Wednesday 2nd February

On this day I had no lessons, so I decided I really should do something. It felt very weird that I had not yet gone to the city. I had been here for a week and a half and had stayed in the university campus, gone to a small residential area to visit a generic supermarket, and taken a bus trip to some nice hills in the countryside. But had not been to the city.

I couldn't really be bothered working out the busses, so I walked the distance. It is only 2 or 3 kilometres.

I had quite a big sleep in, so my first meal of the day was lunch. I found a place in the portland building that sells pancakes (you can use the daily allowance put on your student card). These pancakes have some flaws, but they are also not too bad. I eat them with sugar and lemon, but a more expensive flavour I may one day try is nutella and banana. I buy one of these most days. I also bought a thing of juice which was crushed up from fruit. A girl from Holland said they were good. It was okay, but a little expensive.

I started walking out toward Nottingham. Along the way I walked by a canal which had very nice narrow canal boats that people live on. I felt a bit reluctant to start taking pictures. I took a few when I got to the 'Road to Jerusalem' pub. This one claims to be the oldest in England. It dates to 1100, or sometime around then. It is right underneath a big rocky hill that the castle is built upon. Before checking this out I frantically ran around trying to find a toilet. Big, universal toilet signs gave me hope from a distance, but a snaller sign readable up close told that these are exclusively for museum visitors. They were locked. I'm pretty sure the ones I eventually found were inside a city high school.

It looks like I only took one picture of the oldest pub in England. This is it!

These cliffs are the side of the big raised up thing that the castle is upon. At the bottom there are lots of carved caves. There is some kind of interesting story to do with these but I have forgotten it.

Some streets underneath the castle. I think the houses here look quite nice and comfortable.

 I walked around underneath the castle and eventually came up around to the front of it. Amanda had told me that it's free entry. I was counting on this. It was free entry! Free to Nottingham city residents, anyway. Apparently I am one. So I went in and had a look.

The castle is more of a house. The original castle that existed when Robin Hood was supposed to live, was I think deconstructed during the civil war so that it couldn't be used as a strategic position.

There were some nice views from the top. It is quite exposed and so it was very windy and the wind was cold.

I went inside the big structure and they had a kind of museum. That was free too, but unfortunately I didn't think it was very good!

They had some nice gardens inside the big walls of the cliff that I walked around.

This is a flat bit of ground inside the walls where I think they have some medieval shows. To the right, not in the photo, is some original foundations they have uncovered.

I think this might be an original entranceway, but I'm not sure. It was a nice long tunnel either way.

I saw this from the walls. There seem to a few houses in nottingham built like this but I think this one has an especially nice charm.

The walls are quite high. This is a less high section too.

I finished looking at the castle and decided to walk into the town. I found the big town square which holds some claim for being the largest in England or something like that according to wikipedia. It was the meeting point between a few early towns. Nottingham has a nice tram. I found the store 'Primark' which I had been told sells cheap things. They do! Pants for 8 pounds. Thermal pants and shirts for 3, etc. Unfortunately they'd run out of my size.

The shopping area is quite extensive. There are streets that extend for a few blocks which are open only to pedestrians, or have some kind of restricted access to cars. I wanted to find a supermarket for food. I found a tasteless shopping mall like tea tree plaza or marion, but more grimy and less shiny. They didn't have a supermarket in there! Amazing. I thought that would be a sure place to find one.

Eventually I settled for a 'Tesco's Express' which is a smaller version of the proper Tesco's and just has a few of the things you need. I got grapes and water. I decided to try the self serve checkout. Bad move. The machine wanted me to put everything into the bag too quickly and then to get the chip in my eftpos card scanned. I don't have a chip in my card so that was going to be a problem. I had to walk away from the panicking machine, and use the serving person. In England, the serving people assume that every card has an electronic chip in it. I don't have one, and they get very nervous when I ask them to swipe the card!

I caught a bus back to the university.

At dinner Amanda invited me to make a cake with her and her friends. They make cakes using lots of the single serve packages of butter and sugar that they take from the food hall. But I had to decline because I planned to see science fiction movies with the group I joined last week who do that each week.

I got there and we first watched 'How to Train Your Dragon'. It was pretty good although the jokes weren't that good. After that we watched an episode of the original star trek series. This was quite entertaining. Titled 'The Man Trap'. They landed on a planet and found that a lady was actually a strange alien that can change form to whatever form anyone else wanted. It did that because it wanted to eat their salt, which unfortunately killed the person. There was a personal dilemma whether to kill the alien even though it looked like a previously loved person, but they managed to do it and the alien died.

The people at this night were okay, although I didn't really interact with them. We were watching movies. But in-between, one girl asked if I could be a test subject for her assignment. I'd have to drink chamomile tea and a placebo tea to test if chamomile has a calming effect.

After that I went home. It was about 11pm or a bit later. As I got into my building I realised that the whole hallway was filled with people drinking. It's a narrow hallway so it was difficult to get through. I also think they assumed I was one of them because they weren't too fussed with moving.

I didn't mind too much, however it was an ominous sign of the night I would have before me. I had a lecture the next day at 9am, so I got into bed ready to make it to that. All the people went away into the city soon after, so it became very quiet and I was able to sleep. Unfortunately at 3:30am I woke up to a lot of noise. It's the time they all get back from the city. I'm quite a deep sleeper, so for me to wake up is saying a lot about the noise. Then the room adjacent decided to put on some loud music with subwoofer shaking my walls. It was fairly difficult to sleep!

A party at 3:30am on a wednesday night in a university student sleeping place. I wasn't very happy. I'm told that the marks English students get in their first year of study are not counted toward anything later on.