Catching up
Wow, I didn’t realize it had been almost a month since I had updated my blog, how time flies. So, I’ll share my stories in sections. Here’s the first installment…
The weekend of July 23rd
After the copycat attacks on Thursday, I was feeling an overwhelming urge to get out of the city for a weekend. So, after dragging Parul to an Indian singles party on Friday night (which was surprisingly a lot of fun and yes, digits were exchanged, but we’ll get into that later) we decided to go to Nottingham on Saturday morning to visit Sonia, another friend from my Norway days. It was my first trip to the English countryside and I was really looking forward to being away from the hustle and bustle of London for a bit. We caught a train from St. Pancras, and made it up there in about 3 hours. Within twenty minutes it felt like we were a million miles from the city and at the time, I didn’t really mind.
Nottingham reminds me of Stavanger. It’s a relatively small town ( I suppose any town with a population of less that a half a million is considered small these days). The town center is nice, and it doesn’t take long to walk from one end to the other, through the cobblestone streets. We decided to have dinner at one of the local Indian restaurants, which was really good. We made our way to a pub afterwards called Pitcher and Piano, which was situated in in an old converted church. I was feeling a bit strange ordering a vodka and coke with a pulpit to my right, but I got over it as the night went on. Blame it on the alcohol. ;-) We found a table to one side to sit and chat. After about 30 minutes I thought we may leave given that everyone was a bit tired. Of course, we then decided to hit the dance floor and that’s where we ended up staying until they kicked us out at closing time! It helped that we ran into a bunch of guys who were there for a stag do (bachelor party) and ended up dancing the night away with them. You would think we’d want to go home after that, nope, we walked around looking for another club and found one fairly quickly. After finishing the night off there, we found a cabbie to take us home. It’s a good thing he wasn’t one of those old stodgy types because we made him turn up the music and started dancing in the car and rolled down the windows to wave at random people walking by at 3AM. Yes, I know, 4 thirtysomethings acting like teenagers. Hey, you only live once!
The next day was the Nottingham Mela, which is an annual Indian festival with booths set up selling everything from religious texts, food, jewelry, clothes, and basically anything looking remotely ethnic. Sonia was performing in the afternoon with her dance class. She’s been studying kathak for the past several years, it’s one of the major classical Indian forms of dance that is by no means easy to learn! Unfortunately the weather was horrible…windy, rainy, and cold. Typical English weather but completely unsuitable for outdoor events! The show went on anyway, and after their performance the dance teacher ended up pulling some of us from the audience onto the stage to dance. That was definitely the fun part. :-) In the evening we made our way back to the train station to head back to London, but I felt rejuvenated, ready to face the city again.
