England: Finally on the move

The days here fly by, I've already been here for a week and it feels like an eternity. After spending the first few days hardly leaving the farm to get used to the routine, Sara and I went to Leicester yesterday, the next largest city. It is a beautiful university town (of course not to be compared with Jena...), very British and at the same time multicultural. Leicester is very modern, but you can discover traces of the Romans and the Middle Ages in some places. We took the bus from Barwell to Leicester, which was great because we could look out of the window. But no matter how big the window is, you can't see anything when there's thick fog outside. When we arrived in Leicester, we went to the Newark Houses Museum, which shows life in Leicester and the surrounding area from different centuries. It was small but designed with a lot of love and it was great fun to get to know a little bit about British life. I particularly liked a room where a shopping street was recreated from 19th and 20th century Britain. I felt like Harry Potter in Diagon Alley. We wandered around the museum a bit, always on the run from at least 4 classes of 6-8 year olds. After that, we explored Leicester, we saw the Bell Tower, the Cathedral and the Guild Hall. King Richard III is buried in the Cathedral, but just like the exhibition, we unfortunately couldn't visit the Cathedral because we had to realize that public institutions and shops in Great Britain close quite early. Where you can still buy a beer in Berlin at three in the morning, everything in Leicester closes at four. So we went on a discovery tour through the city, we saw rowers from a university club rowing (fast guys) and visited the beautiful fruit market. Narborough Road is a street with various restaurants from all over the world, and you can get everything from doner kebab to African specialties there. In that street, we met Jan again, who had a dance rehearsal in a community hall. She practices Morris Dance, an English folk dance that confused me a lot. Normally practiced by men, Jan's women's group has to wear woolen beards and dance with handkerchiefs in their hands and clatter sticks together. At another point, there was a witch who stole the handkerchiefs from the others and took away the sticks. Sara and I watched (although we now know the basic steps) and took care of two dogs (by the way, a great idea to take dogs to a dance where mainly big sticks are swung...). Nevertheless, Morris Dancing is very impressive, with loud singing, fiddle and accordion.

There's a lot going on at the farm again, we currently have ten dogs, but only five cats. Half of the dogs are difficult or impossible to get moving when we're in the field. Tommy is ancient and just as deaf as his old owner, and Zak, the giant schnauzer, just had one of his toes amputated and hobby-wise likes to lean against people. Honey, the golden retriever lady, always looks a little sad even though she's actually quite happy. The last sheep are all having lambs at the moment. Yesterday we had to help out because a sheep that had never given birth before couldn't do it without help, so Jan and Dave had to help. We separated them from the herd and then we could see a little lamb being born. That was beautiful :)