Deb's Lunch … and dinner and breakfast too

Saturday was sports day. We got up and fortified ourselves with a full English breakfast at the Camden Bar & Kitchen, probably the most neighborhood-ish, least tourist-y place we’ve been at. It was perfect, a nice walk and everything, except I lost an earring.

Then we tubed over to Emirates Stadium, the Arsenal stop on the Picadilly line, natch – so our tickets told us – other ticket holders are closer to Holloway Rd. John had been a bit worried about me going to an Arsenal game, but Emirates Stadium is quite new and nice – nicer than Soldier Field, even after the upgrades it’s had in the last 10 years or so. It all seemed quite family friendly, no hooligans in evidence. Going in was like going to  Grateful Dead show – food booths and souvenir vending in the parking lot – or that’s what a Dead show woulda had; this was food booths and souvenir vending in the closed neighborhood streets on the way in.

It was nothing-nothing forever, and then the Arse finally won with a goal in the last 2 minutes of 5 minutes overtime. There was one Arsenal player, #7 Tomas Rosicky, that the Woverhampton Wolves (I guess they’re the “wanderers” – everyone calls then the wolves) kept knocking down. The refs never stopped the play; the guy behind me was yelling “Ref, he’s in agony”. #7 got a few close shots on the goal, but never quite got it in. I think the winning goal was another guy, Bacary Sagna, with beaded dreads. Everyone hugged, and we passed our borrowed tickets to the guy on the left, to return them to their rightful owner. I saw several similar transactions going on at the same time. When the gunners got the goal, the people who left early didn’t seem to have made such a good choice anymore. We walked 10 minutes up to the less-crowded tube stop at Finsbury, past food and souvenir booths, guided by mounted police.

We coaxed our wonky Internet to find us a movie to go to, and ended up at Invitcus. I ran over to Waitrose right before we went to the movie, to lay in cookies and ice cream for an after-cinema snack, so we wouldn’t end up like the night before, on our way home from St. Martin’s, poking our head into restaurants and pubs that were closing their kitchens at 10:30 p.m. Waitrose was pretty nuts with people shopping for their Easter roast – and I think they were about to close up for the holiday, too.

The tickets we got were someone’s season tickets – probably they couldn’t use them over the 4-day Easter/Bank Holiday. So they came in permanent red leather wallets with the person’s name – I was Mr. Martin Potter – maps that told which tube exit to take, which color entrance to go in, seats numbers, and fitted out with RFID that unlocked the turnstiles so we could go in. Once in, there was food and drink and offtrack betting. The food at first glance seemed better than the US, but it was really pretty much the same, nachos, pizza, hot dogs. And big screens where people were watching Chelsea vs. Manchester United. Chelsea won, and when the winning goal went in, all the people around us said something about 32 million – I didn’t know if that’s what the kicker that put it in, or the goalie who let it, was getting, but Ethan said the goalie. We’d talked about soccer with our waitress at breakfast and she said in the UK it’s like the US, that sports are all about money and who gets paid the most. The Manchester team is 2nd highest paid in the world after the Yankees – so that’d figure it was the goalie.