Day 11: Starting slow in Sheffield

March 7th, Sunday.

After close to 13 years since I left Sheffield (that show's how old I am now) after graduation, I really can't believe that I am now back. The feeling is almost surreal. But today being a Sunday, we decided to go to church with Marilyn who attends Sheffield Chinese Christian Church (SCCC).

I remembered when I was new in Sheffield I used to follow some seniors and a bunch of my unimates from my batch to this church. It's a great place to meet up with other chinese and christians and students in Sheffield, and they really make you feel at home. But because the church was located quite far off from where I stayed, I soon joined another church - a local one with mainly angmohs but a livelier worship. However, I remained in touch with the cell from SCCC.

The service starts at 10am and we arrived there in good time. The kids were obedient, at first, soaking in the atmosphere in this very old, rather-neglected-and-rundown church, and then after the worship and during the sermon, guess what? William is all warmed up and running around. Thank God we got a pew right at the back, right hand corner of the sanctuary with some space for kids to run around, but then he got adventurous and decided to explore the other empty pews also at the back, but centre of the sanctuary.

We tried to occupy him with his Lego toys which we brought from Malaysia and even Victoria did her best as big jie jie to confine William to just our pews.

There was only another girl about Vic's age sitting with her father in front, and she was angmoh and sat through. Sadly, there are not as many students or congregation as what I remembered during my time. And well, since there were not many people (less than 50 on estimation) it seemed quite alright for William to check out the back pews without making noise.

After the service we had light refreshments. By then it was 12noon and the kids were hungry. William gobbled up the butter cake that I took but poor Vic had nothing that she could eat. So we quickly made an exit and find our way to the nearest launderette to clean bags and bags of our smelly dirty laundry accumulated from the farm stay.

We found one at NetherEdge, that charges 3.40pounds for one load and we dried our clothes for 15minutes at 1.60pounds. While waiting for the clothes to wash, we got our GPS to lead us to Dim Sum restaurant, which serves... well, dim sum, as the name suggest but we ordered a roast duck-bbq pork-roast-pork rice dish for the kids which came in a huge centrepool portion. We tried some of their dim sum too which I wouldn't say bad, even for Malaysian standard. That probably explains why the place was almost full house when we arrived and full house when we left.

The kids obviously were hungry, and ate quickly. After lunch, we went back to the launderette to transfer the washed clothings into the tumble dryer. We hung around outside the launderette, and it was during this time that I spotted a different kind of english post box and asked Vic to pose next to it, maybe just smile.

But this girl... haiya... just suddenly started to cry! And non stop too! She is so camera-shy and hides away everytime I point the camera from her. It's no torture to smile, right... and we really want her to remember this holidays by taking as much pictures as possible. In fact, I do wish I had more pictures of myself : )

Sunday in general was a rather slow day. We went home to rest before bringing Marilyn out for dinner. We initially wanted to eat Vietnamese which was her first choice but the restaurant was so packed, we were told to wait 20minutes. So we decided to try another place nearby but that also was fully packed. Finally we found a Jap restaurant, and by this time too (nearing 8pm) the kids were ravenous!

Vic ordered udon after having tried Aunty Ivy's yummy home cooked udon the other day, but unfortunately the udon that was served here wasn't much to her liking. Probably she was tired but I think the bamboo in the udon soup must have spoilt the taste.

William however, happily helped his sister with her udon noodle and also jumped around so much on the sofa chair because there was no high chair for him in this very tight small spaced restaurant.

Daddy had his pork katsu, and Marilyn ordered chicken katsu.

On the way home, both kids fell asleep in the car. Tomorrow, it's Meadowhall shopping!