BBC Weather, everyone's favorite weather guru, predicted a harsh weekend of "heavy rain," so I didn't make plans accordingly. Imagine my surprise when I woke up Saturday morning (yes, I did manage to get up before noon) to find that it was...sunny? My reaction was appropriately British in that I immediately got really angry (BBC Weather had been wrong! Therefore depriving me of the opportunity to make exciting plans to do god-knows-what! "Typical!" I exclaimed to myself, British-ly). After frantically emailing a few people, Josh, John, and I had loosely stitched together a plan to meet up for lunch, after which Josh and I would get groceries and go to his house to make a barbecue, where John would meet us later.
After lunch, Josh decided to take a "quick trip" to Primark to buy sunglasses. Primark is a huge clothing store filled with trendy and incredibly cheap clothes. Josh should have known better than to take a girl on a "quick trip" to a clothing store. About an hour later, however, I had come to the conclusion that British stores suffer from the same misconceptions about clothing styles that American stores do (that being that all women are either 6 feet tall and anorexic or 4 feet tall and morbidly obese). Not wanting to torture the male contingent of our party further, I agreed to come back a different weekend.
Because it was (shockingly) still nice out, I convinced Josh to buy all the BBQ fixings while I went for a run. The good news is that I know Ipswich well enough at this point to find my way back from more or less anywhere. The bad news is that not all streets necessarily have connecting streets at regular intervals that point in the right direction. I ended up running for a good half-mile down a road looking for the next right turn that wasn't a cul-de-sac before I finally gave up and went back the way I came. Silly curvy English streets.
After I got back, Josh picked me up and we went to his house to bake a cheesecake. While, ultimately, it didn't turn out disastrously, neither Josh nor I are particularly good at reading printed directions, so we had a few unfortunate misunderstandings ("oh, you're only supposed to put the 200mL in and not the whole container?" and "let cool for EIGHT HOURS?! Are they CRAZY?!" being among the utterances). Minus the questionable half-cooled cheesecake, though, the BBQ turned out to be a huge success, especially after it turned into a impromptu dance-party in the kitchen (Josh has portable disco lighting!). At one point, a slow song came on, and I jokingly told everyone to get their lighters out. Oli (one of the BT grads) got his iPhone out instead. I joked that someone should make a "lighter" iPhone app that people could wave at concerts. A few minutes of searching later, we all found out that someone had, indeed, made such an app. "The best 57P I've ever spent," said Oli.
Things started winding down around midnight, when someone had the brilliant idea to go to a nightclub. One taxi ride (and me forgetting my ID and having to flirt my way into the club) later, we all ended up at Liquid, which is apparently the best nightclub in Ipswich (I mean that's kind of like saying it's the best nightclub in rural Montana as far as the UK is concerned, but it was still way better than US clubs).
The next day, I woke up to rain pounding down outside. BBC Weather had finally been right, but I was still pissed off. I stayed pissed off just long enough to go back to sleep until 3PM, which was wonderful. By the time I had woke up, the weather had cleared, so I convinced John to take his new Mazda out for a drive to Felixstowe, the closest beach-side town. We wandered around the beach for about an hour, which was very pretty, and then head home. The rest of the day was uneventful.
Work is still going well, and I've got some cool trips and events lined up for the next few weeks. Check out pictures from the weekend on facebook!
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