Part 4

April 12th, 2010 – Orford Castle

We officially got to check out a castle today! YAY!

Well..before we went to the castle, we attended a “yard sale” type of thingy in one of the near by towns. My step-grandma, Paula, made me laugh cause she sorta “warned” us about the people that we were going to be seeing. “They’re all in-breds”, she said. Truth be told, she wasn’t joking. A LOT of the people there looked alike or were missing the majority of their teeth to the point where I couldnt understand they were saying...aside from the whole accent thing. It was pretty amusing from an outsiders perspective.

There was an area where you could auction off your stuff and so on.. there were a few things I took an interest in, but I managed to find a beat up looking cricket bat. Yes, I know. TOTALLY random thing to want, but I thought it’d be an awesome little souvenier of England considering it’s a massive sport to them. Sure, I could’ve just bought a flag for England, but it wasn’t as spiffy. SO, Paula looked into the information for absentee bidding since we weren’t willing to wait around for 4 hours for the auction to begin, I placed a max bid of 40 quid and off we went to check out Orford Castle. By the time we got back from checking out the castle, she had a message on her answering machine letting her know that she won the cricket bat for 10p (awesome!). Here's my victory prize:

Ok, so the place we checked out today was Orford Castle… pretty historic since it was owned by King Henry II. Given, it’s not as massive as some other castles I’ve heard about, but still! It’s a castle!

Dad is pretending that he's sword fighting down the stairwell

On the right: This is a Tipstaff -Dated 1851, carried by one of the Sergeants-at-Mace of Borough at court procreedings to indicate that this was an official public hearing.

On the left: Constables Truncheon - The Constable was a Borough official responsible for keeping law and order and enforcing trading laws and the use of statutory weights and measures. These truncheons date from the reign of King William IV (1830 - 1837).

Toilet...ewwww..

Lonely lil knight sitting in the corner

The view from ontop of the castle

When you walk in, you pay 5.30 and get a spiffy ittle “tour guide” cell phone that you wear while you’re walking around the place. Each room has a number plaque in which you key that number into the cell phone. At that point, you listen to it and it’ll give you all the historical information about that specific room and what it was used for. Pretty interesting stuff! Lots of great information about how the compound was used, where the King stayed or any important guests. At the end of the tour, I invaded the gift shop and picked up a cool lil leather goblet, a trebuchet paperweight in addition to some Honey Mead (it’s amazing). I was really considering getting a silver goblet, but I figured the leather was a lil more unique (I'll post pics of those later)..

From there, we went to a lil pub down the road that has some amazing food. I have some fried scampi (basically shrimp poppers) and enjoyed some rest and relaxation. One thing I’ve noticed when you’re in an English pub… people don’t like to talk when they’re at their table. They sit in silence a lot and just eat without conversing with one another..kinda odd. When we all sat down and we continued talking, people were staring at us as if we were from another planet. Oh well!

The Pub was down the street from the castle :)

After that, we ventured to a nearby town called “Snape”. If you’ve ever watched Harry Potter, it’s pronounced like Professer Snapes name. Very cute little place with it’s own little shopping mall area! I managed to find some cute little “coffee” mugs although they’re large enough to be used as soup bowls, mini hot pads, sporks (don’t laugh) and even some cute laundry signs for my house. AND, uhhhmazing Vanilla Fudge! I’m already almost out of that stuff so I definitely have to get some more of it before we head back to Belgium. I did my fair share of retail damage there, but the exchange rate from Pounds to Dollars REALLY isn’t all that bad (it’s $1.54 for 1 pound, it was almost $2 for 1 pound a few years back) and I won’t find this stuff back at home.

The pond within the shopping plaza

The boat outside of the shopping area

Once we were done doing some retail damage, we headed off to yet another little town that was at the opposite end of the street that our little cottage is on. We had some coffee / hot chocolate at a café, checked out their little clan of gorgeous swans and un-winded a little more. Some of the boats on the pond were 60+ years old! I only know that since Paula distinctly remembers that one of the boats, named Tweek, was around…she used to ride in it when she was a little kid..that’s roughly 60+ years ago! . All of the lil boats had names and numbers and you can tell they’ve been painted, repainted and super painted to keep them in working order, lol.

They were snuggling up to one another :)

LOTS of Swans!

When you look off into the distance, you see a house that’s literally hanging out WAY higher than any other house. In fact, you’d think it was a water tower. Paula drove us over to it and it’s called “House in the Clouds” and it houses 12 people, apparently. Not only that, but it’s available for rent! How cool is that?(  http://www.houseintheclouds.co.uk/ ) Obviously we had to be tourists, yet again, and take pictures of this thing since I haven’t seen something like that before.

Cool, hunh?

We retired back to Grandpa Ted & Paula’s place for a little bit so I managed to look up some additional information on some things to do in London since we’ll be heading there on Wednesday. SOOO many things to do! SOOO little time! The London Eye looked really cool to go on, but it takes anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour to ride (think of it as a slow moving ferris wheel), then there’s Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, The Ritz, Madam Tsaads, and several other places. After talking to my half aunt, Juliana, we figured on taking a Duck Tour around London for a little bit since it’s a pretty fun way to check out the city. When you’re on a Duck Tour, you ride around in an aqua car like they used on D-Day, but these are painted rubber ducky yellow…definitely eye catching! LOL. After talking to Dad about it, I went ahead and purchased tickets so we’re all set to go on that. Now all we need to do is figure out the train schedule from Aldeburgh to London…