September 18th

My feet really hurt.

This is because last night I accidently traversed the whole of central Nottingham. I wasn’t lost. I was exploring, I swear. The evening started out simply enough. The school crammed us internationals on a bunch of double-deckers and carted us down to this club called Oceana. I’m not much of a clubber, but whatever. I had a few drinks to take the edge off and climbed in the back of the bus with the Canucks. Real wild crowd back there, eh.

-Tangent-
I have found that any conversation I have with two or more Canadians will eventually evoke one phrase that is to be called loudly: ‘NO-TOUCH ICING!’ For those of you that are curious (I will not go into the particulars here) the difference between icing and NO-TOUCH ICING can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icing_(ice_hockey)
The phrase is screamed as a means of honouring Don Cherry. He’s a Canadian anti-hero of sorts. This is what he looks like:

In addition to yelling about 'NO-TOUCH ICING,' Cherry also likes to comment on visors, the inferiority of Quebecois hocky players to English-speaking Canadian hockey players and talk about 'good Canadian bouys (boys).'
-End Tangent-

So, we got off the bus and made our way into Oceana. The place was packed. The bottom room was kinda like a discotheque. It was the kind of room where you might find John Travolta wearing a leisure suit and dancing the pants off of women. No lie. The second floor was more of an actual club with lazer lights and a fog machine and women in mini-skirts. The top floor was the most interesting because it looked like an Opium Den. I think the website for the club describes it as a 'Parisian Boudoir.' It was more like they had Quagmire for an interior decorator. Giggety-giggety.

Anyway. Alfred and I left the club and went across the street for the late night munchies. It wasn't a bad idea at the time, I swear. We chowed down and then, at my behest, went looking for 'that heavy metal bar' that I was hell-bent on finding. We instead, as we tried to make our way back to campus ended up swing to the far south of the city center. On the way we stumbled across not one, but two gay bars. Outside a woman was proudly trying to show her boobs to the street while a VERY TALL transvestite was trying to convince her to put them away. What a show.

As we walked some more we began to get away from the club area and into a more deserted part of town. As I said, we swung widely south (almost to the river) and came back up through a gated community. By the time we got back to campus it was three-o-clock in the ayyemm. As we walked back to our housing we found our way blocked by a wooden fence. In the Hot Fuzz tradition Alfred and I swung over it. Aberrating from the Hot Fuzz tradition, Alfred did not crash down on the fence and break it.

I kinda wish he had though.

Overall, it was a lot of walking and my feet still kinda hurt.

Mahalo y'all.

- Jonathan "Consistantly Ending Up at Gay Bars in Foreign Cities Does Not Make Me Gay" Trenary