Day 2 - Brighton

Today, I'm ashamed to say, I've been a Tourist. You know, one of those strange creatures that visit museums, gape at everything, eat from food stalls, and generally see the world through the LCD of their camera. It's been fun.

We've seen the Big Thing in Brighton, the Royal Pavilion, with a free museum full of strange stuff from all over the world. Egyptian stuff too, obviously. It seems no museum is one if it doesn't have mummies. Just look at the Vatican Museum, holding on display corpses of heathen worshippers of idols. No mummies here though, but a few sarcophages there were.

Then we saw the Next Big Thing, the Brighton Pier. A kind of a very expensive small-scale theme park. Nice though.

At about 4pm Paula left me to my own devices, and the first thing I did was get inside a Tesco. And damn, every time I get into an English supermarket I'm happy as a child in a new world of wonders. After gaping at every colourful salad, ready-to-eat pineapple and decorated bun for a while, I discovered I can meet my daily needs of food intake for less than 2£ (yeee-hawww!).

After that, for reasons that elude rational explanation, I hopped on a bus and then on the first train to Lewes.

It's cute, Lewes, with a certain medieval sensation about it. Stone houses and crooked narrow rock-paved walks between them. And the Big Thing about it: the Castle. Or what's left of it, a tower and a gate for what I've seen.

Very well preserved, full of conmemorative plaques, and actually used as housing. I actually caught the inhabitants of one part of the ruins, a couple in their sixties, going to visit those of the other part, another sixtysome couple, their doors being 20 meters away. But they went through all the ceremony of courteous how-do-you-dos, how-nice-of-you-to-comes, big social smiles and gracious manners as if they had just landed from Auckland. Tic-tic-tic, ils sont fous, ces bretons.

Back in Brighton I met Paula again and we went to carry out a thorough inquiry into what Brighton has to offer in the way of pubs. And it does have quite a lot of them, some very nice and not too horribly expensive. However, our joy was short-lived. It turned out every single pub closed at the unbelievably, mind-bogglingly stupid hour of 23:00, some of them earlier. WTF!!

So we had to gulp down our beers and make our way home walking in slight esses. And that's not only because the expensive day ticket doesn't work for night buses and they are expensive, they also aren't.

But we had fun and that's what matters, right?