Great Britian welcomed me with giant cliffs and gray skies on Friday afternoon. I have discovered now that the grey does not even phase me now. The cliffs were impressive and beautiful, and the ride from Dover to Eastbourne was filled with rolling, green English hills and pastures inundated with sheep and splattered with cows. We also passed through the town that invented the television.
Hugues, his wife Natalie, and I arrived in Eastbourne around noonish. After a delicious lunch (for Hugues and Natalie, fish and chips; for me, vegetarian lasagna), we headed over to a Rotary meeting. Let me preface this next part by writing that before that afternoon, all I knew about this trip was that I was coming to England and that I was being kindly hosted by a woman in a town somewhere between Brighton and Eastbourne. So, I walked into the Rotary meeting , embarassed, wearing jeans. Thankfully for me, someone had left our nametags at the hotel where Natalie and Hugues are staying, so I had time to change into suitable pants and my Rotary blazer when we went to fetch them.
This Rotary meeting, I soon discovered, was the conference meeting for District 1120. (It is pretty much the same thing that I went to in Wilmington for District 7680 last spring before I came to France, complete with the House of Friendship and everything.) The speakers at the Rotary meeting included two men who spoke about Prostate Cancer, an Ambassadorial Scholar from South Korea, a man who discussed Rotaract, Andy Garland a BBC Kent radio show host, and Cheryl Baker who used to be a member of the 80's band Bucks Fizz. Mrs. Baker, who spoke last, sang for us; it was beautiful, and she shared with us a story about one of the band members who had a stroke due to blood clots in his brain, introducing the charity Headfirst.
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