Saturday 23rd August 2008

So we didn’t have a great night’s sleep despite having gone to bed absolutely knackered after being up for around twenty-two hours. In addition to the crickets, someone on the floor above decided that dragging a chair repeatedly across their non-carpeted floor would be a fun thing to do in the middle of the night. Mrs G wants to shoot them but I suggest that may not be the best response for someone training to be a priest.

We get up at 7:00 am local time and have a cuppa with a bowl of Fruit Loops for breakfast. Fruit Loops may be one of the greatest inventions ever. You can tell just by looking at them that they provide all the nutrients that the body needs. I consider living on them while I’m here.

Mrs G proceeds to iron the bed linen and clean the apartment, which is not up to “The Queen of Clean’s” standards. You may be wondering why I, as the house husband, am not doing this. Well, Mrs G is a bit stressed and she finds cleaning therapeutic so I feel it best to just let her get on with it. That’s how considerate I am. I will, of course, be resuming my cleaning regime once we have had a chance to get bleach, rubber gloves and all other necessary equipment.

It’s quite tiring watching Mrs G clean so I read for a bit and play Kirby and the Amazing Mirror while making encouraging noises in her general direction.

We decide to explore the area a bit and get some food. We set off following the route Justin took us on yesterday as we know there are some shops within walking distance along the way. After travelling for quite some time we realise that we have absolutely no idea where we are going so we head back to the apartment and have a cup of tea with grape jelly on toast for lunch followed by an afternoon nap. We later discover that although our initial directions were correct (turn right out of the driveway and go down the hill) we had started from the wrong driveway and gone down the wrong hill.

Around 5:00 we get to go to The Free Room. This is a place where outgoing students leave things they no longer require: sofas; cutlery; crockery; towels; pictures; oven gloves; and so on. We, along with the other international visitors, can help ourselves to whatever we need. We grab some essentials and Mrs G sticks post-it notes on the larger items so we can collect them at a later date. I take a coffee table back with us to replace the one we have which looks like it came over on The Mayflower.

We get taken out for a meal with the other International Students who are about. There are fourteen of us in all with folk from Belarus, Canada, China, Germany, Ghana, Hong Kong and South Korea. We go to a bar called The Playwright which is an American Irish bar (note: not American-Irish). I have a Dustin the Turkey’s Club washed down with a couple of pints of Samuel Adams Summer Ale. The ale is superb but for some strange reason it comes served with a slice of lemon. That’s right. Lemon. In ale. WTF?!?!

On the topic of alcohol, Connecticut has some regulations (known as Blue Laws) which prohibit the sale of alcohol to take away after 9:00 pm Monday to Saturday, or at all on Sundays. What’s more, you can only buy carry-out alcohol from liquor stores. Being the moderate drinker that I am, these laws will cause me no problem. After all, the bars are open till late.

While on the Transit back to YDS I notice a chap sitting opposite us with a face flannel draped on his head. Said chap is a rather large, muscular, swarthy fellow, about as wide as he is tall. He is dressed in denim dungarees and I can see cornrows sticking out from under the rear of the flannel. I suppress my impulse to ask him about this mysterious fashion statement and leave the bus none-the-wiser.

Back at the apartment we have an early night and manage to drift off to sleep. Despite the bloody crickets.