Weekend Number One

I had my first full weekend here in England and decided to spend the better part of it away from Bath. I was kinda missing the ocean and i wanted to take a ride through the countryside to see the rural side of England so I took a train down to Plymouth. This is the place that the Pilgrims took off from. Well, they really took off from Southampton but broke down in Plymouth and went on to America from there. They spent their last night in this Gin Distillery (which was some sort of Christian gather place at the time) that I visited.

The first thing I did when I got there was check out a few historic type things. That only took about an hour or so. I don't really care all that much to relish in the historicness of stuff -- i'm perfectly fine with looking at it, reading a little about it then moving on. This is also a reason that i will probably do most trips while I'm here on my own.

I was waiting to be in a coastal town before I marked fish and chips off the list of English cliches. I was walking from the food place to go take a tour of the gin distillery when two drunk guys got out of a cab right near me. This is at about noon. As they're stumbling into the pub they tell me that i'm going with them and they're buying me a drink -- can't refuse that. A bunch of their friends showed up at the same place and it turns out they are all army guys. There's a base in Plymouth and apparently these guys had the weekend off. Another fun thing i found out was that when they first got out of the cab, the guy in the picture on the right didn't want to buy me a drink, he wanted to beat me up for no reason. The other dude's solution to that was to invite me for a drink. 2 points for me. You can see that one of them is wearing a t-shirt. well, it's literally freezing outside and apparently he left his jacket with the prostitute he bought the night before. With that, when the army guys offered to sneak me on to the base for a free place to stay i figured i'd rather get a hostel.

I ended up at this pub near the university for some dinner. As I'm sitting there a group of college students keeps running over to the jukebox to put on the worst American music -- Pantera, Blink 182, bad 80s stuff, and Michael Jackson. I made a comment to them about it and next thing I know we are all hanging out for the rest of the night. We bounced around from place to place all night so I met a ton of people. I got comments about my accent everywhere from "they're right, you guys do sound stupid" to "say something else, that is so hot."

Even though hanging out with those folks on Saturday was fun, Sunday was pretty great too. I took a ferry over to a Mt. Edgcumbe, which is across the river from Plymouth. I walked around there for a while and on beginning to dread the walk from the ferry dock to the train station a bus pulled up that would take me directly to the station. What I didn't realize was that it was going to be almost a two hour bus ride. It would through the mountains, went through three tiny little villages, along the coast, on a ferry, then finally to my stop. It turned out to be pretty rad. I was in the very front of the top level of the bus so I got a killer view and some decent pictures.

Back Home...
I finally found a nice comfortable coffee joint with free wifi. I went into one place to ask if they had it and they charged so i asked where else might be comfortable and have free wifi. McDonalds was the best she could do.

I'm heading off to Milan this weekend. Hopefully I can have a good time and keep up on my reading too.

The other day it snowed. Then it melted. Then, last night it got about 4-6 inches. That was fun.