You Call This Spaghetti?!?!

Well, it’s been a little while since my blog entries have focused solely on the food we’ve been eating (at the beginning they did more often), but today is a day where all I have to write about is the food really – except this isn’t about how good the food was, it’s about how unbelievably bad it was!  I’m starting to see why the UK has a rep for bad food…

This afternoon we caught a train to the city of Bath Spa, famous for its hot springs and Roman baths built 2000 years ago.  We had originally planned to stop at Stonehenge on the way, but failed to wake up to the 7:30 am alarm I had set.  When we finally got going 3 hours later, we considered making a quick stop at Stonehenge still, but decided against it since we’d have to run from the bus stop to Stonehenge carrying our backpacks (they don’t have luggage storage at the train station).  I’m a bit sad to have missed such a great historical sight, but almost everyone we know who has seen it has said that it wasn’t that impressive and looks just like the pictures you see on the web.  I guess it’s something on the to-do list for when we come back to the UK, whenever that may be!

When we arrived in Bath at 2:30, I wasn’t sure if we would be able to check into our B&B yet (I had told her to expect us at 4), so we stopped for lunch at a pub called The Rat & Parrot in the city center.  Like the last pub we ate at with Calvin, the food was ridiculously cheap – I had a caeser salad with chicken breast and a pint of Strongbow and Paul got a steak and ale pie with a coke and our bill came to ₤13 – but this time, it wasn’t good at all.  The dressing for the caeser salad tasted like really bad ranch dressing and Paul’s pie was only half edible – the inside meat stuffing was ok, but the crust was worse than any pie crust I’ve ever tried to make, and I’ve made some crappy pies!

To add to the bad food experiences for the day, in the evening we tried a pizza/pasta takeout place near our B&B (one of only two choices in the area without going 2km back to city center), and my spaghetti bolognese was honestly the worst I’ve ever had.  It was watery, mushy, and tasted like it had been reheated about 10 different times.  You could take a plain can of Hunt’s tomato sauce and dump it on plain spaghetti noodles and it would taste a thousand times better than the crap I got tonight!  And these guys claim to be Italian, to which I say wtf?!?!

Paul’s fish and chips and lasagna was slightly more edible, but only to the point where we ate enough to not be starving anymore and then tossed the rest.  Sadly our other dining option had closed by the time we were done so we went to bed hungry.  The first thing I’m doing when I go back to city center tomorrow is picking up a cup noodle from the tiny Asian supermarket I noticed on our way to the B&B so that I have something to eat if we run into this problem again!