Real Texans Sign Here

So the last couple of days have been devoted to simple exploration of the city and hitting up some of London's most famous weekend markets. That's meant lots of walking, busing, and tubing and most importantly seeing lots of the city! Yesterday we went to Knotting Hill for the Portobello market. It was absolutely packed with people and interesting things to look at. It seemed to go on forever, we were to exhausted to go the whole way. After the market we found ourselves outside of the London Hardrock Cafe and figured we should go in. Did you know that it's the original Hardrock? Not bad for my first one. Once night rolled around we decided to go out in search of some fun. Guess what we found... The Texas Embassy! It was a restaurant that served real Texas food, had a wall for "real Texans" to sign and had flags and memorabilia from every Texas University. Country from the 90s was playing and they even served Dr. Pepper. It was like the mother ship calling us home, we had to eat there. It was really fun too. Live music started after a while and I made friends with the guitarist so that we could make request. I have to say that British renditions of country and southern rock are a bit different but they were definitely good.
Today we decided to start out in Hyde Park. I love that place and I hope I can find the time to wander around it a bit more. Since it was Sunday folks were speaking at Speakers Corner, now that was an experience. The day before we had talked to Dr. Dunn about our plan to go and he warned us to keep our mouths shut, no matter what. He said we'd regret it if we spoke out, partly because we'd be quickly identified as Americans. To be honest his advice confused us. What could possibly make us want to speak out? and What's so wrong with being pegged American? Well, we found out. Several people come to speakers corner with their step stools so folks can choose who to go listen to. We headed straight for the largest crowd. The man was talking about Christianity, and mostly how he thinks that the Christians need to rise to the challenges of the world. Nothing radical. Then the hecklers started in on him. They called God a figment of his imagination, called him a gullible twit, and took some below the belt hits. They asked condescending questions and were just plain mean. The guy kept his cool though, he was even able to give real answers backed up by scripture to questions they thought would stump him. However, they always interrupted his answer. I feel like I should clarify that these hecklers clearly were not the sort of people who had checked out Christianity for themselves and decided to disagree, their arguments were never intelligent and they demonstrated very poor knowledge of the Bible and basic church structure/history. It escalated pretty quickly and after awhile we noticed that the ENTIRE crowd seemed to be vehemently against this guy. That's when it was hard to keep our mouths shut. We wanted to lend him some support and we wanted to (lovingly, not harshly) try to explain some things to some members of the crowd. But we all reminded each other to heed Dr. Dunns warning (there had been some anti-American expressions) and kept our support down to some affirmative nods and a couple of amens. I have to say I've never been more grateful to live in the USA especially in the Bible belt area. I've never had my faith made fun of or challenged so extremely or with so much... well I feel like I can only call it hatred. I wonder why all of those people feel that way. Have they had bad experiences with Christians? Have they just been taught that way? and what was their problem with America? I mean I know that they have their little stereotypes of us (some of which are a right) but at the end of the day I thought we were buddies...
After getting all worked up in the park we made our way to a couple more markets, then we came to Spitalfield's Market. That was the best one yet. If you ever come here just hit that one and Portobello. Everything at Spitalfield's was really creative and artsy. It was really fun just to walk around and look at it all.