Saturday, 9th November 2024, Colchester

Greetings, dear readers!

Let me, the brilliant Adrien, give you some highlights of our first proper day in England.

The sun hadn’t even had time to properly wake up, and my mother was already wide awake and ready to run out to explore. Seriously, I get that jetlag (not really, because let’s be honest, the one-hour difference doesn’t actually make a difference) is a drag, but we’re on holiday! What we don’t need is to wake up at 5 a.m. Now, now, before the early birds become angry birds, I’d like to point out that I would classify myself as a night owl—if you squint really hard—or perhaps some sort of permanently exhausted pigeon (as most students would). But alas, whether I rejoiced at the wake-up time or not, it was time for us to go out into the world and explore Colchester in all its morning glory.

Some would say we’re cheap; I’d like to think of it as being rather clever, but mum found a guy on YouTube who makes brilliant walking tours, so we opened that and just walked along with him. True to our nature, we abandoned him before the video ended and became enchanted by the squirrels and pigeons in one of the parks, proceeding to take a thousand and one pictures. One of the squirrels even mistook my mum for a tree—that cheeky, bushy-tailed rodent!

Link to the video: 

https://youtu.be/1GwZVaBntcY?si=Ahh5ipI9Nhf4FiV8

I don’t think mum fully understood the extent of my secondhand book-buying tendency before this holiday. Dear readers, since some of you have not yet had the pleasure of getting to know me, let me tell you something about myself: I REALLY like reading, and I’m in my third year at university studying English and French philology with a specialization in education. So, as you can imagine, I was thrilled when I realised I’d be able to once again travel to England and take advantage of the enormous number of charity shops to buy books. Let’s just say there probably aren’t many that escaped my eye. It’s going to take god-level 3D Tetris skills to get them all into the backpack and back to the Czech Republic, but we’re 3D Tetris champions—we’ll manage.

They even have a fortified Tesco here! Can you imagine? We’ll put a photo somewhere to show you. Honestly, you’d think they’d sell some top-tier stuff in there, but to my slight disappointment, it was just a regular English Tesco.

After walking all over and clocking up more steps than a sparrow in 100 years (not an English expression), we ended our day at a 4-star hotel for a party. More on that in our next post. Stay tuned for the next episode of English adventures! 

Yours truly

Adrien✨