Oxbury and Cadford

Welcome back. It's time for another installment in my mildly amusing life abroad. I'm sorry I haven't posted recently but I've been busy and my life has been boring. Anyway, I did some relatively interesting stuff since Dublin. Here it is.

Cadbury World. Chocolate. Observing screaming children who have eaten too much chocolate. That pretty much describes the trip to Cadbury which myself and a few others made on a recent Saturday. The Cadbury factory is in Bournville just outside of Birmingham (pronounced Berm-ing-um, hooked on phonics does not apply to British names and places) and it's pretty huge. Unfortunately it does not look like Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, which is what I was hoping for, well actually I was hoping for Oompa Loompa's but they are not at Cadbury either. It was a pretty long self-guided tour and they gave us free chocolate so I'd say it was pretty good. If we could have seen more of the chocolate making process I think it would have been more interesting, but, alas the mystery of Cadbury's is as tightly guarded as the recipe for the everlasting Gobstopper. Slugworth would have as much luck cracking Cadbury as he did Wonka.

Also, I went to Oxford yesterday with the Travel Society here at the University of Nottingham. It was a fun but I think we all would have appreciated a bit more time in Oxford before the shopping portion of the day. Oxford would have been better had we been able to tour some of the colleges but since students were leaving for Christmas Break we were unable to and had to settle for quick peeks at courtyards and stuff. Maybe that was a good thing though because the academic vibe was oozing from that place and it was kinda intimidating. We saw some students out and about and they looked pretty smart with their blue blazers and thick rimmed glasses. But they also looked like a stiff breeze could kick their ass! This is the kind of thought I comforted myself with while these kids were converting hydrogen into pure energy and lowering carbon emissions. I liked Oxford though, it was a nice, old, beautiful city. And Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings there so it has to be good!

I'm leaving this one short because I have lots of preparations to make before I leave for Rome on Saturday and I'm going to try and get a couple more posts up before then. So if ya don't know, now ya know...