Czech shopping

The Czech shop I wrote about in my last post - Halusky, in East Sheen (or Mortlake - not too sure about southwest London geography) - was small, and rather sparsely stocked due to the snowy weather when we arrived. In spite of that, we still managed to stock up on everything we wanted: a load of Czech dried goods (ie. beer and dumpling flour), frozen knedlicky dumplings and Slovakian chocolate bars. It was quite impressive: from the outside, Halusky looked like a regular newsagent's, but inside everything, even the shelf-edge labels, were in Czech or Slovak.

It got me thinking about the trip I made to Prague and Bohemia in the summer. Prague has an amazing cafe life, and my favourite one was Slavia, for its deco perfection - see below! -closely followed by the Cubist Cafe.

Supper club

I never realised how true the cliche about going to the gym in January is until I, er, went to the gym in January. The place was packed out. There was an actual queue to use the treadmills. At every turn, there was a new recruit being shown around.
It had been quite a while since my last gym effort, confirmed by the fact that I fell off the cross trainer when I attempted to get on it. But this story does have a point. Going to the gym is great because there are TVs there and my favourite thing to watch while struggling away on some hideous machine is Channel 4's so-wrong-it's-right Come Dine With Me.
Last October, my friend suggested a group of us should start a Supper Club, each hosting a dinner party with a different theme. She sold it to me by describing it as 'like Come Dine With Me, only without the voting at the end'. She and her boyfriend hosted an amazing first instalment: they served delicious homemade gyoza dumplings, fried duck breast and garlic rice for their Japanese-themed supper.
This weekend it's my turn to host. We're going for an eastern European-inspired theme with goulash as the main dish, and various meats and Czech-style potato salad for starters.
I'm also really excited because we're planning an expedition (which may or may not actually take place, depending on laziness) to a Czech food store in East Sheen to pick up some other essentials: slizovitch, Czech beer, klobasa sausages and gherkins, and no doubt a bunch of other stuff. I love going to delis and foreign food stores to wander along the aisles and among the unfamiliar labels, and this Czech shop is meant to be one of the best in London...