Bournemouth & Winchester

The last few days have been chop ful of tourist/guide times. I got to be the guide. And a tourist. On Friday I took the family to Bournemouth. It was sunny so I figured it would be ideal. Bournemouth is about a 45 minute train ride to the west of here, weaving through some tiny little towns in the new forest along the way (you can see some ponies). It's basically a resorty town and has a huge (HUGE) sandy beach that stretches on for ages. It was still rather cold and windy, so there weren't really people on the beach, and a lot of things were closed, but it still had a beachy/palm-tree vibe to it. And they have decent-sized stores there as well (they are all the same stores as everywhere else, however).

Friday was also red nose/comic relief day. Which basically meant that every once in a while some people would walk by wearing strange outfits, usually carrying some sort of charity bucket (I'm telling you, any chance to dress up in a silly outfit and the English are all over it). And I believe there was an evening television program on as well.

Returning from Bournemouth, I started giving the family the Southampton tour. After walking a couple blocks down Portland Terrace we were cutting over to Above Bar Street, and there ahead of us a couple of young local men were throwing punches at each other while their friends stood around yelling/video-taping/keeping other people from interfering. Nobody seemed to know what to do, but quite a few other people were running to watch. After a minute or two some cops came running up and broke it up. Not really sure what happened after that, as it was necessary to see all the rest of town in the one remaining hour of daylight.

Yesterday we went over to Winchester. Again. Winchester is not that exciting the third time. If anyone else comes to visit, we're not going there. You can pick another cute town to visit. And then we watched some rugby on television. England lost. It wasn't pretty.