Leicester and Brighton

Well well well, I've had an interesting few days - and definitely the good kind of interesting, don't worry! On Friday afternoon I caught a bus to the coach station in Birmingham, and then a coach up to Leicester. Now there's a few things to say about this. First of all, coach drivers in England are just about the friendliest people I have ever met. Seriously, they're just awesome. And on top of this, the coach driver I had was the same guy who'd driven the coach I was in on my last trip, over a year ago! What are the chances, eh?
Second thing, double-decker buses are a fantastic idea. Remember the days of cramming yourself into a bus on a miserable Monday morning you Sydney-siders? Never again! I say the government should just chop the wheels off every second bus and stack them on top of the rest. Problem solved!
Third, who the hell makes people pay to go to the toilet? At the coach station they had a little turnstile thing which you had to put 30p in to get through - and it had to be exactly 30p. I didn't have 30p, but I did have a full bladder. Thankfully they had another brilliant invention close by, a change machine! I think that's fairly self-explanatory - like a vending machine, except you don't really buy anything. But back to this turnstile business, I just think that's slack. I saw one poor old man going through it - he almost made it, just his leg got stuck in the bars, which swung back up to the top position and left him hopping about on one foot while his wife desperately tried to wrestle his leg away from the Machine of Doom. She quickly succeeded, don't worry. I like to think I'm not a bad enough guy to just watch as an old person struggled with their inflexible hamstrings, thinking to myself 'I should mention this in my blog...'
Okay, last interesting thing about the journey there, then I promise to move onto something less mundane. Someone died on the coach. I was just sitting there, minding my own business when the guy across the aisle started grunting. He was slumped forward in his seat, asleep, but now he was twitching, grunting more and more loudly and drooling copious amounts down the front of his suit. By now the sounds he was making were getting disturbingly loud, and people were starting to stare. 'Sir, are you alright?' I reached out and shook his arm. 'Excuse me sir?' ... And then he grunted, nodded, yawned, and fell back asleep. Okay so he didn't die, I just tried to make it more exciting. Sue me.
Well Leicester itself was quite fun, I got to spend some quality time with some very good family friends of mine. A lot of people I've talked to seem to think Leicester is a bit of a joke, but I don't think it's much different to Birmingham really, just a bit smaller. So hah!
I tagged along with them while they visited relatives in Brighton, three hours drive away. Now here I had a bit of a special moment. Leicester is in the midlands (the middle of Britain), and so I assumed that Brighton was in the Midlands too. After all, in Sydney you can drive for three hours and only get to Campbelltown, which is still really a part of Sydney. So that was a reasonable assumption, right? Nope. Brighton is south of London, apparently. I seemed to have forgotten just how tiny this country is. But Brighton itself was lovely with all its rolling hills and massive plains, even if the famous Brighton Beach was disappointingly, well, lacking any sand. Nevermind, we made stone-castles all the same!
And then, after hanging around a bit more, I caught a coach home, and lo and behold - it was the same coach driver yet again! What are the chances of that, I ask you? Unless, as my brother suggested, all I was seeing was different parts of a set of quintuplets. I'm not sure which is more likely.
And that's that for that little trip. Now I must say, I've been quite disappointed with the lack of comments you guys have been leaving - come on, let's get some dialogue going! If you don't know how to leave a comment, you just click on the '0 comments' link below any post, and you can write a comment for it. I think you need to make a Google account to do it but that's pretty quick to do. Now I have a proposition for all of you. At any time, you can leave me challenges in the comments - some task, big or small, funny or serious (preferably funny) that you'd like to see me try to accomplish, and unless it's illegal or downright stupid I'll give it a go!