Two weeks down

Another week in the books here in the UK. This one was significantly longer and more stressful than the last. I wasn't sure that was possible. The first couple days weren't terrible. However, as our Friday status meeting approached people started getting much more anxious and rushed to finish their sections of the presentation. The morning of Friday's meeting was particularly rough as I was working on a hard deadline to prepare and format the presentation before the 1pm meeting.

By the time our meeting was over on Friday I was very much ready for the weekend. Matt, Jie and I went to a very delicious tapas restaurant in Durham that evening. It was probably the best service we've received since arriving in England. We were sat next to an older guy who was wearing a Broncos hat so I ended up talking to him for awhile about Cutler/Orton and Shanahan. He was very upset that they fired Shanahan.

On Saturday, Matt and I had heard there was a soccer match in Newcastle that afternoon so we decided to try to go. We took the 15 minute train ride and it was packed with Newcastle united fans. Very cool atmosphere already. We struck up some convos with local fans and made our way to the stadium. We got two tickets and then hit up a couple bars before the match. The brits don't tailgate before games - they just pack the bars and drink. Everyone we talked to on the way there had a regular bar they always go to before the games. The bars were packed and people were chanting - pretty much the atmosphere I had imagined. We made our way into the stadium a little bit late. Neither of us really cared much about the game...we just wanted to go for the atmosphere. The game was actually a pretty big one for Newcastle. They needed to win to stay out of the bottom three and potential relegation. Our seats were real cheap and real high up, we actually never sat in them once. We kept just walking around the stadium once we got in. We would find a nice place to stand until someone told us to move and then we'd just go stand somewhere else.

Around half time we started looking around the inside of the stadium and wandered into this one bar area we were not supposed to be in - you needed to have a ticket or something. There were several bachelor parties in there hanging out so we parked next to the bar and started talking to some of the dudes. They were all scottish and each was dressed in a different superhero costume. People in England really do it up for bachelor parties, apparently. Newcastle was down 1-0 and it started raining so we actually didn't make it back in there for the second half. We were having a real good time hanging with the Scottish dudes. Once the game finished we stayed for another beer or two and followed them to a bar.

We hung out with them for awhile and then parted ways. Matt and I wandered around Newcastle and then took a cab back to Durham.