Someone remind me to pay my university fees soon. -_- Sadly I won't be seeing James this semester and he'll be at his internship until 5:00pm every weekday. And we'll probably be a bit busy on weekends. I hope he can take a day off every once in a while.

Like yesterday, he took a day off. We went to the aquarium.

The train ride down, was roughly three hours all up. I met up with several friends at the station and we got a whole train carriage to ourselves. We slept, played a bit too much I-Spy, and ran up and down the carriage. Finally, around 10am we got there. We watched a brief video about the history of steel and the mill, which was the first 20 minutes of boredom. We were given these really uncomfortable safety goggles, rather nice helmets, gloves and safety overalls. Then the tour began, and oh, it was terrible.

Did I mention the headsets? The earpieces were a good 12 mm across. They didn’t even fit in my ears, so I just sort of draped them there and turned the volume to zero the whole time. Boring as shit. Our guide spent so much time on..something we ran out of time for the more interesting stuff. And on the way back at noon after we had returned the gear we had borrowed, we all saw a big tray of sandwiches. As we prepared to plunder it, we were told it was not for us, and we were sent off the way we came. Horrible. The heat was intense, through the sweaty gloves and coveralls. My goggles fogged up so badly I could barely see a thing, so I just kept my eyes looking out through a thin rim on the bottom so I could see where I was stepping. When we were standing still, I just shut my eyes; it was really that bad.
The worst part of it all was the fact that we had each paid $20 to go, and I didn’t really learn anything. I could hear the guide even without my headset, and he was talking so many facts and figures there wasn’t any time to let it sink in before we were off again. On the way back we played more I-Spy, and we all ate whatever we had brought. Good thing I had noodles. Phew, hehe. I thought it was all over.

It wasn’t.

When I got to the station, it was 2:59 pm. I thought I had a bus that would take me home at 3 pm sharp, but it turned out to depart at 2:55. The next bus was at 3:30 and so I just sat there, sipping a bottle of water and talking to a friend about how crap the whole thing was. The bus came at 3:40. 40 minutes, we just sat there. Argh. It was a quarter past 4 when I got home; a total of seven and a half hours of public transport.

Ahh, I’ll eat stuff now. Hoohoo