Knick Knack Paddy Whack Give a Dog a Bone...

This weekend has been pretty low-key, but yesterday I went down to Sunderland which is a 45 min metro ride away to explore the city just south of here. I was definitely not expecting it to be as dead as it was, but I guess when everything closes at 5 they really mean it. I did see this lovely pub named Paddy Whack and it inspired me to write a little something in my blog. This is the pub:
Other than that I saw the Empire Theatre (notice the re instead of er) and the river Wear. Newcastle and it's surrounding cities are near two rivers. Newcastle is on the river tyne (thus it's called Newcastle Upon Tyne, and Sunderland is on the Wear (and most likely called Sunderland Upon Wear). The metro that connects the two cities is approriatly called the Tyne and Wear Metro.

This week my flatmate Haley and I met Brom...Brom is the ice cream man who "comes around 6 nights per week" we are pretty sure he doesn't come on Tuesday nights which we thought was random. Every night we hear him coming by the student flats and we debate going out to get ice cream from his trunk.

We also went on the search for corn meal (to make the lovely blueberry corn muffin recipe that Sarah gave me), which was not very easy to find. It was in the 4th supermarket we looked at and under the name maize meal and polenta. I got some pretty strange looks asking people for corn meal, and the stock boy said he had never had a corn muffin (I looked at him in disbelief).

Other than that I have added more words to the pile of odd things brits say:
spillage, buggar, stead fast, maize, zed (for the letter z), theater (Operating Room, and probably spelled theatre), Lue (same as toilets), fortnight (two weeks)

Words they pronounce differently:
Cervical (cer - vy - ick - all)
Repiratory (Res - peer - atory)
Schedule (Shesh - wull)
Issue ( iss - eww)
Mobile ( Mo - bile)
Umbilical (Um - bye - ical)
Amino ( A - my- know)
Skeletal (Ska - lee - tull)


I wanted to end with a pretty picture to proove that it isn't always raining here, so this is a picture of the North Sea from my trip down to the coast last weekend :
That's all for now, cheers and have a great week!