The sunburn is a result of spending a wee too much time in the sun on the Norwich Broads. To explain, Norwich (about an hour to the north of Ipswich on the eastern coast of England) has a series of interconnecting rivers called the Broads. It's popular to take boats out on the Broads on nice days, and seeing as this was probably one of the nicest weekends in the UK in recent history (sunny, warm, not a cloud in the sky), that's exactly what we did. One of the BT Grads, Danny, organized for a group of 18 of us to rent out three boats for the day. John and I drove up with two of the other grads, Marcus and Adam, early on Saturday morning. Since we woke up so early, I asked John the night before if we could stop for breakfast on the drive up, which he said was fine. Well, we were running late, so we didn't stop for breakfast. After we checked into our hotel, we were still running late, so we didn't stop for breakfast on the walk to meet up with the group either. Nor did we eat breakfast while we waited for the bus out to the Broads for about half an hour ("it's coming any minute now, don't go get food" said Danny, for about 20 minutes). We stopped at a grocery store before heading out so everyone could buy the equivalent of a six-pack or two of beer (I bought a sandwich, since it was already closer to lunch that breakfast). Favorite dialogue from my quick trip through the bakery aisle:
Me: "The donuts are so much smaller here!"
Marcus: "So are the people."
We finally got out to the boat rental place, which was run by a quasi-cheerful old man who looked like he had been recently yanked from his home in Appalachia. Danny referred to him for the rest of the trip as "ZZ Top." Once we were out on the Broads, at the relatively late hour of 11AM, everyone cracked open their respective beverages, and I cracked open my sandwich, which turned out to be so ridiculously disgusting that, even in my half-starved state, I could only eat half of it.
For whatever reason, there is a speed limit of about 4MPH on the Broads. Luckily, the boats we were in (when they were working, to be explained later) couldn't really go much faster, so the speed limit wasn't an issue. Not that it stopped us from occasionally crashing the boats into the bank/reeds/ground/other boats at regular intervals. Those things do not like going in a straight line.
What I hadn't known until we were about half an hour into the trip was that the plan was to stop at every, single pub we ran into. Being that this is England, there are already a lot of pubs. Since the Broads are a popular holiday spot, stopping at every pub involved almost as much time getting in and out of boats as actually traveling in them. My first error was deciding to go in for a pint with everyone else at Pub #1. Since my food consumption at this point consisted of all of half a sandwich, having an entire pint of beer at 11AM, given my aforementioned lightweightedness (see entry about my first pub trip), was perhaps not the best call.
There were 18 people total, three of whom were girls, so it came down to one girl per boat. That was fine, except when I needed sunscreen put on my back. If you ever want to feel like a leper, ask a boat full of male engineers if anyone wants to put sunscreen on your back. Anyway, after an awkward 30 seconds of silence and blank stares, one of the guys finally volunteered, but was apparently so eager to get the sunscreening over with that he ended up missing huge swaths of back (which I found out later in the afternoon when my back had lobster-fied). Some day I'm sure my skin will return to it's normal color...
After pint #1, I decided it was unwise to drink more, so I kind of sat back and watched as the rest of the group knocked back a pint or three at more or less regular intervals for the next four hours. Unrelatedly (I'm sure...), we only had one working boat (of the original three) by the time we got back to the rental place. One boat stalled when Josh, class clown of the grad crew, decided to go boat-hopping (Josh later fell off a two-foot high fence, gashed up his knee, and had to go to a hospital). Unfortunately, we couldn't get the boat to un-stall and the boat rental company ended up having to tow it back. Shortly thereafter, the boat I was in started to fill with water. This slowed us down from the speedy 4MPH we were going to about 1MPH. The boat being towed actually passed us. We were probably on the verge of sinking when we finally pulled up to the dock ("Looks like you've sprung a leak!" said ZZ Top, displaying truly astounding mechanical intuition). All in all though it was an incredibly fun trip (pictures on facebook).
Because (apparently) people had not yet had enough to drink, most of the group went out to dinner and a bar after we got back to Norwich proper (while I went home and passed out for 3 hours). We all met up at a club later, which ended up being really cool. Clubs in the UK are SO MUCH CLASSIER! Really enjoyed myself (pictures of the club are also up on facebook).
Lee, who is from Norwich, met up with John and I the next morning and we went on a self-guided walking tour of Norwich. Norwich has two things of note: the castle and a whole bunch of cathedrals. The number of cathedrals wouldn't be impressive if the town of Norwich weren't relatively small (especially compared to slightly larger municipalities in the vicinity, like, say, London). Although each cathedral was stunningly beautiful, I couldn't help but wonder the whole time what on Earth the demand for so many cathedrals was. Maybe when the people of Norwich get tired of boating on the Broads, they built cathedrals. We may never know.
After we'd wandered around Norwich, we all drove up to the quaint beach-side town of Idonotactuallyrememberthenameshire, which looked like a standard beach-side town in the US except there was less a) sand and b) obese people (in general, the obese people were American tourists). There wasn't actually a whole lot to DO in said town, however, except kind of walk up and down the beach and eat at the various cholesterol-ridden establishments, so we didn't actually end up spending much time there.
We got back from Norwich Sunday evening, and since then I've just been catching up on work (but not on sleep, because apparently I can't kick my staying-up-late-doing-god-knows-what habit). I spent Wednesday in Cambridge again, where I continued to meet with really interesting and incredible people (this track record can't hold up for long...). Today I'm in London at BT Center/Centre meeting the head of BT Wales and doing some interviews about my work here. BTC is right around the corner from St. Paul's Cathedral, so I might go be a tourist for awhile (although, forgot my camera today *&^%$#@) until I catch the 4:30 train back to the 'Swich.
In other news, I miss bagels. Today, I had a "bagel" at the BTC cafeteria, which was really just bagel-shaped bread with some weird British version of cream cheese (aka "whipped butter in a cream cheese container"). It was really disappointing. But the British make up for it with crumpets (so...addicted...). Must find a way to smuggle crumpet supply back to America.
Interesting linguistic observation of the day:
The British do not "wash things off." They just "wash things." I said I was going to wash my hands off, and I got confused looks until one guy said "are your hands going to be gone after you're done?" This kind of makes sense, actually...traditionally one washed something OFF something else...but in America we've kind of dropped the "something else," which confuses the hell out of the Brits, it turns out.
In other news, I continue to use "pants" instead of "trousers," and I continue to get horrified looks from people. I'll probably fix this problem right before I get back to the states, where people will laugh at me for using the word "trousers." Ah well.
Until next time...
If i didn't know any better i would suspect that you're saying pants on purpose at this point
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