Heading North to Norwich

After York, everything seemed less excited and most of London seemed common to us, we knew at this point of the trip that we were getting used to our surroundings. At first, we were excited about everything, going to all of the museums and seeing all of what London had to offer. By this time in the trip, I opened the tour guide book that Aaron gave me and realized I had been to almost every location in the book. I needed to find another tour guide book in order to find out what other stuff there was to do in this giant city! There are many places that I traveled in the city that I am sure I forgot about since I have been slacking in writing this blog, but the fact is, because everything became less impressive, I forgot to remember things that seemed unimportant.
This was the week that we would be travelling up to Norwich to visit Nico and Tom, the guys who so kindly welcomed me to the UK and taught me the best and most affordable pubs to go too. That was the one thing that got us through the week, knowing that at the end of it we would be spending the time with English guys that were our age that actually knew stuff about the country that we were living in, things that we probably would have never learned or found on our own in the time that we were living in the England. On Monday we went to the V&A, a museum that had just about everything, literally. We went for Tudor England class because they had a large exhibit on that period. It was fairly boring, things that we had already learned about or seen before, but we were patient, at least we didn't have to sit in the classroom all day! We had a little bit of free time afterwards so we went to a room that was partially under construction. It was the most giant room of plaster casts EVER! Apparently the English had a lot of money so they just travelled around the world making casts of all of the impressive things that they didn't own. For example, the David. Leslie and I were extremely excited because we had wanted to see if while we were in Italy but we weren't in the right city to see it. We wandered this room and then spent the rest of the day having a typical school experience for the next two days...
On Wednesday, we went to the Imperial War Museum for Intercultural Experience class, a class that we don't get credit for but have to go to every week for two hours. This was the first class that I loved, this museum was by far the most interesting to me. We had two hours to go where ever we wanted in this museum so I started in the wars room and worked my way through. My favorite part of this exhibit was the propanda signs that they had during the second world war, they were hilarious. I'm hoping to go back sometime this term and buy a couple of them as postcards just because they made me laugh so hard. Apparently they were successful though, and not a laughing matter in those days. There were tons of school groups this day so I quickly left and headed to the Holocaust exhibit. It is supposed to be the second most intense Holocaust exhibit in the world. It was giant, it took me a little over an hour to walk through the whole thing. It also left me extremely depressed but I learned a lot more about the Holocaust than I had ever known! Which was good, I could always use more knowledge about world events.
Thursday was an epic day as we got to see the most amazing performance yet. The week before (I left this out of my last blog) we had gone to see Hamlet at the Royal National Theatre. It was the best performance we had seen, though the actor playing Hamlet was a little too whiny for my liking. This week, we got to see another showing of King Lear except this time it would be a whole lot different! Not only would we be watching a live performance of the play in a movie theatre miles away from the actual theatre, but Derek Jacobi himself would be playing the part of King Lear! For those of you that don't know who he is, do a Google search and read all that he's been in. I recognized him from Gladiator but there are many other movies and plays that he has played major roles in. He did a spectacular job, we were all captivated by his stage presence and half of the time we didn't even realize we were in a movie theatre. Except for the camera angles and the panning in and out, or when the screen went blank as the satellite lost contact. It was hilarious, we could still hear the play but we couldn't see anything and then all of a sudden, some random man interrupted Derek Jacobi during King Lear's mad scence and announced "We're having technical difficulties, the play will be suspended until they are fixed." We couldn't believe it! Not only was this one of the most crucial scenes of the entire play, but Derek Jacobi was cut off on stage! So much for "the show must go on..."
On Friday, Erin, Leslie, Chloe and I boarded an afternoon train for Norwich. Again, we had all of the essentials: Cadbury caramel chocolate and Haribo gummy bears. But this time, Chloe and I decided we had to add one more thing to the mix: travel wine! They honestly sell plastic cups that have wine inside in the stores at the train station and they are made specifically for travelling purposes. It was great, we ate tons of sweets and drank wine, there really isn't a better way to spend a two hour train trip than doing that! We arrived in Norwich and were greeted by our friends, I was overjoyed to see them. We headed straight to Nico's house by cab and decided that Leslie and Erin would stay with him while Chloe and I would stay with Tom. We all walked down to Tom's house, first stopping to buy beer and wine, and talked to him and his roommates befor we headed out for dinner. Norwich, while being a beautiful town, smells of manure and has a horrible wind that blows through it all day. We honestly couldn't walk against the wind of awhile! We went to an Indian restaurant and bought way too much food! It ended up being an extremely expensive meal, one that we weren't expecting to have on this trip. But then we went out for drinks at a local pub and stayed there until early in the morning. We were just enjoying each other's company and made plans for the next day: we'd go to the beach!
Chloe and I woke up a little before noon, and didn't know what to do since Tom wasn't awake yet and we really didn't know his roommates. We got ready for the day and waiting anxiously for Tom to wake up so we could have our traditional English breakfast that we'd been promised. Nico called and he insisted that we wake Tom up because it was getting to be too late and we needed to leave before too long. Eventually Tom woke up and made breakfast for Chloe and I, which was delicious! A traditional English breakfast is, scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, baked beans, toast and half of a tomato. Nico and the girls showed up, wondering where breakfast was because they thought that they were eating with us too. Oops! We headed to the train station and headed out to Sheridam, a city on the coast that was about an hour away from Norwich.
It was exactly like the Oregon coast: cold, dark and drizzle! We got fish and chips upon arriving and it was seriously the freshest fish I've had! We walked down to the water and skipped rocks into the ocean for awhile. Since it was raining, we decided to head up to a pub. But on the way to the pub, we discovered the amusement area. It was two pence to play a game so we all dug into our wallets and started playing on different machines. And like all gambling games, we all got addicted. We almost won five pounds, but we spent about five pounds on trying to win it so we finally gave up. Leslie found another machine that we were sure that we would have success on. And it looked like we were going to win and when Les entered her last coin, we didn't win anything. In anger, Chloe shoved the machine and a few coins jingled out as simultaneously the alarm started going off. Erin and Chloe ran, the rest of us stood around laughing but not knowing what to do. The people running the store didn't do anything so we continued playing until yet again we were out of money and then we decided it was time for the pub. We had a few pints here and then Leslie and I decided we wanted to go back to the amusements and see if we could win the five pounds. Afterwards we went to the grocery store and bought beer, since Chloe decided that Tom, Nico and I had to play Power Hour on the way home.
Power Hour is game that you drink a shot of beer every minute, meaning you'll drink around seven beers in an hour. We didn't have shot glasses, but the train ride home was almost an hour so we figured out about how much beer we should drink and the fun began. Tom listened to his iPod the entire trip back but Nico and I attempted to talk betweens swigs of beer. We drank a lot of beer, and we got off the train full but not quite drunk yet. We decided to walk to get food for dinner and buy the girls alcohol at a store. Nico and I had about a half of beer left to finish so we stood in the trolley garage in the parking lot to finish the beers. It was a great bonding time for the two of us, I'm extremely glad that Marian and him found each other so I had the opportunity to become friends with him. I'm even more excited for his trip to the US in April and again in July when he comes to rodeo with me!
We were unsuccessful in getting food or alcohol, so we went back to Tom's house and decided to watch Gladiator, mainly because we wanted to see Derek Jacobi in a movie and also because Leslie and I have been wanting to watch it since our trip to Rome. We all fell asleep right after the movie after Nico and the girls left to his place and woke up late again the next morning. We had to be on the train by 4 pm but Tom didn't wake up until 1:30 pm that day, so we really didn't get to go out and see Norwich. Nico had a football game so Leslie and Erin went to that and met up with on of Erin's friends that was studying in Norwich. Tom made Chloe and I a delicious breakfast again and after we had to pack up to go home. We said good-bye to Tom but didn't get the chance to see Nico, but hopefully we'll get to see both of them in London sometime! The train trip was uneventful and we spent most of the time playing card games against each other. We got home and did a little bit of homework, but for the most part, we went to bed. We're constantly exhausted on this trip, but it's well worth it!