Dominica May

Tuesday 30th October

It was a fairly relaxing day today. I hung about Matt and Bec’s place until mid-morning when Bec, Cara, Luke, Doyle and I headed out to the Beeston shopping mall and I discovered the joys of Argos – a shop where you look through a catalogue at the front to find what you want to buy, then write down the catalogue number, take it to the checkout to pay, then pick up the item you asked for in about four minutes. It’s actually very convenient, I thought.

In the afternoon, we all headed into Nottingham on the bus to have a look around, getting off on Maid Marian Way so I could see the statue of Robin Hood. It amuses me how much they’re milking the Robin Hood fame. We visited the oldest pub in the world, and did a bit of shopping. We found a pretty nice but cheap clothing store and ended up purchasing a few new warmer clothes for Doyle and Jeremy.

Then we headed back to Beeston on the bus and Bec made us a really yummy dinner. It was so good having a home-cooked meal.

Wednesday 31st October

First up, as it is Halloween, I wanted to comment on how surprised I’ve been since I arrived in England last week how big Halloween seemed to be over here – it’s certainly a bigger deal in the shops than it is in Australia. And judging by the radio, some might even say kids could be encouraged to go trick-or-treating. But I digress…

Today was another easy-going day. After all, our main reason for travelling to Nottingham was to catch up with Matt and Bec’s family since they moved out here last month. We stayed in until about 10:30am when we headed out to some more shops, picking up some extra Christmas presents for the Malcolms in Nottingham so we wouldn’t have to send things over later.

We had lunch when we came back, then headed out to Wollaston Hall to have a look at many taxidermic animals, including a very interesting but clearly male gorilla.

Then it was back to Nottingham to go to the museum at the castle, which is not the original castle, due to it being demolished around the same time Kenilworth was after the Civil War in the 1600s. We got in for free, which is good considering the cost of parking in Nottingham, and got to see just about everything on offer there. They even had an exhibition about the latest BBC Robin Hood series, which we haven’t watched but has aired in Australia, at the museum. It kind of made me want to watch it now.

It took us a little while to head back into Beeston, but we came home to yet more of Bec’s home-cooked food. It was delicious.

Despite how big Halloween seems to be over here, we only had one trick-or-treater. I’m not sure why, but we’ve had more than that in Australia, and we don’t even celebrate it there.

After dinner, we played Trivial Pursuit, but stopped playing at 11pm and declared Bec the winner because it got too late to play any longer.

Thursday 1st November

A new month already! We headed off around 9:30am or so to Cambridge, arriving in the centre of town and parking around 12:30pm. We spent the afternoon wandering around the markets, the backs, and the colleges, before finding where we could take a punting tour on the Cam, as that was what Jeremy wanted to do most. It was a lot of fun, and our punting guide told us all sorts of information and interesting stories about the university.

We then went for a short walk to Fitzwilliam Museum. It’s a beautiful museum, and contains a lot of awesome Ancient Egypt artefacts, among other things. I highly recommend it as a museum to visit. Plus it’s free. When it closed, we headed back to the car, and then spent about two hours driving around trying to find the B&B we booked for the night. It wasn’t the map that was the problem this time, but rather the signs on the streets not giving me the information I needed to tell Jeremy where I wanted him to go. In the end, though, we did find our B&B, and it’s the biggest room we’ve stayed in to date, so hopefully the full English breakfast tomorrow morning won’t disappoint either.

We have free wireless Internet at the B&B here, too, so I thought I’d take advantage of it by posting about my last few days now. The next chance we’ll have access to the Internet will probably be when we get to Brazil and the IGF.