Norwich: miscellaneous British things.

Bonfire Night

November 5th - also known as Guy Fawkes' Day. The night of, Ella and I watched V for Vendetta, which I had never seen before, with a few fireworks going off outside. The next night, we went out to near the uni to watch the official fireworks. We could've paid seven pounds or so to get onto the fairgrounds to supposedly get a better view, but we're cheap, and the mixture of fog and firework smoke made it difficult to see everything pretty quickly, anyway.

Revolution shmevolution!

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rugby

Woah. Rugby is intense. A few of us met at the uni pub to watch England vs. New Zealand. It was the first time I had actually watched rugby - except, I think, they played it once on Friends to highlight Ross's wussiness. I was secretly rooting for the All Blacks [in the actual game, not on Friends] - and they were victorious!

I have a lot of respect for the game. The players don't try to score pity points with theatrics like in soccer [don't get me wrong, I get a huge kick out of the drama in soccer, but I don't have much respect for it], and they accept the refs' decisions.

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comedians

A long time ago, we saw Shazia Mirza at the Norwich Arts Centre. Besides being a bit awkward - which I guess is pretty much required for a comedian - she was great. She's from a Muslim, Pakistani family, so most of her material is about pressures from that, her family trying to set her up, things like that. She talked about how she had been invited to tea at Buckingham Palace, along with several other well-known Indian Brits. She decided to not point out that she's actually Pakistani. The incredibly awkward small talk between her and the Queen is just brilliant. At one point during her show, she asked whether anyone was there from the States, and the others made me raise my hand. When I told her where I was from, she said, "Oh yes, Wisconstins...isn't that some kind of sauce?"

A few weeks later, we went back to see Robin Ince, who mostly talked about and read from books he had bought at secondhand book stores. One of the best ones was a romance novel whose plot included deadly crabs - as in, actually the animal. We made sure to get a picture with him and one book he particularly got a kick out of, which contained only pictures of hunks in various stages of undress and ridiculous poses and settings:


He didn't talk about this on this particular evening, but this is still an amusing clip:

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just some things I've seen around

It's a tree on a house! I don't know why. But it looks good.

Bussiness? The state of being bus-like? I didn't know that was usually open.

Apparently they're really into the University of Michigan? I haven't actually seen anyone wearing these out on the streets, though - next big thing, I guess.

Speaking of which, I've been going to the campus of the University of East Anglia so much - to hang out at the grad bar and environmental sciences happy hour, go to concerts, I even went to an American Studies guest lecture on swearing like a sailor in the 1700s [apparently "damned son of a bitch" was the ultimate insult back then, even among no-good mutinying scoundrels] - that I almost feel like a part of it, so I got a UEA sweatshirt [with a rabbit on the sleeve to represent all the rabbits running around campus] and bag. I was wearing the sweatshirt in town one day and went to get a smoothie - and got a student discount just because of the sweatshirt! Cha ching. A few more smoothies, and this thing'll have paid for itself!