Hi everyone!It's been awhile since my last update; since classes have started I've suddenly found myself with much less time on my hands. Gosh I don't even know where to begin, or remember where I left off last time! I guess I'll just dive in and hope I don't confuse anyone.
So last week we had our first seminar trip. The R-MWC (plus others) group has its seminar class World in Britain all year and one of the best perks is the weekend long trips that we take throughout the year. Our first trip this year was a marathon: we left Friday morning at 8am and didn't come back until 7 or so Sunday night. We visited Stonehenge, Montecute House, Wells, Bristol, Bath, and Lacock. Yikes. And away we go!
Ok, so day one: Friday. We left the houses at the bright and early time of 8 in the morning and, after about an hour of driving through countrysides that seemed to have come straight off of the cover of Dad's copy of The Fellowship of the Ring and a good bit of napping, our couch bus rolled over a hill to reveal a very familiar pile of rocks ahead. We all piled off and immediately pulled our scarves and coats tighter; it was freezing! We got our audio guides (which I admit, I didn't really listen to) and set off to look at some 5000+ year old stones. There was a very small rope forming a large circumference around the henges so we couldn't get close, which was a bit of a shame, but it was fun enough to see it from a distance. My house and I basically entertained ourselves by taking pictures that I believe are nothing short of epic. For those of you without Facebook, I'll be sending you pictures from the weekend so you can see them. So yea, Stonehenge was loads of fun and pretty exciting, thanks not only to the stones but also to my amazing housemates. There is a sad story from this tale, however... I was wearing my favorite pair of shoes ever for this trip. These shoes have a history that I simply can't go into detail here because it would take too long, but I will say that I've had them since freshman year of high school and they've gone with me literally everywhere. Well, I had a feeling they were nearing their end due to the English rain (they soak it up like a sieve) but it was when a small piece of the bottom of my shoe came off at Stonehenge that I knew it was time to start saying my goodbyes. But hey, they've been to Stonehenge, and a part of them stayed there; that's gotta count for something.
Anyway, moving past the tragic story of my shoes. After we'd had our fill of old stones (and after we had lost feeling in all of our extremities) we piled back on the bus to head out to Montacute House, an Elizabethan stone-built house. It was interesting; the rooms were pretty nice and it had a large collection of portraits from the English monarchy. We wondered around the gardens outside a little bit and then went in to the house's cafe for lunch, then off to Wells! In Wells we spent most of our time walking around the Wells Cathedral, in which we got a detailed tour from our architecture lecturer Mr. McHardy. It drew on a little long for my tastes at times, so I wandered around a little bit by myself. Eventually we went out to wonder around the town for a little bit, I bought truffles at a chocolate shop, and then it was getting dark and time to head to Bristol to get settled into our hostel.
The Youth Hostel in Bristol was right on the river less than a 5 minute walk to a great area with good restaurants. The hostel was divided by gender (not that it mattered much since the group is 99.9% female, the male of the group, of course, being Brooke [she's not really, that was just my lame attempt at a joke]) and my room was the whole 153 group: Brooke, Sarah, Robin, Sam, Reena, and myself. Yep, 6 girls in one room, and we couldn't be more excited if we tried. I honestly didn't forsee myself finding such a group where I'd actually WANT to be with the 5 of them all the time; it's pretty awesome. After dropping off our stuff and relaxing a little, we met up with some of the girls from 141 and went out to an Italian cafe for dinner. Exhausted, we came back to the hostel and passed out.
That was day one.
Now, onto the rest of the weekend. Don't worry, we did far more in the first day than the others, so this hopefully won't take too long. On Saturday we set out early again, this time to the city of Bath. Our first stop there was happily the Roman Baths, where I spent at least an hour and a half walking around and listening to the audio guide (yes, I did!). After learning about the Roman Bath system in classes it was so exciting to actually walk through one! I even remembered some stuff from the baths in Pompeii and managed to look smart in front of the group. The baths themselves still had water pumping into them from the natural underground spring and it was so warm that the whole area was steaming; it would have looked inviting on that cold morning if it wasn't also bright green with unidentifiable most likely single-cell organisms floating around in it. After that, we passed through the Pump Room and just had to try the warm mineral water from the spring. It tasted like eggs and felt like milk, but I guess it was an experience I had to have...
We had the whole day at Bath so we walked around to find things to occupy us. Sarah, Robin, and I found a craft store at a church and, being nostalgically reminded of our own church craft fairs, went in. It was very cute and definitely reminded me of the New Hope October Bazaar, pretty much my most favourable memory of that church, which isn't say too much but still says something, back at home. We wandered upstairs and they were having a Charity Christmas Card sale. England is very good to its charities and one of the things that it does is have Charity Card Sales in churches. How it works is there's a long line of charities represented, each with stacks of different kinds of Christmas/holiday cards you can buy for your friends and family. You can pick the charity you want to support, get cards from that section, and then all the proceeds to the charity. I got a pack of cards from the MS research charity, and then we moved on our way. Dr. Ivy had purchased tickets for our group in two places besides the Roman Baths: the Fashion Museum and the Royal Crescent. My little group of 3 headed first to the Fashion Museum, which featured costumes (not what we would call costumes in the States; that's called 'fancy dress' here... can you imagine how embararssing it would be for a person from England to be invited to an American party with 'fancy dress attire'? That thought always makes me laugh) from a wide range of time periods, including some Victorian dresses which were quite nice. The highlight of that was definitely the room where we could try on our own corsets and dress skeletons (I'm horrible and have completely forgotten what they're called), and you can see pictures from this adventure in the album I'll send out. After corsets and a light lunch we headed to the Royal Crescent, which was more or less an old house. It was quite pretty, but honestly a bit like all the other old houses I saw all weekend, so I'm going to move on now.
The next most amazing experience in Bath was Sally Lunn's, a famous little bun shoppe that took us 15 minutes of waiting in the rain to get into, but was worth every minute. The three of us got a small table and ordered a pot of tea and a bun each, all covered in cinnamon and served with clotted creame. This is no ordinary cinnamon bun, but is even better. I can't even describe how it tastes, but it was so amazingly satisfying that I'm making myself hungry just thinking about it right now. We spend 2 hours in there with our tea (they gave us another kettle free of charge) and it was absolutely lovely.
We left Bath at about 5:30 and headed back to Bristol. Victoria, Elysia, and I headed out to dinner at a local sensation called "Flavourz", which was a buffet with Indian, Chinese, Italian, and Mexican style options. Sounds sketchy, I know, but it was actually amazing, and the first time I've had Chinese food since I've been here, or been to (or SEEN) a buffet even. I once again walked to the hostel and quickly passed out.
And now on to day 3. We spent the first part of the day wandering around Bristol, and we visited the Red Lodge and Georgian House, both old English homes elegantly furnished with period pieces and a lot of portraits. In all honesty, though, I was feeling a bit worn out on old houses and portraits, so after those two I sat down in a cafe (called The Boston Tea Party) and let the rest of the group wander off as I drank a pot of tea, ate a chocolate muffin, and wrote in my journal. It was actually quite wonderful and peaceful, and though I love my housemates dearly, I needed some time on my own. After I felt like I'd imposed on the cafe long enough (though there were plenty of people doing the same thing around me), I went to start walking back to the bus for our rendezvous. I walked past the city council and a Cathedral and it was absolutely gorgeous; the beauty of the ivory colours and modest fountains were only furthered by the bright yellow and orange fall leaves that covered the ground and the tall trees around the small open garden in front of them. I walked along the path alongside it for a bit, then continued on to the river where I met with Sarah and Robin, who were buying crepes from a stand. We all got on the bus and headed off for Lacocke.
I didn't really know what to expect of Lacock; the only things that I knew was that it was once an Abbey, was then a school, and is now a stately home/museum. I ALSO knew that many parts of the first and second Harry Potter movie were filmed there and, I am slightly embarrassed to admit, that fact excited me far more than the former ones. When we got there we split up into smaller groups and Robin, Sam, Sarah, Reena, and I started wandering through the house, followed shortly by Mr. Dr. Ivy. Shortly after beginning we realized that this was far different from all the other houses we'd seen: not only where the decorations far more ideal and interesting (for myself, at least) but the guides in each room were absolutely amazing. One of them tried to 'sell' us a terribly gaudy chandellier, broken Chinese bowl (alas, it was dropped by the delivery boy just moments before it was to be given to Queen Victoria), and a Royal Pardon (imagine the things we could do with THAT... we'd never get deported!); the next tour guide told us all about where Harry Potter was filmed and also fascinating bits actually relevant to the history of the house. We were also lucky enough to have Dr. Ivy at our heels, and he delighted us with an impromptu tour as well. After an surprisingly wonderful time in the house, we headed out to the Cloisters, where the Harry Potter bits were filmed. We got far too excited about all of it; yea, we're in college.
After all that, we wondered around Lacocke Village, which served as Hogsmeade in the third movie and has been featured in countless other films and shows since due to its overly picturesque appearance. It was absolutely, positively the epitome of what I'd imagined a small English rural town would be. We (same group minus Reena, who'd gone to the museum) went into a local wool store run by a little old man whose hours were "10am to 4ish, everyday but Sunday" and whose posted etiquette rules consisted of "Dogs are welcome!" We eventually found an adorable tea shop and ordered another kettle; they all got scones, and I decided to try the "lumb", which turned out to be like 3 small buns stacked on top of one another with cinnamon between, almost like the Sally Lunn bun. After enjoying a short time there we had to run off to the bus for our return journey. We came back to Whiteknights Road, I walked into 153 and dropped my bag, my purse, and myself, and don't feel like I've moved since. Well, election night sure woke me up, but that's another story entirely.
Long story short, it's a wonderful world.
I'll hopefully write again soon; thanks for making it this far.
Cheers,
Katt/Katherine
