Willandkatespotting...

Please feel free to cheat…scroll down to the Will and Kate video, then begin to read!

Every day, I’m learning a bit more about British culture, and in fact can now do a few things that only the British can do. Yesterday, for example, David invited the Colgate students over to our house to continue their classroom discussion from the day before. Two of the students are keeping a blog of their own on the Colgate Maroon-News website, and I read it regularly. Earlier in the week, they had posted an entry about not being able to find a tea house that served “cream tea” in St. Andrews. So, despite being American, never having had a cream tea, or never having gone to a tea house, I decided to serve a “cream tea” to the students. The first step was to go right to Wikipedia and figure out what a cream tea was. After learning that it was not tea with cream in it, but a small meal complete with dainty sandwiches cut with special cookie cutters, I started to question the wisdom of my decision.

David agreed to help, though, and we pressed on. We assembled some scones and Scottish strawberry conserves from Morrison’s and set about making some sandwiches on thin white bread. I filled half of them with egg salad, and the other half I spread with butter and paper thin slices of cucumber (after thankfully noticing that cucumbers are individually shrink wrapped here, preventing the students from having cucumber, butter and shrink wrap tea sandwiches…). Since our poorly-equipped kitchen has nothing in it that resembles a cookie cutter, I just cut the crusts off (though I did consider mashing them off with the edge of a drinking glass). The knives are incredibly dull, though, so instead of having sharp, smart looking edges, each finger sandwich looked a bit masticated, and the egg salad ones especially appeared as if we had started to digest them for the students. I piled them on a platter anyway, and hoped they wouldn’t notice. David started to work on the tea, so I moved on to dealing with the most important part of the meal: the cream.

A cream tea requires "clotted cream." Clotted cream, also called Devonshire cream, is simply unpasteurized cow's milk that has been heated with steam, then allowed to cool in a shallow pan so that the cream separates, rises to the top, and forms a thick skin of yellow "clots." I know this now, after opening the container and being appalled at the waxy yellow contents, and immediately thinking that David had neglected to check the expiry date and picked one that had gone bad. I went back to Wikipedia to double-check, and learned that indeed, it WAS supposed to look like that. So I stirred the container and put it in a serving bowl, thinking that it should instead be called “clotted artery.” I did taste a bit of the cream just before the students arrived, and wasn’t too impressed---it basically tastes like unsalted butter that has been left out on a counter all day. I’m sure that served on top of a pile of strawberry jam on a scone, it was delicious. Or at least I hoped so…though the fact that the students ate all the scones and most of the cream makes me believe it’s so!

The other thing I can now do like a Brit is seek out personal appearances of Prince William and Kate Middleton! This morning, I met up with some of the students to catch a glimpse of the “royal couple,” who are in town to mark the 600^th-ish anniversary of the University (there’s apparently some debate about when it was actually first started, which is completely understandable as even the printing press wasn’t yet invented at the time!)We met at 9:15 on North Street, which would give us plenty of time to find a spot in front of St. Salvator’s, where they were scheduled to speak at 10:30. None of our students had been invited to the event (and it was rumored that no English students were invited, either…) so we settled for standing along the barricades. We were really only interested in catching a glimpse of her outfit and hearing his accent, of course, so found a spot that gave us a reasonable chance of doing both. Since it was a bit rainy in the morning, our discussion centered on what manner of hat she would be wearing, since the “feather fascinator” she wore in Wales yesterday probably wouldn’t stand up to St. Andrews rain. The crowd was immense, and kept getting larger and larger as the event began. I was surrounded by three Koreans, two women from South Africa and a whole group of Americans. I don’t think I heard a single Scottish accent all morning, since Kate and William are old news here, though the town is now fully kitted out in royalgear. All the shops are full of plates, tea towels, and even cakes emblazoned with the CW moniker (like all Brits, I know that in a royal wedding the man’s initial is supposed to go before the woman’s, but Will and Catherine, as she’s officially known, are the first couple to reverse this and put her initial first. This is not a statement about their equality in the marriage, however, but a necessity, since the initials “WC” in Britain mean “toilet”).

Finally, around 11:30, the ceremony began, and though it was inside the St. Salvator’s Quad, they piped the audio out on the street, so we could all hear his accent. (See video below!). And around noon, they finally appeared on North Street, quite close to where I was standing, actually. Two schoolchildren gave them a bouquet of flowers, and they walked down the street to shake a few hands, then hopped into Range Rovers and zoomed off. The rumor is that they’re still in town, and staying through the Fashion Show, which is the annual event in which Kate modeled the dress that apparently caught Will’s eye. I was so incredibly cold from standing in 18 square millimeters of space for over three hours that I left, just hanging around long enough to catch a video of the tail lights of their Range Rover as they drove off!