The Village of the Year Award

I know I should first write about Scotland, one of the most amazing weekends I've ever had, but I just have to write about my day I had today.

One of our Dickinson assingments this semester was to do a "travel report" on an assigned town/city/village in East Anglia, our section of England. We didn't have much direction with this project, besides Qualls grouping us in threes and assigning us a place with a name we had never heard of before. Megan, Barron and I were assigned somewhere called Worstead, and we decided in advance that today would be the day we would set out to explore it. Since Worstead is only 20 minutes outside of Norwich, the train tickets were only £5, and even though we didn't know anything about the place, we kept our minds open.

This is where the trip started turning into a tragi-comedy. Our train pulled into Worstead "station," which was really an old, boarded-up brick building with a concrete platform, and we were the only three people to get off. The train pulled out of the station, and we were the only souls in view, surrounded by dirt roads, cows, and fields. I had Google-Earthed the village beforehand, so I knew it was small and I knew that the train station was about a mile away from the village, so we starte trudging through the cold and the rain. It didn't appear as though we were getting anywhere, so we stumbled upon a Heinz ketchup factory (which smelled gloriously of frying oil and chips/fries) and wandered in to ask directions to the village. It turned out we were going the wrong way, and the factory worker we asked seemed to be utterly perplexed as to why three American kids wanted to be in the middle of nowhere.

So, we went back on the road through the rain. Instead of just following the road like the man said, we came upon a dirt pathway cutting across a field of cows that appeared to head straight into town (marked by a huge church peeking over the trees), so we took the shortcut. It did in fact end up being a shortcut, but somewhere closeby a SHOTGUN went off, and we were pretty sure we heard a bird or duck falling to the ground. Needless to say, we hurried on.

The town was completely deserted. We found the church, but it was dark and locked, and there wasn't a soul or car in sight. Next door, however, there was a pub with lights on, and we thanked the Lord. We actually had quite a lovely lunch inside the most authentic-looking pub I've ever seen and took refuge from the cold and the rain, and the bartender sold us a little book on the history of Worstead for a fiver. We'll probably base our entire 10-minute presentation on the information contained in that pamphlet.

After filling up, we headed back out in the rain in search of the actual town. It took us about five minutes to realize that the church and the pub WAS the town...the only other thing besides houses and cows there was a pathetic little post office, which had a few cards for sale on a rack, a guy behind a window, and a single hand-knit sweater on a hanger for sale. There wasn't even a general store where you could buy aspirin or milk or bread. If anyone's seen Hot Fuzz, the village was about ten times smaller and more boring than Sanford, and that's saying something. I'm completely baffled by what people DO with themselves in villages like this. At least small towns in Connecticut have places where you can buy FOOD and MEDICINE. It was also unsettling that the whole time we were in Worstead, we didn't see another soul, save for the bartender and the one or two men drinking at the bar in the pub. Presumably, there was a farmer shooting birds somewhere closeby (we heard a few more shots later), and several cars passed our lonely forms on the side of the road, splashing us with muddy water, but it was actually eerie that we didn't see or hear from another person, and that the lights were off in every single house and the church.

Because there was nothing else to see and because we were absolutely drenched and freezing, we decided to head back to the pub we ate lunch in to wait for our train, because at least it was warm. However, when we came upon it, we found the lights off and the door locked, even though we had just been inside with one other patron 20 minutes before. Severely disgruntled, we headed to the train station, but following the road this time so we didn't get shot. This proved to be dangerous: country lanes are NARROW, there were a few blind corners we could have gotten killed at, and we winced every time a car passed, expecting to get drenched with puddle-spray.

Our train didn't come into the station for about one and a half hours, so we sat on a freezing cold metal bench as the sun set and the temperature dropped (the sun is completely set by about 5PM here in October, so it was halfway dark by 4) as we froze. Two trains actually passed the station without stopping, even though they said "NORWICH" on the front, and we began to freak out a bit. Eventually another man came on the platform, and he told us that there was a train back to Norwich in about 20 minutes, and we thanked the Lord again. We got back to UEA by 5:45, which isn't too bad, but keep in mind it had been completely dark for about 45 minutes and looked at felt more like 10PM, and that we had been stuck out in the cold rain for hours.

Even though I'm a bit miffed that we wasted the whole day, it truly was a hilarious experience. It was like one of those shots in a movie where a train pulls out of a station, revealing three disgruntled-looking people on the platform making -.- faces. It was also creepy that the entire town was deserted (save for the pub, but when we returned to it, it was deserted, and it only had two other people in it to begin with) and that the only sounds we heard besides cows and birds was disconcertingly close shotgun shots. The only things that would have made it a worse experience would be if we hadn't found food and shelter from the cold and rain in the pub, and if...well, if we had gotten shot by the random, unseen farmer, or if we'd gotten run over by a car.