The show was held at the Newcastle Metro Radio Arena, which looked pretty big- standard arena type stuff on the tickets webpage. But it is actually basically just a hockey arena. Like, say, Walter Brown-sized for those of you familiar with BU. So our seats which we thought were pretty good on the map were a lot closer than we thought they'd be. Of course, so was every other seat in the arena! Fun fact about UK event food- they have the usual not very good burgers, pizza, fries, and soda, but they ALSO sell hot fresh donuts. Hot. Fresh. Donuts. Oh man. I totally wanted some but I refrained. While we were waiting in line to pick up our tickets at the box office, we thought we smelled funnel cake and got really excited and then were very confused when there didn't seem to be anything like that around. And then we saw the donut stall. They looked (and smelled!) pretty good; I'll have to try them if I go to another show while I'm here.
Here's a not very good picture- my camera couldn't really handle the giant screen in a darkened arena thing very well.
And now we come to the not so exciting part of the story. The show was supposed to last 2 hours. The venue listed the show as running until 10:10. The last train back to York was at 10:46 and the station is only about 10 minutes from the arena, so we figured we'd be fine. Well, that would be true if Eddie had followed his lighting cues to wrap up either of the first two times they blinked at him. So at 10:30, we start worrying. But then, miraculously, he wraps up! Clapping, clapping, we can totally make the train! Oh no he's back for an encore. And its about the American space race. Dang it. So we, along with about 10 other college aged people make a beeline out of there and RUN for the train, figuring we're totally going to miss it. We're running, we get there, it is exactly 10:46... and the train is listed as 2 minutes late. Thank goodness. So we didn't get stranded in Newcastle for the night and all was well, except that we missed the last bit of his routine. But the DVD comes out at the end of the week, so one of us will have to get it so we can see what we missed.
If you are at all familiar with Latin, I recommend this clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4YOmOd40iY for Eddie's take on Latin inefficiencies :)
He'll also be back in the US for an abbreviated tour, so if you're interested, you may want to check that out. So yeah, that's about all that's new. I spent the weekend sick so I haven't been up to much except watching old movies and whatnot in the past few days. Oh, and doing reading for class. Can't forget that...
Today I spent 50 BPDS on groceries at Asda (yay Walmart) and made some interesting discoveries:
1) Asda only charges 3.50 for deliveries during the day, as opposed to Tesco's 5 pounds all the time.
2) Ground beef is "minced beef" here.
3) There is no American or Mexican cheese blends available here. Which is only to be expected, I suppose, but still somewhat disappointing. We have cheddar back home! Show North American cheeses some love, UK!
4) There is no shredded cheese, but there is "grated cheese" as long as you want Cheddar, Gloucester, Parmesan, or Mozzarella.
5) It isn't sour cream, it is soured cream. Which is not quite as appetizing of a name...
6) YOU CAN BUY SCONES AND CLOTTED CREAM! I already had the strawberry jam, so prepare yourselves for some picture spam and poetic odes to the glories of a cream tea sometime soon.
7) US fries = UK chips. This is common knowledge. US chips = UK crisps. Also (semi) common knowledge. The exception: Tortilla chips. Still called chips. However, the UK's idea of corn chips are Doritos. All kinds of different flavors of Doritos. I did find a "lightly salted" flavor that I'm hoping is just regular old tortilla chips.
8) Baileys makes non-alcoholic cream like for coffee/tea. I did not get any but I was intrigued.
9) Technically an old grocery store discovery, but I'm going to share here anyway. They have really good strawberries here year round. They're a lot smaller than the California monstrosities we're used to, but the weather stays good enough year round for sweet delicious strawberries.
10) They do not sell deodorant/antiperspirant in a tube that you twist up and rub on your armpits, unless you buy the stupid expensive (not to mention foul-smelling) organic brand. Everything else is aerosol spray. Weird.
11) You can buy macaroni cheese (they don't put the & in for some reason) in a can. It is apparently disgusting, but you can. No blue box here! :(
12) I did find, however, El Paso Taco Kit! So excited.
So basically half of the battle to finding something resembling what you want is knowing what to look for. I had to search through pages upon pages of "dairy" to find "grated cheese" because I simply didn't think to search for grated rather than shredded. But I'm picking up the differences and I'm sure that by the time I leave I'll have finally gotten everything sorted out!
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