How To Get Yourself Homesick

To be perfectly honest, I didn't really want to do homestay this weekend. My flatmates were all making plans to do fun things and I would have much rather spent time with people I know I like. Gloucester (Somehow pronounced 'Glaw-stur') is a small town about 120 miles Northeast of London. It's best known for a cathedral where scenes from Harry Potter were shot as well as its historical docks. Apparently those are the only notable things in the town at all, and I never saw the docks. We arrived late on Friday night after a four hour coach ride. This wasn't as bad as it could have been--I slept most of the time. In fact, I feel like this whole weekend was an opportunity to catch up on missed sleep. So we got there around 10 at night and it was so uncomfortable I just wanted to go to bed immediately. I met the family: T, the father, who I'd guess was around 45, thin, bald and with the face of a bull terrier...but not nearly as cute. He was very nice though. Then there's Chris, the wife, who I would age in her late fifties and had to be about twice T's size. If I had to assign her a dog it would be a chow...but much fatter. She was also very nice, but I really didn't understand her humour and she seemed to be completely lost when I talked about English literature. All I said was "Renaissance"! I also (very briefly) met another exchange student who had been staying with them for two months but who left the morning after I got there. Her name escapes me, but that's really okay because she was not at all a significant person...she was about 16, German, spoke very poor English, and only spoke in complaints. I wasn't so sad to see her go. However, I found out the next day that I was the only student from our group who didn't get paired with someone else from the group. Just me and the fam. It took me a while to decide if this was a good thing or a bad thing--I don't particularly like any of the other students in that group--but I soon realised that the awkwardness with the family was quite a lot to handle.
So I went to sleep surprisingly early for me and got up early the next day for a group foot tour of the city with the other students. This was completely miserable: freezing weather and no gloves, the oldest possible tour guide who had nothing significant to say (mostly personal anecdotes about her travels to other places as well as the occasional "here's a really old building"), and loads of people who seemed to be trapped in 1998. Very strange. And I must add that the whole town seems to consist entirely of preteens and the elderly. I'm not sure how that happened, but it's quite unfortunate. So I walked around, saw some insignificant things and ate an unremarkable sandwich at a pub. The Harry Potter Cathedral was the highlight. When I got back to the Tanner home I took a long nap (I was shocked and impressed by my body's ability to sleep solely out of boredom) until dinner ("dinner"), which consisted of a soggy microwave quiche and the driest salad I've ever eaten. Yum!
But then the real fun began. I was told we were going to a gothic surprise birthday party for Chris' son's "partner". I didn't know gay people were aloud in such a rural town!! I was disappointed to find that, in fact, said partner was a woman. They worked together, I guess, but I also saw him touching her kind of inappropriately so I don't fully understand what exactly their relationship was. Whatever. It was interesting to see what a whale of a middle aged woman living in Gloucester thinks of as "gothic". I was disappointed. The party took place at some sort of event hall that was set up for an uncomfortable wedding reception. Eight tables with identical trashy purple and black decor and the number 30 everywhere. And we were early. So I sat with my host family, barely talking, until the bar opened and they started feeding me cider. And what could I do? The only thing to escape the massive boredom and awkwardness was to get a little tipsy. Once the party kicked off, the fun really commenced. The DJ played all of today's greatest hits including Wham's "Wake Me Up Before You Go Go" and the classic "Final Countdown" by Europe. The best part, however, was the cake. It actually had Marilyn Manson's face on it. I bet you were all wondering why I had a picture of him at the beginning of this post! Just for anyone who doesn't know that handsome face.
So we stayed too long and I immediately went to bed when we got back, slept late the next morning until I finally got to leave. And there went Gloucester!