Quiche and My Weekend

I ate quiche for lunch today. I think it is about the 6th time I have eaten quiche since arriving in Cambridge. It is a vegetarian dining hall staple, and I think if I eat it again that I will turn into quiche. The dining hall also serves leeks regularly, chopped up and cooked. They are actually pretty good. During the first week I was here I had another interesting culinary encounter. I bought a prepackaged sandwich at the buttery in Churchill; I was hungry and it was the last one left and the label said that it had cheese and pickle.

I bit into the sandwich, only to discover that "pickle" means something different over here. It's this brown gunk that most definitely has been pickled, but does not have cucumber. Apparently it's some sort of vegetable scraps. Also, the tendency over here for food not to have any artificial coloring added would seem like a good thing, but it seems to result in a lot of food in the dining hall that looks sort of brown or gray. Maybe that's just the Churchill dining hall, but in any case, it's not horribly appetizing.

Tonight I made myself a peanut butter and banana sandwich for dinner, and it was one of the more satisfying things I've eaten in a few days.

Anyway, my weekend was pretty good, despite the fact that I have class at 9 and 10 in the morning every Saturday. Friday evening I biked to Tesco, which is kind of like Wal-Mart... it's big and gloriously, gloriously cheap. Saturday afternoon I went with a friend to see the Fitzwilliam, a museum in town, for an hour or so. I only saw the lower level, but it has a really nice collection particularly the Egyptian artifacts, which included several mummies:

and would a museum in Britain really be complete without suits of armor?
Then on Sunday I played some squash first thing in the morning and then later I got to go rowing with some other people at Churchill who were new to it. It was a lot of fun. The Churchill boat house is a 10-15 minute bicycle ride from the college (I'm getting more used to cycling here; I still haven't been hit by a double-decker bus). Then Sunday night I went to one of the clubs in town for a party for graduate students from across Cambridge. The drinking culture here is such that people have no problem attending an event involving lots of drinking and being up really late on a Sunday night.