Streets of Philadelphia

Before I’d been to Philadelphia (which we shall now call Philly in order to save my keyboard) I only knew three things about the town. First was that a quite fancy cheese spread came from there.

In fact when my student grant came in – shortly before I blew it on Merrydown Silver, drugs, cigarette papers to make rollups from the butts in the ashtray, and those leggings you wear under your jeans to enable them to have holes in but not expose your knees to the cold whilst at the same time saying “arsehole” to the rest of the world, I’d get a warm crusty bloomer and a tub of Philadelphia. That was living it up. Possibly the greatest cheese spread known to mankind, lording it over Boursin and all those other pretenders. To me then, Philly then was a town in which people all worked long tough days in the cream cheese industry but all went home happy knowing the world was a better place for it.

The second thing I knew about Philly came from the movie Philadelphia, which I never saw but from what I could gather from the trailers, and that Springsteen song was that the town was eternally overcast, everyone had AIDS (and was presumably gay), and that the population enjoyed entirely tuneless dirges and setting fire to bins.

The last prejudice I’d built up was based on Rocky. Rocky came from Philly. Rocky was great, Mickey was great, Apollo was great. It made it seem possible that anyone with a dream, enough spirit, their own soundtrack and a montage could become anything. I loved those films (well, 1 & 2 anyway), and we’d just seen 6 which wasn’t half bad either. I wanted to run up those steps.

Turns out we have friends who live in Philly and they’d invited us down for the weekend so I stuffed all my preconceptions in my bag and went looking to validate them.

Actually I’d been there before. Twice in fact. The first time was during a slightly hungover extremely humid day a couple of years back. That time I did the historical tourist side of things and so here’s the facts:

Philly is a smallish city and it is Very Historical. It is home to the Liberty Bell, a bell as famous as bells get. This was rung to call everyone to the signing of the declaration of independance, amongst other things and is seen as a symbol of freedom etc. It was cast in London, and as something of a testament to English engineering it split the first time they rang it. Philly is also home to Independance Hall which looks a little bit like those ‘how they used to live’ museums you find in Littlehampton. This was the place the declaration was signed and we had a little look. Independance Hall was built by the English and designed by Edmund Woolley, an Englishman. So here the first 13 states got together and started to the US of A, and just down the road a woman named Betty knocked up the flag we all know (which still has space for one more UK shaped star), and lo! there were burgers, and the world was changed.

The second time in Philly was spend with Aunt Marie, learning to cook curry and look masculine in an apron.

This time we stayed in the city centre at Megan and Matt’s place and got to do the important things. The Rocky steps and a Cheesesteak.

The Rocky steps belong to the Art Museum and somewhat stuffily they refused to host a statue of the great man at the top of the steps, preferring instead to plonk it somewhere off to the side. There are many great and imposing statues in Philly, mostly of the founding fathers or depicting the revolutionary war, but from what I could see they were all ignored for the master. Admire us faithfully recreating a scene from the movie under His eyes:

Round the corner from the statue is the Art Museum. Which has far too many steps to actually run up, but we all made something of an effort at the top (note my new All American Gut, and how proud Meg is to be friends with us, standing a good 10 feet to the left).

We weren’t the only ones. Far from it. In fact here comes a photo of the other direction which I took since the view is quite impressive but you can clearly see devotees running their own pilgrimage.

In the evening it was off to South Street for a Philly Cheesesteak, famous local food. Outside the more well known Cheeseteak places people queue for 45 minutes to get one. So we queued for 45 minutes to get one, heading to Jims. So what’s a Cheesesteak ? Well you get a bread roll, you put cheese in it, then you add steak. Done. Not entirely impossible to recreate this at home I’d imagine, still people must queue for a reason. Here is the queue once we got in the shop, and a photo of the one man who makes them:

I’m sure Jim knows the Cheesesteak business pretty well, but if I might offer some advice – having more than one person making the food will increase the number of people you can sell them to at once and make the queue shorter. Your options when it comes to the Cheesesteak is which cheese to have with it, and whether you want onions or not. No special blend of 12 herbs and spices here. If you look closely at the photo of the man making the food you can see what appear to be paint tins containing yellow paint in front of him. This was the discovery of the weekend, it is known as Cheese Whiz and is, as far as I know the only Cheese that comes in liquid form from a paint can. It tastes fantastic, like if you melted babybells with the casing still on, and like the cream cheese it is also made by Kraft who seem to own this town. Having invented liquid cheese Kraft then did the decent thing and put it in an aerosol called Easy Cheese, I will investigate this as a priority, as well as using Cheese Whiz in a variety of experiments soon.

So once we’d scored the food we headed home for fine wine, conversation, cheese whizz more wine and then around midnight something happened to the Americans in the room: (please excuse blurriness, it looked fine to me at the time)

They got a large tub of Ice Cream each and got stuck right in, behaviour I’d not seen before outside of a chick flick.

The next day was a late breakfast and the trip home. I like Philadelphia. No, its better than that, I love Philadelphia. It’s not your typical big American city, built for cars. Nor is it a bunch of strip malls on an Interstate. Its a nice sized town with gorgeous buildings, completely walkable, tons of non chain shops, nice bars & restaurants and a very English feel. I think that was the weird thing, I loved this town because it reminded me of the nice parts of Reading. I think I’m getting homesick.