Birmingham - DanceXchange was pretty cool with its lovely studios, views of the shiny new city and the amazing Bullring building. Our first 2 night run since Brighton went very well apart from managing to elbow myself in the knee (yes, really!) and being a little tricky backstage doing our quick changes in a cupboard!After the show on Friday we really got to experience Birmingham nightlife (though not directly) due to some genius building the hotel on top of a nightclub. Hurrah! It wasn't that I couldn't sleep because of the music being loud, incessant and on until 5am - but rather because it was actually quite good and made me boogie a bit. David pointed out that the hotel had no 'customer comment' forms, despite having the corporate motto of 'your smile is our reward'. Most of the company weren't smiling in the morning...
24 hours in London before zooming to Ipswich for our first and only Sunday show. We had been anticipating some technical difficulties with this performance due to it's unique octagonal stage, but actually it was quite nice to have so much space! And kudos for providing sandwiches and being the first venue to provide toilet reading material in the form of the bestseller (apparently) '101 things your cat would ask your vet - if it could talk'!
As if to be some kind of sign of the strange evening ahead, we discovered a foot-long baby snake in the middle of Ipswich high street. After trying to palm it off to two of the most butch looking locals we could find (who both ran away like girls!), we sadly had to leave it on its way. To Sssssssomerfield or something (apologies, that was terrible).
The hotel was a unique experience, an old building covered in 70's movie posters, tribal masks and other knick-knacks. We retired to the dining room discussing scary movies over our take-aways and noticed that the dining chairs were adorned with coats that seemed to belong to nobody. A little freaked out, we headed to our rooms where staircases leading to nowhere made us wonder if we would hear some kind of bumps in the night. We survived though, heading to Cambridge bright and early. A place with many many bicycles but not many people riding them... Following a fairly smooth performance we were bundled into taxis and fed pizza on the train back home for a quick rest before Newport.
Upon our late arrival in Newport we struggled to find any restaurants open. It would seem that home cooked food in Wales is more popular. This point was proven when we finally found a charming Portuguese restaurant covered in trompe d'oeil, where the food took a little while but was brilliant (and incidentally cooked by Mama!). The theatre was pretty massive which made spacing a doddle and for the first time we got wolf-whistles from the feisty Welsh during a certain section of the show, can you guess which...?
