I'll Bet You €1 the Jags Win
October 1-3, 2016
We are fans of the Seattle Seahawks American Football team. Big fans. The first thing that went up on our walls when we moved to Berlin was a 12th Man flag given to us by our Hawks-loving friends. That being said, for no real good reason, we are also fans of the Jacksonville Jaguars, and have been for years. To put it simply, they are just the worst sports franchise in the world, and we love them for it. They have the stupidest uniforms. They always lose in the stupidest ways. If there's a mistake to be made, chances are the Jags are going to make it. They're definitely going to Jag it. It's like a car crash happening in slow motion that you can't look away from, and it happens every Sunday like clockwork. At the beginning of each game, Mazz asks Kirb if he wants to bet €1 that the Jags are going to win, and Kirb always takes the bet, because by the end of the season he's always going to have come out a few Euros ahead.
So of all of the legitimate reasons for travelers to go to London, ours was bizarrely to see the Jacksonville Jaguars play football in Wembley Stadium in front of a bunch of Brits. The timing was perfect to tack it on to our trip to Portugal, so we flew to London for the weekend straight from Lisbon. The timing was doubly perfect considering the exchange rate for the Pound was more favorable for other currencies than it had been in our adult lifetimes since the UK Brexited itself. Our friend Iain, who had worked with Mazz in Seattle, was now back living in London, and graciously agreed to let us stay at his house for the weekend. He had also been indoctrinated into liking the Seahawks while he was living in Seattle, so he was also interested in learning what a London NFL game entailed.
Because our whole trip to London was based around this silly sports game, and because it was sort of randomly tacked on to a 2 week vacation to Portugal, neither of us actually really thought about or planned what we were going to do in London all weekend. We didn't even realize our lack of planning until we were on the hour-long train from Stansted airport into the city. Stansted is the crappy, inconveniently out-of-the-way airport where they stick all the low-budget flights, which are all we fly within Europe so we can spend our money on important things like Jaguars tickets. We asked Facebook for recommendations for the weekend, and our friends were helpful and insightful. Before long we had a long list of places to see and things we should eat. Iain met us at Elephant & Castle and we took a bus to his house in East Dulwich. It was a long travel day, so we just hung out in his neighborhood that night, eating pizza and having a couple of pints at a local Irish pub that was covered in British flags.
Saturday morning was mostly spent wandering through various food markets. For breakfast, we found a guy who had roasted an entire pig, and was selling pulled pork sandwiches with apple jam and fried cracklins. From there we made our way to Borough Market, which was full of delicious-looking cheeses and pastries, though none of us were hungry enough at that point to actually buy anything.
Mazz is occasionally well cultured, so she was particularly interested in going to the Tate Modern Museum. The exhibitions there were excellent, but exhausting. There was so much to see that we only made it through about half before our eyes were worn out and we decided it was time to move on.
We left the museum and decided to walk along the Thames to catch some of the signature London sights, though none of us were particularly interested in any real sightseeing. We walked along the water until we made it to Westminster Bridge so we could have a look at Large Ben, and from there we continued on to Lindsay Buckingham's palace. There was a large group of people there standing at the fence, looking at the men in the Dr. Seuss hats, and we stood there with them for a minute before realizing that we didn't actually care about any of that. Royalty is a stupid and outdated concept. There were some people there in Jaguars gear standing with a guy who looked particularly sporty, so Kirb started talking to him. He turned out to be the Jags' long snapper, Carson Tinker, and Kirb asked him if he had any tickets for the game the next day. He did not. It didn't hurt to try though; the game was already sold out by the time we realized we wanted to go. Outside of finding random Jaguars on the streets of London and asking for tickets, our only other option was to get them from scalpers outside of the venue.
There were supposed to be some festivities for the game set up in a shopping district, so we made our way over to Regent Street and were amazed with what we found. The entire street was shut down for the weekend with giant inflatable helmets, TV stages, throwing and kicking games, and merch stations. The NFL was clearly making a concerted effort to get the people of London into their sport. We got some Jaguars temporary tattoos and wandered through the massive bizzarro American football scene that had materialized on one of London's poshest shopping streets.
We'd been on our feet all day, so it was time for a pint. We were pleasantly surprised by how excellent the beers at Brewdog Brewery were. Though expensive, their microbrews were very flavorful, and their chicken wings were also top notch. The Punk IPA and Jet Black Heart nitro stout stood out as favorites.
The real food draw for the weekend though was Indian food. Other than the football game, it was what we were most looking forward too. If celebrity TV chefs could be believed, London has the best Indian food you can find outside of India thanks to its oppressive colonialist history. Hugo, another one of Mazz's scientist friends, also lives in London, and his wife is Pakistani and very particular about where she will eat. Specifically, there are only two Indian restaurants in all of London that meet her quality standards. We met Hugo at a bar in Shoreditch and he picked one of the two for us to go called Tayyabs. He called in to try and get a table but their reservations for the evening were booked, but they told us that if we showed up when they opened for dinner and waited in line we could probably get a table without too much trouble.
One thing Hugo particularly liked about Tayyabs was that it's BYOB. Apparently it's not worth the hassle for some Indian places to pay for a liquor license since so much of their clientele doesn't drink, so they allow those who do to bring in whatever they want. We stopped by a market on the way and bought a bevy of beers, wines, and ciders. We bought extra assuming we were going to be waiting a long time for a table, but ended up being seated before we were even halfway through our first beer.
We let Hugo take charge of ordering, since he had been here before and knew what was up. Our expectations at this point were pretty high, but honestly, neither of us had eaten what could be considered high-level Indian food before, so we didn't have a specific bar to gauge it against. It became perfectly clear though once we started eating just how uninitiated we were in the matter. It was unbelievable how flavorful the food was, and it blew us away. We all shared chicken tikka, lamb chops served on the bone, fried veggie pakora, karahi chicken, saag paneer, tarka daal, and garlic and peshwari naan. The standout though was simply called "dry meat," an intensely-flavored beef dish that was like someone had figured out how to make the best beef jerky you'd ever eaten into a main course that split apart with a fork.
By the time we finished eating, the restaurant - which was huge - was completely packed, and the line of people waiting for tables was at least 50 deep. Somehow, this incredible feast only worked out to about 20 pounds each. We found a bar in Shoreditch for some after-dinner drinks, but we were way too full to fit in more than a pint or two. It had been a busy day, and none of us felt the need to push ourselves harder or later than we were comfortable.
Iain rustled up some groceries to make breakfast sandwiches the next morning, so we fed ourselves before heading off to the game. Iain's house in East Dulwich was pretty much on the exact opposite side of London as Wembley stadium, and it turns out that London is a pretty big city (the biggest in Europe, even), so we had quite a ride in front of us to get to the game. And since we still had to find ourselves tickets as well, we started our NFL journey right after breakfast.
It didn't take long after we got to Wembley to find some scalpers. Though the game was sold out, we had learned from an informative Reddit thread that it really wasn't hard to score tickets to London NFL games from scalpers. Strangely, the scalper game here was completely controlled by white British guys in their 50s and 60s. In every other city where we've bought second-hand tickets, young Africans have run the scalper game. The difficult part turned out being that we wanted 3 tickets together, an odd number and harder-to-fill request than single tickets. Eventually we found a ticketman whose jib we liked the cut of, and bartered with him not nearly enough down to around 50 bucks a ticket. This was lower than the listed price, but we knew we could have pushed harder, and he was grateful for us not being dicks about it.
With tickets in hand, we had some time to kill, and there was a small market off the drag leading up to the stadium. We bought some ciders almost entirely because they were called "Scrumpy Jack" and drank them outside while we watched the crowds passing by. The NFL is not-so-secretly trying to move the Jaguars to London, so they make them play there every year, and now they have become the de facto "home team." Because of this, you see more Jaguars jerseys than any other team, but that's still maybe only 10-15% of the fans. The rest of the people were wearing random jerseys of every other team in the league. It became a fun game to see which teams were least represented, and then "Where's Waldo" through the crowds until you spotted one of those jerseys. After 30-some minutes and two Scumpy Jacks we decided the team Londoners care the least about is the Tennessee Titans.
We made our way to our seats in the 300-section with every intention of moving down to empty, more expensive seats as soon as we could. They had made this impossible in Wembley however, with no way to go back downstairs without showing guards your tickets, so we stayed put in our assigned, scalped seats, though there were huge empty sections in the 100-level. We ended up sitting next to an older guy in a Niners jersey who was fantastically knowledgeable about the game, and clearly wanted to demonstrate it. It turns out he was a referee for an amateur American Football club in London, and had worked one of the NFL games as a ref a few years back. He was very nice but we told him we were Seahawks fans and that we hate the Niners and that we could never be friends.
Seahawks games at Century Link field are characterized by one thing: Noise. Seahawks fans are the loudest fans in the league, and it works as an incredibly effective home field advantage. The volume at the Clink is deafening – it's equal to the noise of a plane taking off. This being the norm for us when we go to a live game, it was quite a surprise then that Wembley was basically silent the entire time. Though the Jags are the "home team," it's not like anyone in the stadium is screaming for them. Everyone is wearing a different team's jersey, and no one really cares who wins. So no one screams. People clap politely. It's the lowest-stakes game any team could possibly play, totally neutral and non-committal, like being a Jets fan.
In classic Jags form, they were up by 17 points over the Colts in the 4th quarter and started squandering it away like they were desperate to lose. But then, improbably, Bortles threw a long bomb touchdown to seal the victory with 5 minutes left and they actually won the game. Kirb gave Mazz €1 that day, but that was a rarity. It was one of only €3 she would collect the entire season. The Jags are a terrible football team. Go Jags.
Getting out of the stadium and back onto the subway was a nightmare. There were thousands of people bottlenecked on the street, and it seemed like it would take hours for all of them to get on trains at the Wembley Park Station, so we took off on foot to another station a little farther away. There were still massive amounts of people trying to get home there as well, but it was less ridiculous than the station in front of the stadium. By the time we got back over near Iain's side of town it was past dinnertime. Getting to and from the game and watching it had taken literally the entire day.
Wanting to close out our London excursion in a fittingly British fashion, our final meal was savory meat pies and pints of bitter. Bitter is flat, sour beer and neither of us understood what British people like about it so much. We called it an early night, as a cab was coming at 4am to take us to the train station, where we'd have to make the hour-long train ride back out to Stansted airport to catch our 7am flight. We spent much of our trip to London being brazenly American, but thanks to the growing global hegemony of the International Football League, we fit right in.
Here's some tips for your next trip to London to make sure you fit in as well: Say, "It's just like Abbey Road," any time you cross the street. British people love that joke and always think it's funny. No matter where you are in the city, especially if you're asking for directions, only refer to it as, "Old London Town." They'll know what you mean. If you see someone selling Guy Fawkes masks, insist that it's Batman, and only agree to purchase one if he says it's Batman too. And finally, loudly proclaim, "Wots all this, then?" whenever you enter any room. Follow these simple tips and you too can seamlessly integrate yourself into British culture.