UK Eagles 3: Where's Waldo?

I figure I'll catch you all up on the happenings of the past two days as a way of decompressing from a slightly traumatic haircutting experience this evening.  To explain; on every tour Kmimi gives me a haircut.  For the past few years it has been a standard faux-hawk.  She is really good at it.  Recently it had been suggested that perhaps I should have more mo' and less faux', which would mean having my hair considerably shorter.  It's hard to do that with scissors, but as it would happen Ham had a pair of clippers so we were able to get it shorter... mush shorter!  "uh-oh", "oops", and "is it supposed to look like that" are never things you want to hear coming from the people cutting your hair.  After a small snafu in which more hair than was expected disappeared from my head, Phaidra came to the rescue and faded, blended, and clipped me out of tragedy and into what became trendy.  In fact, at one point I felt a little like a movie star with Phaidra clipping one side and Kmiecik trimming the other and all my teammates wandering in to take pictures because they heard disaster was abounding.  All I needed was someone doing my make-up...

My exciting haircut aside, yesterday and today were really relaxing days, which was nice.  Yesterday, we had a morning session that was really high-paced and intense, which felt good.  It's great that things are starting to click and we are starting to get really excited about our game in less than a week!  After practice we came back to the dorms and pretty much just relaxed.  The weather was really gray and rainy again, so I didn't want to do anything.  Some people went into town to do some shopping.  I helped Kitt do laundry.  We got caught in a bit of a deluge, but eventually made it back to the dorm.

When we got back to the dorm it was time to start prepping for dinner.  Kmimi was heading up the food brigade, so we had all hands on deck to do the prep work for pizza night.  We had all sorts of veggies, meats, and other toppings being chopped and diced all over every surface of the kitchen.  We wound up with an awesome feast of three different pizzas.  We even had a few slices left over so we could snack on them during the Trueblood showing that happened later in the evening.

As you might have guessed, we watched some Trueblood that evening.  We decided, since we had today off, that we could watch two episodes.  We made some popcorn and got settled in.

Interestingly enough, we ended our day last night with Trueblood and then started our day with it today.  After having an awesome omelet that Ham made for breakfast, we decided that we had some time, so we ought to watch an episode of Trueblood before starting our day off.  We got through Episode 7, we decided it was still early enough that we really should watch Episode 8 as well.  I mean afterall, Episode 9 was going to be aired tonight.  We really should get ourselves caught up!  So we watched another one and then got ready to head into town to do some sight seeing.

There was a large group that all went into town.  We had a lot of fun adventures during our time in Guildford. I think a lot of it was facilitated by Nathalie who decided that we needed to recreate the Where's Waldo books all throughout the village.  We found Waldo at the bus, in phone booths, in trees, at the castle... really everywhere you looked there was Waldo.

Throughout this we saw a lot of cool stuff...  We wandered around the castle and the castle gardens.  The castle was built in 1066AD and there were walls around it that dated to the 12th and 13th century.  That is so ancient. I don't get how they were able to build the keep (that's what the tall castle tower is called) and the walls in those times.  Baffling.  While at the castle, we got to see a few teams competing in Lawn Bowling.  After the castle we went through some of the narrow alleys (called closes) and saw some of the old cathedrals and hospitals.  I've got some of the pictures here, but if you want to see all the days activity you can go to My World Cup Pictures.

We head over to the World Cup village at Surrey Sports Park tomorrow morning at which point all the other teams will be arriving (though NZ arrived yesterday so we've seen them around our dorms a bit).  So, tomorrow marks the official beginning of the tournament.  That meant that tonight there was a flurry of activity as we started packing up everything in preparation for the move.

Sadly, we weren't able to watch the latest episode of TB because it airs in the States at 8pm, which is 1am UK time. Maybe it'll be up online tomorrow so we can get our fix.  I really think that if we had had TB, we might have avoided the unfortunate hair escapade of this evening.  I think that we need TB to assuage our need for melodrama in our lives, and without it we are forced to generate our own...

Alright, time to sign out.  Next time I write it'll be from the World Cup athletes' village and we'll be one step closer to our goal!