And so we near the half-way point of our trip! Ephraim, probably still jet-lagged, is still sleeping in in the mornings, and we celebrate that! The other thing that has happened on this trip is that Ephraim has switched to a new stage and he's full blown toddler.
He's at that stage where he'd rather be let to wander and roam rather than be held or carried. He's his own man with his own mind. Watch out world! We think this is pretty awesome, although we're not looking forward to the flight home. The flight here was a night flight and he slept pretty much the whole way - going home it's a day flight. Should be interesting.
So the sun was shiny bright over here in bony England. We started off the day with a drive whereupon I found my new favourite sign. It only slightly trumps the "Elderly People" sign:
We decided to devote today to the area we're staying in, namely Dorchester, and to start off we went to the weekly market.
I think, based on the market's back home, I was expecting more produce and food, but it ended up being more "stuff" than anything: clothing, books, antiques, collectables, etc… which was still fine by me. We ended up doing quite a bit of shopping, some for ourselves, some for people back home. Ephraim got restless and so I threw him up on my shoulders, where he got goofy. So I bit him. That's right.
Next we went back to Tesco (which owns a portion of the UK by the seems of it) to help Erik and Amy get stuff for their wedding. They needed extra hands for the trolley of shopping carts. I noticed this the other day but forgot to comment on it. Cheese is REALLY cheap here. Amazingly cheap. A block of cheese that costs $9 back home is thrown in with a 3 pound lunch meal here. The reason comes down to a quick history lesson, which I recalled from my Visual Heritage Project days. During the close of WWII, a man named Ross "Butterfingers" Butler became famous for doing a butter sculpture (a tradition still held today at The Ex and Royal Winter's Fair) of the Queen on a horse. At the time England was having a butter-scare. It was pretty rare. And so the Queen made a stink about how we Canadians were playing with butter when the British couldn't even afford to eat it. So the Canadian gov't sent England (this number could be wrong) something like five hundred pounds of butter as a way of passive-aggressively apologizing and telling them to 'sod off'. Her pride attacked, the Queen made sure that dairy production expanded, and so it has, to the point where there are so many cows that cheese is as cheap as it is. So there's that.
After that we parked in Dorchester and did some more shopping (new luggage for the bag that the airport broke. Bastards.), and then we headed to the Teddy Bear Museum.
Another fun historical fact: The origin of the teddy bear came from when Theodore Roosevelt was President and out hunting. Apparently he refused to shoot a little bear cub, and so the next day a shop owner put a stuffed bear in a window advertising it as "Teddy's Bear", and the rest, as they say, is history. It was a cool (small) little museum which was filled with mostly replicas of famous bears, including one that sold at auction for a quarter of a million dollars.
For dinner I cooked something called 'Scampi' which is, essentially, shrimp grinded up and breaded. It was okay, there is a milk thing in it as well that made it a bit creamier than I would have liked. Not bad though. I also went to the organic story next door (where Ephraim played some more with their dog, Rosie) and bought some of their local beer from a company called "Piddle", I bought the "strongest" one called 'Silent Slasher in a Bottle' and was instructed that I absolutely must pour it and NOT drink it from the bottle.
It's an okay beer. I'm a fan of dark ales so I don't think this is something I would get again, but I'll gladly enjoy the two bottles that I did buy.
Ephraim went to sleep without us having to go for a drive. Tomorrow - castles and ruins!
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