Saturday, December 18, 2004
Road trippin'
So far, my British road trip has been very different than I was expecting. I’m writing this from Louis’s house in Norfolk, England. He just laughed at me because I thought Norfolk was a city instead of a county, but it’s okay because I get to laugh every time someone here tells me they thought Seattle was on the east coast because they know it’s in Washington and they didn’t know there was a difference between Washington state and Washington, D.C. That kind of thing makes it slightly less appalling that I came here under the impression that England and Britain were synonymous.
It felt as bizarre as I thought it might to leave Aberdeen yesterday. We just got in Louis’s car and starting driving away from the city and I thought, Shit, there are roads leading away from Aberdeen? Obviously, there are lots of them. Louis and I spent the following nine hours on several of them as we headed south all the way to...Marham. See, since I had heard of Norfolk before, I just assumed it was a big city and Louis would live in a massive penthouse on top of a skyscraper or whatever. Instead, the nearest town is called King’s Lynn. It is a place where the term “skyscraper” applies to any building more than two stories tall. I don’t know what to call the actual area where Louis’s house is. I was thinking “village,” but just plain “house” is most accurate, I think.
The drive down wasn’t all that bad for a nine-hour car ride. I had stayed up all night the night before, so I spent a good portion of it dozing off, but unfortunately I didn’t get a whole lot of actual sleep because every time Louis saw that I had fallen asleep he would scream “HELLO ERIC WHAT’S GOING ON” in my ear and I would spend five minutes looking around trying to sort out what was real and what I had been dreaming about. Let me tell you something, nine times out of ten, the cake and strippers were nothing more than figments of my imagination.
To be continued, as Louis is urging me out the door so we can hop on a train to spend the evening doing something or other in Cambridge. More as soon as I get home!
It felt as bizarre as I thought it might to leave Aberdeen yesterday. We just got in Louis’s car and starting driving away from the city and I thought, Shit, there are roads leading away from Aberdeen? Obviously, there are lots of them. Louis and I spent the following nine hours on several of them as we headed south all the way to...Marham. See, since I had heard of Norfolk before, I just assumed it was a big city and Louis would live in a massive penthouse on top of a skyscraper or whatever. Instead, the nearest town is called King’s Lynn. It is a place where the term “skyscraper” applies to any building more than two stories tall. I don’t know what to call the actual area where Louis’s house is. I was thinking “village,” but just plain “house” is most accurate, I think.
The drive down wasn’t all that bad for a nine-hour car ride. I had stayed up all night the night before, so I spent a good portion of it dozing off, but unfortunately I didn’t get a whole lot of actual sleep because every time Louis saw that I had fallen asleep he would scream “HELLO ERIC WHAT’S GOING ON” in my ear and I would spend five minutes looking around trying to sort out what was real and what I had been dreaming about. Let me tell you something, nine times out of ten, the cake and strippers were nothing more than figments of my imagination.
To be continued, as Louis is urging me out the door so we can hop on a train to spend the evening doing something or other in Cambridge. More as soon as I get home!
