God Save the King!

Rach and I kicked off our European summer with a flight to London and some incredibly loose plans to bounce around the UK. The first two weeks turned into quite the hodge podge as we traveled from London to Bath to Cardiff, Wales then to Liverpool. I recently talked to a good friend of mine who was born and raised in London, and he laughed at our journey, indicating he had never been to any of these places, and he would have given us a list of very different recommendations had he known we were coming! We really let the wind blow us for these first weeks and frankly loved our experiences that took us to the road less traveled - our effective credo for this trip.

As we journeyed across the Atlantic from New York, where we stayed in Brooklyn for a few nights, I fancied myself more of a writer than I did at the outset of our Asia journey – apparently a handful of blog posts and some text messaged compliments from my immediate family members will do that to someone – and naturally, I started thinking about and comparing myself to all the great English writers that I’ve read in my literary upbringing. I thought of Shakespeare as we visited the Globe Theater, Chaucer and his “Wife of Bath’s Tale” as we traveled into the English countryside, of Jane Austen and Mary Shelley who I spent time enjoying recently, and then my mind landed on a lesser known British writer, Nick Hornby, who I enjoyed during my adolescence. He’d undoubtedly be thrilled to put anywhere near this list of esteemed authors, but he wrote one that shaped many of my angsty teenage years called “High Fidelity.” The book’s about a British record shop owner whose recent break-up drives him into an existential crisis defined primarily by apathy, where he and his fellow employees make “top 5” lists about anything and everything they can conceive. In homage to Nick Hornby, I’ll borrow from his novel and use my own top 5 lists to guide this piece.

Top 5 Content from Nick Hornby:

1. Fever Pitch

2. High Fidelity

3. Dickens and Prince

4. About a Boy

5. Slam

I only learned Nick Hornby wrote "Fever Pitch" as I started writing this blog post, but it’s a masterpiece of a rom-com featuring a man’s love affair with Fenway Park and the Boston Red Sox. It’s funny to me that a Brit chose to write about the romanticism of baseball when the entire UK is so clearly in a deeply loving relationship with the game of football (aka soccer). Much of our reason for making London the first stop in our journey was to catch a few games at the tail end of the English Premier League season, and we got to see it first hand. It’s sports passion unlike I’ve ever seen it before, and it’s beautiful. Grown men spend countless hours composing and promoting new songs featuring their favorite players, and life stops for a few hours every Friday - Sunday of the season when their team graces the pitch. During our first weekend in London there were two big games in town. The first was at Tottenham in North London against a lowly Crystal Palace team and the second was at West Ham against a heavy favorite, Manchester United.

We were ecstatic to go to Tottenham, whereas we were initially bummed that the only other game in the city was at West Ham - I’ll get into reasons for both. First, the exciting things about Tottenham: they’ve built a new stadium to replace the iconic White Hart Lane, which was erected back in 1899! I’ve had amazing experiences visiting original, iconic ballparks in the US (partly due to my own love affair with Fenway Park), but those trips were built on decades of adoration and reverence from watching baseball games or playing video games with my friends. Of course the existence of a 100+ year old stadium is cool and all, but to make my point, I’ve learned that if I’ve got no connection to the venue and I’m looking to have a great time, it’s pretty tough to beat a brand new, billion dollar property with 100 foot jumbotrons, comfortable seats and infinite access to beer and food. The New Tottenham Stadium is just that. It’s massive and beautiful and clearly the focal point in the entire city. The one downside is it was relatively far from where we were staying in South Kensington which made our commute to the game challenging, especially given it was Coronation Day for King Charles III.

Top 5 Kings:

1. King Louis XIV, the Sun King

2. Elvis Presley, The King

3. Michael Jackson, King of Pop

4. Leonidas I

5. King Richard III

A theme for us on this trip, as you’ll soon see, is lucking into attending ridiculous spectacles and events. When we booked this trip, we had zero idea that we’d be in London on the same day as the coronation: it was the first that’s taken place since Elizabeth II’s over 70 years ago, and it was a momentous spectacle beyond what I could have fathomed that lasted four days including a viewing party, royal procession, city-wide gathering, street parties and even allowing pubs to stay open later all weekend long! Perhaps not a surprise, but I didn’t have much knowledge about the royal family until I got the rundown from Rachael on the day before the event. Key details I learned were: a) King Charles III is the late Queen’s son; 2) a lot of people were hoping he’d abdicate the throne in favor of his son, Prince William, who he had with Princess Diana (gasp!); 3) There was a lot of conspiracy around her death that was tied up in King Charles III; and lastly 4) an insane number of people are in love with the Royal Family.

The football match was on the Saturday of the coronation, where the King was crowned and there was an enormous procession from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey and back. We wanted to catch a glimpse of the pomp and circumstance associated with the coronation, but were heavily prioritizing getting to Tottenham so we could enjoy some beers before the game and get fully into football mode, and the best way we figured to do this was to walk to Hyde Park, where they were hosting an enormous viewing party featuring two 100 foot screens projecting live footage and audio from within Westminster Abbey to easily 100,000 people (if not more) in the pouring rain. There were families, grandparents, college-age kids. It didn’t matter, everyone was out for this, and they were glued to the ceremony, we could hear it from 15 blocks away, and to my absolute pleasure, the sound was just like I hoped it’d be. There was a cacophony of string music ringing through the streets of London, and you could feel the royal energy from every single Union Jack flag waving in the very wet breeze.

We left our hotel about three hours before the start of the match, and on a normal day we’d learned it should take us 45 minutes to get from South Kensington to the stadium, but we figured with a stop at the park to see the ceremony, and the added traffic, it’d be about 50% longer, which should have left us about 90 minutes for pre-game festivities. I can’t believe how much I underestimated the support and security that’d be out for the royals. It took over an hour to walk a kilometer from the park to the tube station, as we wedged ourselves into the masses and weaved through different security check and choke points, but the energy was so good, even despite the rain, that it all felt like a glorious experience and the icing on the cake was when we heard a man say, to no one in particular: “We’re good on time, football’s not off for another three hours.”

Draw number two for Tottenham: star forward, Son Heung-Min. He was a standout in the last World Cup with Korea so we were excited to watch him play, but even more so, we were excited to see the crowd he would draw. When Korean born, Hyun-Jin Ryu pitched for the Dodgers from 2013-2019 there were tons of Korean tourists who attended and were in awe at every game, so we figured a soccer player of this status had to draw huge crowds with amazing energy. This did not disappoint. In our row, there were 4 Korean tourists who we learned traveled from Seoul to watch Son, and there must have been 20 more folks in our section who were apparent from the Korean flags they were waving or from their exuberance anytime Son touched the ball. He had multiple shots on goal in the game, and when one of those shots went off the crossbar I thought the lady sitting in front of us was going to faint; she Facetimed at least 5 people at half-time and recounted the moment. It was amazing. Rach and I even bought into the action by purchasing a Tottenham scarf adorned with a Korean flag at the official merch store in the stadium, in his honor.

Lastly, for reason number three, our closest friends are big Arsenal fans and we knew it’d piss them off royally to come back to the states decked out in Tottenham gear. Sorry guys!

I also mentioned some animosity toward going to a West Ham United match. Rach and I are huge Ted Lasso fans and our negative feelings toward the club were due to their rise as the primary antagonists in the show. So on the way to the stadium, we had entirely planned on buying some Man United gear and rooting in favor of the away team, but the second we got off the train and to see fans pouring into pubs wearing maroon and blue shirts, scarfs and hats, singing their anthem “Forever Blowing Bubbles” we knew we were sold. How could we root against such amazing energy? We didn’t want to be the object of 60,000 people’s frustration and furthermore, we realized that all our negativity was due to an entirely fictional account of the team and its fictional head coach and owner…

Even better, the decision paid off a million times over when they went on to pull off an epic 1-0 upset that kept them from getting relegated to the lower league the following year. The stadium rang out with chants of “we’re not going down” late into the night as people, including us, refused to leave the stadium and the grounds. They kept the beer vendors in the building flowing, and even had a DJ blasting music, which felt like a hilarious concept – celebrating because your team isn’t getting relegated, in other words, for being bad but not the worst! And speaking of, we also saw Everton play in Liverpool against the top ranked Manchester City, and they unfortunately took a bad loss that’s threatening to drop them down. Here’s hoping they don’t fall, because naturally we’re Everton fans too!

If football’s the religion of the UK, then its parishes are definitely pubs. There’s a pub on every other corner in the entire city of London, and I wanted to be in every single one. We must have visited 30 different pubs on our 11 day journey across the country, and while each was unique with its own splendor, the things that unified them were what made them so special. There are always people inside, there are always beers on draft, most of the time in a cask variety and a full draft system like you’d see in the US, they’re always homey and welcoming with at least one bartender who offers you any seat you’d like and makes sure your proper pint glass is never empty.

Two quick tangents to explain lesser known concepts above. 1) Cask Beer - if you’ve ever heard that Brits like to drink warm beer, this is it. Cask beers are brewed from traditional ingredients, are matured from secondary fermentation inside the container from which they are dispensed to the drinker and have no added carbonation. 2) Proper Pint - for some glorious reason, the pints in the UK are not 16 ounces, they are larger by some unstandardized amount, so you get more beer in every glass. I’ll admit, after about 100 cask ales, I still prefer my beer bubbly and cold, but I’m sure as hell going to miss the proper pints.

Top 5 Pubs we visited:

1. Queen's Vault (Cardiff)

2. The Raven (Bath)

3. No. 8 Tottenham (London)

4. The Coal Hole (London)

5. The Abbey (Liverpool)

Most pub experiences we had were awesome, but by the book. Meaning we walked in, found a seat, had a beer and a snack of some sort, then moved on. In fact, they often acted as trampolines for substantial events, both catapulting us toward craziness or catching us on the way back down, and tucking us into bed properly.

The story of my number one took place in Wales, where I’ll credit a pub for helping us make our morning train out of the country. We started the evening with a few cocktails at a cool bar called The Flight Club, a three story, bougie venue with electronic, steel tip dart boards. I’d never seen this technology before and was enamored by their bowling alley-esque display systems and constantly changing party games that made each round of darts unique while leveling the playing field between regular dart throwers and those without peak hand-eye coordination. From there, we planned on heading back to the hotel and calling it a night to avoid a hungover travel day, but as it goes, on our walk home we passed by an enormous bar called Proud Mary’s (a Tina Turner themed bar), pumping out disco tunes with people flooding inside.

Before we walked in we could tell the clientele was absurd: from 17 year olds dressed to the nines in heels and prom dresses, to 40 year old Welsh men right off the golf course, and a lot of interesting characters in between, but despite this observation, we couldn’t fight the tractor beam of curiosity that had latched onto us. Once inside they cemented our fate by playing the song “Proud Mary,” which then triggered the entire wait staff to get onto the bar and into a choreographed dance. The wait staff absolutely hated every second of it, and they weren’t hiding it. There was a look of pure horror and humiliation on all their faces as they drudged through each step, but the crowd, us very much included, loved it and urged them along with a chorus of cheers and applause. Even better, we noticed this happened at exactly 10pm, and we had it hunch that it had to happen again. So naturally, we vowed to stay until they did. My bet was every thirty minutes, Rachael guessed every hour. Wishful thinking. They did eventually run it back, but it wasn’t for 2 hours, and by then, the night got weird for each of us. The tenor of the crowd starting turning in the direction of drunk. My encounter manifested in the form of a man crush, where a 20 something year old bro came up to me and called me a “proper thick cunt” as he grasped my left arm and patted me repeatedly on the back, telling me “there aren’t many built like us in this country.” One of the bigger compliments I’ve received, whereas Rachael’s situation was more of a classic dance floor advance from a stranger. After the final rendition of Proud Mary, it’s 12:05 am, we’ve had six more drinks than we planned and we’re both finally becoming aware that our morning train is beckoning, so we decide to get out of there.

You can imagine the state we were in, but to get explicit, we were high on Tina Turner jams, full on proper pints of Madri, and there was low likelihood of a good night’s sleep. Enter, the Queen’s Vault pub. The pub is quite large, and it was off the beaten path a bit so it maintained a homey, quiet energy and is presided over by about 20 Welsh men and women who are on the downswing of their night as well. The second we walked in, we were recognized as Americans, and a few people came up to us and asked where we were from, and how we ended up in Cardiff. The friendliest of the group were a man named Rupert and his good friend from south London named Chelsea, who implored us to please call her “Beans.” The four of us lock into a deep conversation over a pretty sloppy game of doubles pool, a pint each of still cider, and an order of sobering British chips (french fries). They were so welcoming and loving, they even invited us back to their flat to keep drinking and confirmed they had “plenty of cigarettes” for all of us. We ultimately declined, but not before they ensured we had a pint of water each as the bartender proclaimed it was closing time and we had to get out.

Every time we entered a pub in the UK, this was the reception we received. It was a beautiful thing, so much good energy, so much warm beer, and tons of really heavy food to plump you up. Even in what were described to us as rough pubs, outside some of the football matches, or in seedier parts of town that we found ourselves in, the pubs were always a place to find a respite. God save the King, so the King may continue to commend the pubs!