Gastronomic Firsts: The English Breakfast and London Pride

(Note: Due to lack of free internets in London, this post has been published later. Post date and time are reflective of the approximate time at which this was written.)

The English Breakfast:
Once we settled into our hotel rooms, John, Lee, and I set off to explore the area around our hotel. Our hotel is situated adjacent to Hyde Park, which is London's equivalent of NYC's Central Park. We stopped by a pizza buffet (called The Pizza Factory) and had our first authentic English breakfast. The English breakfast consists of Cumberland sausage, baked beans, bacon, potatoes (usually in hash brown form or wedge form), scrambled eggs, fried eggs, grilled mushrooms, and grilled tomatoes. I'm quite a fan of Cumberland sausage. While I don't know what's in it, I do think that it is not entirely made out of meat. The bacon actually looks more like ham in terms of thickness and color, but shapewise it resembles American bacon. Very filling breakfast, although very similar to the American fatty breakfast. What I do like about the English breakfast is tomatoes and the mushrooms; don't see a lot of veggie (and fungus) action going on in American breakfast unless it's an omelette (wait, are omelettes French?).

London Pride:
After exploring SoHo, John and I decided to grab a pint before heading off to bed. We went to a pub near the hotel, called The Black Lion. We stepped inside and asked the bartender to give us the most London beer he had. He poured each of us a pint of London Pride. I'm not a fan of beer, but since I'm in England and I like horribly cliche gimmicks like celebrating the first night in London by getting a pint, I drank the whole pint. And was not the least bit affected (if anything, the Tropical Sunshine margarita at Chili's affected me more). However, WHAT A NASTY TASTE! Even John, more of a beer connoisseur than I, agreed that it tasted "like ass" (a claim which Felipe challenged him on later, eventually leading John to admit he doesn't know what ass tastes like). The after taste was so bad, and we just each had a pint, that we developed beer munchies. The pub did not serve food after 10pm (!) so we ended up walking down Queensway to get something. A 10 piece bargain bucket at KFC would've hit the spot, but they were out of chicken! So we eventually settled on getting lame ass shit off the value menu at Burger King, which didn't hit the spot at all, but at least got rid of the after taste.

Moral of the story: don't order London Pride

P.S. I didn't get carded at the pub. :)