Norwich: A Cutie!

May I first say how absolutely wonderfully British my flatmates are! Case in point: we have three tea pots sitting on our stove at all times for those emergency tea parties! They say wonderfully British things like: "Now he's a right bloke!" and "I tripped over my trousers on the way to the Uni!" I find myself smiling at them all the time cause they are so darn cute. Tonight we ordered take-away Chinese and had a movie night, and they were all awed and excited by fortune cookies! My roommate Rob who had never had one before ate the fortune without knowing. It's also funny watching shows like Family Guy with them because they don't necessarily get all the jokes and clips that pertain to American pop culture... I'll laugh about something, and then have to explain it a moment later.

Today I walked into Norwich and took a walking tour with a bunch of international students. I met a friend Jonas from Germany and met up with a pre-existing friend Claudia from Switzerland. Although they could have spoken German together, they declared profusely that they didn't want to, so we spoke English. That is, after all, what they are here to do. The tour started at the Cathedral and wound through some 16th Century Elizabethan buildings and one of the only surviving monasteries after King Henry VIII decided to create his own church with his own rules and dissolved them all. He didn't want to pay nothin to nobody. The tour guide asked where everyone was from and looked at me and said "The history here is kind of overwhelming, eh?" And it is! THere was a cottage that had a view of the river (really Norwich is connected to a whole network of rivers called the Broods that served as a great trading and commercial area during the Middle Ages) from which none other than QUEEN ELIZABETH I had watched a boat parade in her own honor. That really hit me that I was standing in a place that had once been frequented by one of the greatest monarchs and feminists in history.

The streets were named things like "Elm's Hill" and some of the tea houses even had thatched roofs! I am SO bringing back tea! Jonas, Claudia and I had tea after the tour, and headed over the Cathedral to hear the boy's choir do Gregorian chants, as they were scheduled to do. But it turned out that it was the ONE day they weren't performing in the Cathedral because it was Admiral Nelson's 250th Birthday (he was a local hero who helped defeat the Spanish Armada), so they were singing in another town. I am definitely planning to go back for it though because the tour guide said it was like stepping back 900 years when the monks would sing their chants.

There is so much more I could say about Norwich, but I think I will let some pictures do the talking. It has inspired me to fashion my own little tour around England. One of these weekends, I'm going to spend about four or five days on a "literary pilgrimage" of sorts where I visit all the places that my favorite authors lived or are meaningful to my thesis. So, I will probably be going to Bath, Stratford upon Avon, the Cotswalds, the Lake District, West Yorkshire, and Oxford. I'm going to stay in B&B's, and just kind of go wherever I feel like going.