot to put the direct links and sometimes there are problems with the youtube pluggin

First video https://youtu.be/kM7MC7ragtU

The same video but in galician https://youtu.be/EfgRxa7Lbv8

Second video https://youtu.be/iRdLDeCB59E

I hope you can access now to them and that you can watch them.

thank you very much!

I already have all the material that I need for the two next post, now I only have to find the time to write them

[Drago]

Wow, you really live in such a beautiful area I love how blue the ocean looks. Do you visit the beach often?

[Hamsterita]

Right now I don't go much (this summer probably I'm not going to go at all) because I'm studying for the State Attorney exams and I don't have time, but when I had a life errr I mean free time yes, I went to the beach every time that the weather let me do it (that is not often too), and I liked it a lot. The ocean is very clean however the water doesn't look very clear because it is very deep not far from the shore. I have a couple of photos of the beaches too. I'll post them here some day

[dreamtree1234]

Hamsterita, thanks for the direct links to the videos. I just finished watching them. They were truly lovely.

By the way, I love your new signature banner. Blacky looks so adorable in it!

[Hamsterita]

Thanks, yours is very cute too, eros and snickers look lovely. Leedsgurl is very nice for doing them for us, she rules!

[Hamsterita]

[PART 1]

I don't know if you know it (and I hope I don't hurt anybody's feelings) but you (US citizens and UK citizens) are known in Spain for having a crappy food. We usually think that US food is not healthy but can be yummy, and we think that UK food is unhealthy and terrible in general.

Now that I've been in the UK I can say that in my honest opinion, the food is not as terrible as I thought it was going to be, but is not good compared with what I'm used to. I think that the main problem is the "raw material", I mean, the fresh food it's hard to find and when you find it, it's expensive and it looks over treated and/or processed (with preservatives and that kind of things that make them loose a lot of flavour) , so it's hard to cook exquisite things when you don't have good enough ingredients to do it. Another problem is that due to globalization people doesn't have time and prefers to eat fast food or processed food, and that doesn't help either (but it's only my opinion, and I can be wrong).

Anyway, I thought that I was going to starve, but in the end I found several places that I liked a lot. Again, there's no place like home, but things considered I really liked them.

I thought that it would be interesting to share the places where I ate.

I arrived to London in the evening, it was funny (I'm being ironic) that they lost my luggage in the airport, and we lost a lot of time making a claim to the company about it, but more over, in years there hadn't been an underground strike, and we had to arrive when the underground workers went to the biggest strike ever, so we had a lot of problems to arrive at King's Cross Station. When we finally did, we hurried up to the check in at the hotel and we looked for a place to have dinner.

We started with the wrong foot. Near King's Cross I had seen a pizza restaurant, and I thought: "you can go wrong with a pizza, why don't we go there to have dinner?" My Bf was a little bit reluctant but he agreed. The place was full, and apparently it is a well know chain as there are several restaurants like it spread all over London, but to me it was HIDEOUS... The place was very modern. You order your pizza and they give you a button with a light that tells you when your pizza is ready turning on a red light (I was amazed). It was our first contact with the pounds and it was sooo expensive for us, now that I think about it I still feel stolen, because the pizza was so bad... Well, as I was saying we order a pepperoni pizza and it was the worst pizza that I've ever tried, and very small, and the crust was half burnt. Outrageous. It was so small that we had to order a salad to fill our stomachs, and I would never had thought that I was going to say anything like this but the salad was better than the pizza, and I'm not a fan of salads at all!!! I even enjoyed my salad after the pizza, seriously. I was so hungry that I didn't remember to take a picture of the salad. This is the dreadful pizza

I think that the plaze was Pizza Union, but I had to google it, it’s the only place that I didn’t remember the name, my memory wanted to make me a favour and erased all the unnecessary information.

The next morning my lucky changed. I love hotels with good buffets. Our hotel was nice and the breakfast was incredible. They had variety and quality, of savoury and sweet food, so I really enjoyed it. They had muffins, scones, croissants, bagels, and other things like that that I don’t know how to translate, cereals, yogurt, fresh fruit, pancakes, waffles, sausages, roasted tomatoes, boiled eggs, fried eggs, scrambled eggs, sausages, bacon, beans, several kinds of cheese, ham, granola bars, jam, several kinds of bread, honey, several kinds of juice… it was paradise and one of the best things of my stay. There I discovered porridge, but at the time I didn’t know what it was. I always have a ritual, first I eat the savoury food, and then the sweet.


Yes, I ate all that in one breakfast, probably even more. My bf says that I’m the monster of the buffets, he doesn’t understand how I can eat all that, but I needed the strength to walk all over London all day!

Between the British Museum and the soho, near Forbbiden Planet Store there’s a restaurant called “Flat Iron”, again, I think that it’s very famous in London. I really liked the place, for our budget it was a little bit expensive, but I think that for someone that is paid in pounds is ok. There I ate the food with best quality (in my opinion) that I tried in London. They specialize in meat, and we ordered two steaks. They were tender and very tasty, I don’t have a single complain about them. For that price where I live you could buy bigger pieces and other kind of meat that usually is more expensive (for example sirloin instead of steaks) but flat iron’s steaks don’t have much to loose against some of the steaks that you can find here (probably our meat gourmets would disagree, but for a regular palate like mine they were really good, seriously). We also liked the place because it was well decorated and the silverware was very fun. Look at that knife! I posed with the knife for a photo like I was a serial killer butcher or something. The waitress must thought “those Spanish are idiots”. The photo is too silly to be shown. I thought that it was curious that they served popcorn with the food (and it was for free), I suppose that they do that to offer you something to eat while you wait for the real food. The salad was included in the steak's price and I think that the fries too (I’m sure that I wouldn’t have ordered the salad but I’m not sure about the fries).


We visited two hamburger restaurants. The first one was “The honest”. I think that it’s also a famous restaurant in London (I don’t know for sure, but we tried to google the best ones in our range of money). We went to the one that is located in White Chapel. I really liked the place, I liked the decoration, they were very kind with us, and the hamburgers were ok. I think that the fries were included in the price and the hamburgers weren’t expensive. I preferred the hamburgers of “Patty&bun” and I prefer the hamburgers where I live (they are bigger and the meat is more tasty) but I liked them. What I liked the most was the place where they sat us. The views weren’t anything spectacular at all (it was a regular street) but I found it charming, and it was hot, so the breeze was something to be grateful for.


I know that I couldn’t make a living of my drawings, and the trackpad of my computer doesn’t help lol.

The second one as you can imagine was “Patty&bun”. We went to one that’s near Selfridge’s. The place was tiny and it was very crowded, I could touch the people in the next table without moving too much, it was hot as hell, and we had to wait a lot for the food, but it was worth it. I liked the hamburgers, I don’t know if it was the dressing or what, but they were very tasty and at least the ones that we chose there were more special that the ones that we chose at “The honest”. In this restaurant you have to pay for the fries and the sauces (My way of knowing/remembering this is to look at the pictures, because I usually don’t eat fries, it’s not something that I crave, so, if there is only one cup of fries, they are my bf’s fries, if there are two dishes with fries, that’s because they were included in the price). I think that the price of the hamburgers were more or less the same. Anyway, If I had to choose, “Pattys&bun” would be my place to go.


I wanted to try a take away, but my bf doesn’t like them, he says that it’s uncomfortable and that the food has worse quality than the food in restaurants. We are the ones that created the term “slow food” and we aren’t used to take aways, maybe in some cities like Madrid or Barcelona is more common, but for us is not something that we order every day. If you have to eat at work, you cook your food at home and use a container to be able to eat it at work, or you eat at the work’s restaurant, or in some cafe near your work, but we usually don’t go to take aways because we think that is not healthy. Obviously the behaviour patterns are changing, people has less free time, people is becoming more lazy in that way, the globalization makes us discover new trends and take aways are becoming famous here too, but generally they still aren’t our first choice for now. The day that we went to the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum the queue for them was nuts. We arrived soon in the morning and we had no problems to enter in the Science Museum, but when we finished our visit and went to the Natural History Museum the queue surrounded the whole building, so I pushed the idea of a take away again. We could order some food and ate it at the queue. He grant me my wish and we went to “wasabi”. What a huge mistake! Sushi’s price, compared with where I live was a bargain. Anyway I was very hungry, so we ordered regular Chinese/Japanese food. It was terrible. It didn’t have a lot of flavour, and thank god, because it wasn’t good, the noodles were dry, stuck to each other… they were a no no. If that wasn’t enough, they give me diarrhea, so definitely that wouldn’t be a place that I would recommend. If I were my bf I would had been complaining all day, but he was a good boy and he didn’t tease me.

[Hamsterita]

[PART 2]

Near our hotel in Islington there was a Vietnamese restaurant, “Pho”. Everyday when I walked by it I saw the big bowls of noodles and it made me so hungry. We like to try different kinds of food, and there aren’t Vietnamese restaurants where I live, actually there weren’t any restaurants like that, last summer a thai restaurant opened in the city center, but until that we only had regular Chinese restaurants and a couple of Japanese restaurants. One day we decided to give it a try, and we really liked it. I don’t know what we ordered but it was yummy. Placing the order was nuts, we are Spanish and my bf was living in the US so he knows to speak English very well, but we obviously don't have british accent, and the waiter was French and he had the strangest accent that I've ever heard, and I couldn't understand a thing of he was saying, so I'm sure that it was very funny to watch us trying to understand each other
As a starter we ordered some kind of dumplings, they were very strange, spicy, sour and sweet, but we liked them. They look yukky, I know, but believe me, they were great.

And then we ordered the pho (a bowl of noodles) and rice. I didn’t like the pho, but It was my fault. I should have ordered another flavour. It had an herb that I don’t like, unfortunately I don’t know what herb (or spice) is, but I recognize the flavour from other foods that I’ve tried and it always ruins me the dishes.

The rice was supreme! The gravy was delicious and very tasty!


And finally we went to “tortellini cup”. At the time it was the best rated Italian restaurant in London in tripadvisor website. I’ve checked and now is the º14 of all restaurants in London. It’s not in the city center. Actually it’s in the third area of the London underground, but very close to the end of the second area. We had a card to travel without limits for a week in the areas 1&2, so we took the underground to the limit of the area 2 and then we went walking to the place. It was a long walk, but it was a nice walk for me, because I could see a typical Londoner neighbourhood, with the individual houses with front yards and it was very nice. When we arrived we were a little bit disappointed because we thought that it was a restaurant, and it was a take away in the middle of a mall. Anyway you can eat in the bar and that’s what we did.

The guys that own the place are a couple of real Italians and they were very kind and nice with us, we even talked a bit, and they tried to talk in Spanish. If you choose to take away your food, they put it in a cup, it was very funny, and I suppose that that’s why it’s called tortellini cup. It was very cheap compared with the average prices of uk restaurants, and I’ve tried far better pasta where I live and in other places (I think it’s a matter of the quality of the ingredients as I said at the beginning of this post), but for the money that we spent, it probably was the best food for the money that we got in London.



I hope you find it interesting. If you tried some of these places I would like to know what do you think about them. If not and you visit London I recommend you to try some of them!

[BorisPasha]

Very interesting post Hamsterita, I enjoyed reading it and looking at the food pics (well some of them anyway and you've made me hungry lol). I'm not offended at all about your opinions on British food I think it can be hard to find good places, or food that appeals to you. I always look at trip adviser and most of the restaurants with the best reviews are not my type of thing. I don't like things that are too fancy (like you and Lizzy said on your previous post, portions are too small and you leave hungry lol).

I'm a big fan of buffet breakfasts. I can always eat loads at breakfast when I'm away from home

I laughed at the little mini butcher knife you got with your steak. Before I read I wondered what you were holding in your hand xD

Your face is very different from how I imagined it to look and I didn't think bows in your hair would be your thing lol. :P

[Hamsterita]

It's my bf's hand, my photo was too silly to be posted, no paint and drawn bows could help it

Nahhh bows aren't my thing really, but I wanted to look feminine lol

If it makes you feel better now I'm hungry too

I wanted to try shepperd's pie but we couldn't find a restaurant where they offered it, and people told us that it was more of a scottish thing, I don't know if that was true.

[Thin Lizzy]

Hamsterita, reading and seeing the pics of the food almost had me drooling onto my tablet lol! I'm so hungry.
I like that you give your honest opinion, that breakfast buffet looked so tasty.