Norfolk Terrace, Day 28. 22:39. A Winter March: The Rest of Friday and A Saturday in the City
Twenty-seven hours later…
My weariness is lessening with each moment that I look outside my dorm window and see the world of a snow globe come to life, people walking past and falling snow just outside my grasp. Now I see a figure in a hoodie gathering snow for some mischievous purpose. My window is lined with ice, the ground outside carries a thin blanket of fresh snow. Winter is here.
Twenty-seven hours ago, after writing the blog of a Friday without a dramatic highlight, I bought frozen pizza and a 2-L bottle of Strongbow cider, had the microwaved dish (my flatmate Charlie teased me for being on a roll with cooking until that night, since he reads the blog), and hurried to the main bus stop with the cider and three layers of clothing. It was time to go to Stef’s birthday (Stef = Dodo’s friend who’s in my classes).
After wandering confusedly around a street near the Cathedral, the valiant Liam (Stef’s friend/housemate, met him at the Harry Potter party) found me and brought me to the house. Retrospectively, I can say that this was my first time in a British house. The rather narrow hallway and staircase, doors the same size as in America, spacious and messy living and dining room, and a cluttered kitchen were the main features, but apart from the narrowness, I enjoyed the place. There was an old keyboard organ contraption, but playing anything on it was difficult due to its underlying hum and exotic timbre.
I had just arrived in time to watch a blind-folded Stef hit the shit out of a mini-piñata—only once the piñata was on the ground could she break open the candy-filled beast. Then she proceeded to place the opened, globular-shaped piñata on her head as a hat. My level of sobriety lessened significantly within the hour, as I met others in the house. One housemate is training seriously for canoeing in the next Olympics (2016)—his arms are bricks, honestly though.
Taxis arrived soon and somehow Liam and I found ourselves in a 5-person taxi that turned from a regular ride into a drunken support group for the slightly depressed taxi driver. He was a good fellow.
The next four hours were spent at the new club on Prince of Wales Rd., Project. Before heading in, a group of us stopped at a nearby ATM, and I had a glorious America moment with this guy Wes when he pulled out his red Bank of America Visa card. I pulled out my mine and we felt a bond. Wes is originally from Boston, studying abroad at UEA for his second time. He studied here last spring, finished up his dissertation on the history of ____ [memory fails me; it was very specific] in the fall back home, and then had an opportunity to come back so he did. Back at Stef’s house, I played around on the organ with him and we conversed about America and the great feeling of camaraderie there is when meeting a fellow American in a crowd.
Once in the club, I maintained a good level of warmth, dancing in a group with Liam, Stef, Wes, Helen/Eleni [met her at HP], this girl Maddy, Kurt [who apparently got partially run over by a car earlier that day and was still dancing tonight…made me believe there was more to the story] etc. About a half-hour in, my flatmates, Vinnie, Joseph, and Mo showed up and I had a good round with Vinnie. On the dance floor, I went back and forth between flatmates, etc. and Stef, Liam, etc. This led to trouble for me, when Vinnie texted that he was back in the flat. I quickly found Stef’s group and around 3:30am, the quest for food began. Stef wound up with a free box of chips [or what they REALLY are: French fries] at some nice pizza place.
The march back to the house was toilsome, especially for the high-heeled girls. I finally convinced Stef to just hold the heels and she blamed me for making her feet exceptionally colder.
There was a moment that I’ve paused in my memory as one of pure bliss: walking past a waist-high, circular, stone brick wall, we stopped and looked in the contained little field. Liam, Stef, Maddy, Adam (another housemate of Stef’s), and I stepped over the wall, and I felt my foot crunch to the ground. I looked down and saw white powder surrounding my foot. I smiled. It was my first sight of British snow.
I crashed on their downstairs couch, one of three, and Maddy crashed across the room on another one. The generous Liam lent me his sleeping bag and spare pillow, so I was rather comfy despite sleeping in my clothes. Maddy found only one glass for water and so we made a ritual of placing the glass in the middle of the room after drinking from it. We stayed up a bit, just unable to sleep, and talked about “Sherlock”, “How I Met Your Mother”, and the skewed philosophy behind choosing one’s career so early in the UK educational system. Technically speaking, at 15 a student should be getting an idea on what to focus in for A-levels (uh, think SAT subject tests but directly relates to what one will be studying at university).
Finally I got to sleep, after remembering that I had made plans to eat with Rebecca and Sierra in the city centre late morning. I set an alarm for 10:30, then awoke and reset it for 11:15. I left the house about the same time as Maddy, saying thanks and good-bye to Kate on the way out. I met Kate on Day 13, “Convenient Coincidences”; she’s Stef’s best friend and housemate, and incidentally, I ran (pun) into her on the track on Thursday at the Athletics Club session. Conveniently, I got on the same bus that Rebecca and Sierra, and their friends Marika and Alex, were all on.
Once in the city, we made our way to Starbucks first. While they ordered, I took the opportunity to go to an ATM, wash up in a bathroom (to look like I got more than just four hours of sleep) in the House of Fraser shopping mall, and return refreshed. Walking around, we came across the Copper Kettle Café and ordered lunch. As the Americans we are, we were still not used to the servers bringing the food out one at a time, instead of all together, and so had to suppress the American etiquette of waiting for everyone to have their food before chowing down. Another British quirk is the literalness of menu items: a “chicken omelette” is just chicken in an omelette. No cheese. Luckily, this dish came with a side salad (literally lettuce with a few vegetables on top), so I managed to make my omelette more like an omelette that I’d eat back home.Being the only guy, I did not have a choice in the nature of the next activity: shopping. I enjoyed it, though, since I did need a jumper (read “sweater”) and found nice athletic socks. The overall time spent in Primark (think Marshalls) and Next (an extremely expensive designer store quite out of my price range) was doubled the time at lunch, but it was good to be out and about. Last on the list, Marika and Alex went off to shop more as Rebecca, Sierra, and I went all out in grocery shopping at Sainsbury’s. Oh, for “Sainsbury’s”, read Costco.
[A note on the Primark bag: After taking a rhetoric class with an interpretative focus on photography back at UC Berkeley, I really could not resist this insanely great example of photographic irony: "I'm a green bag".]
We bus’ed it back and as I was organizing all my food items into storage, I likened the placement of refrigerated items to a hands-on game of Tetris (14 people sharing two fridges = a challenge). Soon after, I was knocked out cold [ha, just as the snow began to fall—coincidence] for 3 hours. At 9 this evening, I made a creamy fusilli with cherry tomatoes and retreated to my room as many of my flatmates pre-gamed and were off on another night of escapades.
I think I’ll just reflect on the day as I watch the darkness fall on the winter wonderland outside my window.
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