Day 0b: numbers are hard, let's go shopping

Wow, this morning feels like a long time ago. So I made it to Hamburg in one piece. (This does, today, not go without saying: I was about half an hour early, and made sure to amble around away from three drunken people who were very close to getting inot a fistfight with a taxi driver.) Having checked in online (note to self: pay with paypal and they can't have a mismatch between name on credit card and name of passenger, which in my case is a missing middle initial), I had a bit of time in Hamburg to sit around at the gate. Flight was uneventful (tomato and cream cheese croissant).
Transfer from Heathrow to Victoria Coach was ... amusing, since there were three fairly loud Germans in the same carriage, who were planning to change at Lay-chester Square and were otherwise talking in German (so it's kind of hard to pretend you don't understand). Don't know if that was the world's smallest stag do or just a lad's week off -- the only plan I heard them mention was visiting a Tank museum.
And I will mention at this point that I think the signage from Victoria underground to Victoria coach is, errr, suboptimal, with tiny signs and crossing a street or two without any sign at all. (Note to self: it's a block further than you think, and behind you. Free suggestion to TfL: put a colored line on the pavement all the way from one to the other. Works for Kiel and its four cruise quays.)
So, to come around to the title of the post, I'm sitting in VCS waiting for my bus with approx. an hour to spare, and I apparently look at it properly the first time -- why is the return trip on a wednesday when my flight and my room are until thursday? Fortunately, Great Yarmouth is not cut off from the mainland by high tide when the moon is full or somesuch, so this problem can easily be solved by throwing money at it. Dates are hard, apparently, let's go shopping! I try to further use the time by getting a bit more cash out of an ATM there (I avoid ATMs in Heathrow, I figure they have no interest at all in giving you a good rate or low withdrawal fees since they need to refinance the most expensive rent ever), and find out the hard way that apparently the PIN on my CC isn't what I thought it was?
So I spent four hours in a fairly run-down NatEx coach to Yarrrrmouth, going through plans B, C and D. (I have my Maestro debit card with me, and fortunately, that gives my money over here, but I didn't know if it had a foreign transaction limit. Or, in fact, I know that my bank does impose a foreign transaction limit, and that it has different limits for "Europe" and "otherworldly" (my phrasing, not theirs), but I recall when I went there six years ago to have them adjusted, the bank clerk basically could not tell me if "Europe" is Euro-zone, EEC, or SWIFT-zone. (At this point in my travel, I was worried that the nice people at Copperfield's would very strongly prefer cash -- on my first trip to Blackpool oh so many moons ago, the b&b charged me their banking charge of 2%. With a guessed daily tx limit of 100€, it would have taken a few days to pay my board/with the card not working in their machine, I was prepared to leave a 200€ deposit while I go find an ATM.)
Anyway, all this turned out to be inconsequential -- I got to the b&b, nobody was there, but they had left a phone number to call (it's very possibly I've not made a phone call with it since Bournemouth last year, calling the guy about how to get into the flat we rented, when it turned out we were looking at a number-combination-locked box that was not the box we were supposed to be looking at), and people turned up about ten minutes later (they were on their way back from the hospital). And yes, my Maestro debit card worked, and the room is nice and the bed doesn't have a footboard, which is very useful, and it's right next to the shared shower/WC.
And so I dropped my stuff, tried to re-deodorate as best I could (no spray allowed on planes, and the roll-on I have had the miraculous quality of not giving lcohen asthma attacks, but does buggerall about transpiration and smell) and headed out to the beach. The beach is maybe a hundred meters down the road, and there's arcades on the corner and stuff, even if some of the stored seem to already have closed for the season. Talking of closed and weird, there's an oil rig sitting here in spitting distance. I will venture out and get the angle right and take a picture of the oil rig and the big ferris wheel.
And I had a bit of sniffle, because I miss Prawn, my offspring which I will never see again (because custody being what it is), and we could've built little tidepools and have father-son bonding moments. (GY beach is sand and shell fragments on the land side, but the tide actually drags in lots of pebble, so the actual tidal part is pebble.) I think he would've enjoyed that. (For those of you not following this closely, Prawn is lcohen's and my common offspring, a stuffed orange seahorse I gestated in time for her second trip to Germany, I think.) Since vacations are my pondering-time, expect more maudlinity along those lines. I'm sad she took a "do this or I'll never ever talk to you again" attitude, from pretty early on.
And now I have more cash and some basic shopping to get me through to tomorrow: decaf tea bags, roast lamb and mint crisps (rather nice actually), some granola bars and new deodorant. Still need sunscreen, though -- it's around 28C and sunny here, which is why I'm now hiding inside to write this, even though it's only half past five.
In other news, I have a problem: people here have a vowel enunciation and triggers my brain into thinking they're talking German. Something about the 'a's, I think. On the bus, I thought it was the two indian-looking guys speaking some third language altogether, but even here, people in the mid-distance sound like they say "Ja" and "Nein".
What else is going on here? There's going to be some sort of festival ("Out and about" or so?) this weekend, there's already a couple of trapeze artists training on a huge swingy ropy contraption on the beach.
That's all I can think about right now, but I guess that's plenty.