There are about 45 students in the first-year class at Lispa. Twenty-one of us have our classes in Hackney, in East London, and the rest have theirs on the West Side, on Latimer Road. All of us in the Initiation Course, plus the second-years (a.k.a. the Advanced Course), meet together on Monday afternoons to watch short pieces that we first-years have put together, fulfilling vague assignments like "A place, an event" or "The invisible man or woman." Come January, we'll all have classes in one location--Three Mills Studios in East London, which is closer to where I live, in Plaistow. At the initial getting-to-know-you meeting of first-years, we told where we're from. Our full class includes people from (as I recall) Portugal, India, Norway, Germany, Sweden, Israel, Puerto Rico, Japan, Zambia, Greece, Italy, Croatia, Ireland, Mexico, Brazil, Spain, France, Bermuda, Australia, England, and the US. Whew! The London International School of Performing Arts, indeed.
I share a house with three other students, one from England, one from India, one from the States. They're all second-years, so their classes start when mine end in mid-afternoon. I get a lot of time to myself at home, which is fine. I had my worries about where we live, though. The first night I was to sleep here, I walked the last half-mile from the nearest Tube stop. I could have waited for a bus, but it seemed just as quick to walk. On the final leg, I heard a car accelerate from behind me and felt something splat right between my shoulder blades. Something wet sprayed on the back of my neck and in my hair. When I got home I found that I'd been egged. Welcome to Plaistow.
I don't walk from the Tube stop late at night anymore.
On my second weekend here, Richard--a classmate who's a Cockney East Ender himself--took one of his housemates and me out for a traditional meal of "pie and mash with green liquor." (Steak-and-kidney pie, mashed potatoes, and a non-alcoholic green gravy that looked like a weak soup flavored with some pulverized herb.) It was really pretty good. And then he ordered three bowls of jellied eels. He must really like them, I thought. But no, he was ordering one bowl for each of us. And he told us he'd never had them himself.
Mmmm, jellied eels... can you even imagine it?
You may be afraid to, but I'll bet you can.
But can you imagine eating them? Me neither. Still I figured, why not? I'd had haggis in Scotland. Why not jellied eels in the East End? (Though I'd never have ordered them myself!)
I'm not quite sure how you cook eel, but they came sliced into rounds about 3/4 of an inch thick. The meat is a bit flaky and not too bad. I expected it to be all slimy, but thank God it wasn't. The jelly is some kind of translucent light green Jell-O kind of substance. Best not to ask what it's made of, I figured. The whole thing was pretty mild in taste, only vaguely fishy.
We were in a small white-tiled diner in East Ham. Narrow marble-topped tables and benches on the side. Robin's, it was called. Two women who'd probably presided for decades served from behind the counter. Three other women at the table behind me told us as they left that we should put a lot of vinegar and pepper on the eels (though that just made them taste pungent). And the women behind the counter scolded Richard for not ordering them hot, as that's apparently the proper way to eat eel.
But hot jelly? Sorry. Not willing to go there. Though I did tell Richard I'll buy him a bowl of hot jellied eels sometime to pay him back.
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