cider and more...

Things are going well here. It's saturday morning and I am just about to head out to walk around the city and see a big music fest going on in Queen's square (its a georgian style square downtown)...

Last night my housemates and I went out to the local pub The Cadbury, it was loads of fun. Very different atmosphere from pubs i've been to in Canada - really nice and chilled out... Pubs here close earlier at around 11:00 and people from there either go out to clubs/dance halls or just head home. It was nice to hang out with the housemates away from the living room, and I got to meet a lot of their friends which was also nice.

The southwest is really big on cider - there are lots of local independant breweries so I enjoyed trying a couple last night. I think i prefer cider to beer anyway, so i'm glad that there are so many options here.

It seems as though people are very open about anti-americanism here... or maybe it's just that I'm Canadian and people assume that I like to talk about differences between americans and the rest of the world... so there was a lot of talk about George W and his gang at the pub last night which was nice to have something I knew a bit about to discuss (I'm totally out of the loop on British politics, celebs, music, films, etc).. but it does seem that people really generalize the american culture and mentality a bit more here than we do in Canada. It's probably because they are so separated from actual Americans...

I've already seen a few people on the streets wearing anti-bush t-shirts that say "Somewhere in Texas a village is missing it's idiot" which I had a laugh over.

I was trying to explain to them a bit about Canadian-American relations but it was difficult to uexplain. People seemed pretty interested to hear about Canada and what's going on there from me though, but I didn't want to talk too much about it - because I'd rather be learning more about british culture than talking about my own country.

I'm going to a Sept. 11th talk at the cube (check it out here) tomorrow night with some people from work... the cube is a multi-purpose performance/art/film/music space which is a bit more alternative in its programming than other venues in Bristol. The speaker is a past MI5 member and is going to talk about conspiracy theories and what not surrounding Sept. 11 - should be interesting to see what transpires.

That's pretty much all that's going on here. My week at work was really good - I found a speaker for that talk coming up and got a bunch of other things done so I think my boss was really happy with what I'm doing.

Oh yeah, they also brought me a huge plate of biscuits, a few trinkets from the giftshop and a big card midday for my birthday which I though was really nice. Then in the afternoon my co-worker Liz (who i get along with well alot due to the fact that we both love to talk about food) brought be a piece of this amazing lemon cake with a raspberry jam and butter icing.. it was one of the best pieces of cake i've ever had.

anyway, that's it for now. I'm off to track down the live music going on in the centre

- Chris