Awe-Inspiring Canterbury Cathedral

It's hard to believe, but it's my next-to-last weekend in England!  Wanting to make the most of it and see as many things as I can, my hosts were lovely enough to suggest going with me to Canterbury and then taking me today to see the Seven Sisters park (which I'll talk more about in another post).  My preceptor, Karen, had a driving lesson and wasn't able to go to Canterbury with her husband, David, and I.  We set out early Saturday morning in one of the coldest mornings I've had here, with a hard frost on the ground and the car thermometer reading -2.5!  Of course, that's a little less cold when you consider that's Celsius.  It warmed up as we went along, but it was still enough to warrant starting the day with a nice hot latte to warm my hands, especially since I misplaced my gloves at some point during the previous day.  We started off strolling through Canterbury, intending to slowly meander our way over to the cathedral.  Neither of us had been to Canterbury before and I personally was imagining the cathedral to be set apart from the shopping district by at least some distance, so imagine our surprise when we turned a corner and saw this:

That would be the ancient entrance to the courtyard of Canterbury cathedral, smack dab next to a Starbucks.  

Now some obligatory shots of the outside of the Cathedral, which dates from 1100 (a tour guide told us at one point, "There isn't much left from the oldest part of the church.  Almost everything else you see here is new".  When I asked him when was it re-done, he replied, "Oh, in the 1300 and 1400s." Never assume that new means from your lifetime, or even from your great-great-grandparents lifetime)

 Can you see the scaffolding on the lower right of this shot?  Recently (actually recently) a few stones fell off the outside of the church.  With closer inspection, they realized that there were a few parts that were cracking and putting some of the stained glass windows in danger.  They took all those out and are cleaning them while re-doing the outside of the cathedral.  We're lucky this isn't like the 1300s; they just completely demolished the building then and started over.

 The Cathedral cat, Laptop.

Only in St. Anselm's chapel was the stained glass doing this to the walls.  I just loved it. 

These places are awfully awe-inspiring.  Also, I think of Star Wars.  I have no idea why.

Canterbury Cathedral is the mother church of the Church of England.  It was founded by St. Augustine, but really became something when Thomas Becket, Archbishop, was murdered here by a few rogue knights who thought they were on a mission from the King.  He was sainted at lightspeed (only 2 years) and pilgrims flocked here by the thousands to be healed by touching or kissing his tomb.  Unfortunately for them, King Henry VIII had a big issue with the Catholic church (namely that pesky first wife) and spent a lot of time destroying anything to do with Roman Catholicism, including the relics of St. Thomas Beckett.  He couldn't just destroy them because Beckett was an important figure.  So he put Beckett on trial, claiming that if he was really a saint he could arise from his grave to defend himself.  Since that didn't happen, Henry VIII declared Beckett to be a heretic and burned his bones.

Can you see the arms and elbows in this marble alter?

St. Augustine's Abbey ruins

Canterbury University

London One More Time

Yesterday I had a free day and a few pounds in my wallet, so I decided to hop a train into London for the day.  On my definite "wants" to do for the day was St. Paul's Cathedral, but doing it up proper this time instead of doing a quick look around when walking through the crypt to the loo.  But before I headed there, I wanted to do a good wander around the city and just take in the sights.  (One of my favorite things of traveling is seeing how other people live in other parts of the world, which is why I am always going on about kids climbing on castle ruins, etc.)  So I spent a couple hours just wandering around, getting "lost".  I put that in parentheses bc I had a map and crossed quite a few tube stops, so don't be worried.  I didn't always know where I was, but I was always just loving the buildings, the people having lattes in their cute little coffee shops, and going into their high end grocery stores.  I didn't take many pictures, which I tend to not when I'm alone.

When I first set out, the day was chilly and grey, like most days here.  However, after a few minutes in London, it became very warm and sunny.  Here's my proof of a beautiful sunny day in London:

This pic was taken in Sloane square, just outside the tube station.  Have I mentioned how much I love love love the London underground?

I also spent some time at Hyde Park, which Steve and I walked through together on our time here.  The difference is that when we walked through together, it was definitely wintertime for the flowers.  When I walked through yesterday, it smelled of honeysuckle and roses, all of which were budding or blooming!  That just tells you how mild it has been here, something that people keep telling me is super unusual.  I'll take it!

I also ate my breakfast here in Hyde Park after ducking into a Waitrose, a high end grocery store that I'd heard a lot about here.  Well, it has nothing on Whole Foods, especially the Whole Foods here.  Brits love their cheese, but WF took it to another level, having a massive (MASSIVE!) cheese counter AND a cheese curing(?) room:

I was in total awe here. It's been awhile since I walked stupidly around a grocery store, but this one did it to me. 

And how could I NOT get a meal here?  I love to eat at WF anyways.  It was such an eerie feeling to be sitting somewhere that felt familiar and completely alien at the same time.  Loved it!

I also went back to St. Paul's Cathedral and spent almost 3 hours there, taking in the Cathedral, walking the much touted 267 steps to the Whispering Gallery, and taking a guided tour through the Cathedral.  It was the highlight of my already awesome day.  Sadly, I couldn't take any pictures in the Cathedral, but here are a few highlights:

• The whispering gallery made me appreciate what schizophrenics must hear.  I could hear a multitude of voices, some soft and some loud, that belonged to people whom I had never seen but were saying very odd things.  Eerie.
• Really, 267 steps that are like 1-inch high is not something to be warning people about as being difficult.  I mean, really.
• When offered the choice of taking the free guided tour vs the free audio tour, always take the guided tour.  We got to go places that are off-limits the rest of the time.  For instance, the Geometric Staircase (google image search it) was incredible.  It's a spiral staircase where each stair's weight is supported by the stair underneath it.  We also sat in the quire, where the choir sings.  The benches there were from the 1400s.  Glad I didn't scratch them!
• Hearing the story of how the English received the book of names of Americans killed in WWII while serving on/based from English bases was a little different than what I had heard before.  The difference lay in the sentiment...my guide presented it as something the Americans forced the English to do as partial payment for the debt that the Brits now forever owed to America.  I prefer to think of it as the Brits were so grateful that they wanted to keep the book in honor.  I think my guide had a chip on his shoulder anyway, since he kept singling out the Americans in the group to watch the steps and that we may have to go up a couple steps if we can manage... (and thankfully I didn't trip on any steps.  I just knew I was going to reinforce his ribbing)
• BTW, that book was names was really really big.  I asked the guide and he said they have a facsimile book that family members can look through to find their loved ones' names.  He said it's one of the more touching parts of his job.
• The Churchill gates in the crypt do not mark where Churchill actually rests, they just stand in memorium.  Churchill is buried at his family crypt at some place not St. Paul's.
• St. Paul's was famously a target during the Blitz and was hit by several firebombs, but each bomb fell in a location where no valuable artifacts/art was damaged.  For instance, if one of the bombs had fallen about 10 feet west, it would have irreparably damaged the beautiful Byzantine mosaics on the ceiling that had no arch support.  As it was, the bomb fell exactly where there was support and no damage was really done.

I can keep going about St. Paul's, but I'd never stop.  I thoroughly enjoyed it and highly recommend it.  The view from St. Paul's steps is a little funny:

Can you see some of the tents to the side?  Some sort of Occupy protest, but each tent seems to be protesting their own things. I saw a PETA tent, a Greenpeace tent, and one tent asking for your end of the year bonus.

I thought this was a little funny; people watching and tent watching.  It works.

After St. paul's, I headed up to Camden Market, somewhere I had read was a cool, funky place to go shopping.  It was definitely funky.  

I didn't stick around here for too long since most of the shopping available was rip-off merchandise, which makes me a little uncomfortable.  Anybody from the Goeller family remember the Great Nike Watches Sting from DC trip 1996?  I sure do!  :)

After Camden Market, I headed to Whole Foods, but those pics are up above. It was a wonderful day and a great way to say good-bye to London. I'm quickly drawing to the close of my time here in England, which has gone by way too quickly.  Upcoming posts:  Canterbury/Seven Sisters Weekend, English Healthcare Experiences, Edinburgh Weekend, and English Differences.

Also there has been much talk from Steve about doing some posts from our trip, but those have yet to materialize....

Chawton and Oxford

This past weekend, my hosts (Karen and David) and I headed to Chawton, Hampshire.  Chawton is Jane Austen's home, where she accomplished most of her writing during her too short life.  It was small in the 18th and 19th century and it is small now!  One of the things I love so much about England is the maintenance of that which is old. On our drive to Chawton, we passed several buildings that my hosts told me are "old", which here means early 1400s.  Really!  1400s!  People are still LIVING in those houses!  They have been done up again, patched here and there with newer bricks (like sometime in the 1700s), but still they remain.  Things aren't abandoned here, they are patched up and continue to be used.  I've always read about thatched roofs (a roofing method where they take bundles of thatch and lay it in such a way as to create a very stable, sturdy, and extremely flammable roof), but I never imagined people living in a house with thatched roofs, much less imagined it as a tri-plex situation:

It's difficult to see from this picture, but there are actually 3 front doors here, all separated from each other with a little wall in between. Very very cute!  I imagine a little drafty, though.

This little house is just across the street from Jane Austen's house, Chawton House:

Technically, this was Jane's brother's house and he just let her and her sister live in it rent-free for life.  Nice guy, I'd say. :)  It was really just awesome.  The house is not a national historical site and is maintained by the Jane Austen Society, who have tried to preserve it as close to how it was when Jane and her beloved sister Cassandra lived there.  They had a few hand-written things from Jane, but no letters or manuscripts.  After Jane died, her sister burned everything that she had in Jane's handwriting, believing they may later paint her in a negative light.  As such, there aren't too many things left of Jane's original writings.

This is the backside of Chawton house, part of the "courtyard".

Their English Garden.  It's been so mild here that flowers are already beginning to bloom.

The building at the end of the road is the Chawton library.  Newer building...from the 1700s.  Yeah.

I was so excited to make it here on my time in England!  After we went into the house, we ate at a little teahouse across the road and then walked down to Chawton church:

Parts of this church, mainly the sanctuary, (St. Nicholas's? Maybe the name of it) date from the 1300s.  This church is still an active congregation!  It was absolutely beautiful inside, but none of my pictures really turned out.  It still kind of weirds me out that churchs and cemetaries here go hand in hand and usually a little closer than that. Many people are actually buried IN the church (which makes it difficult to avoid stepping on their graves and makes me feel incredibly rude).  I do think that the cemetaries are just so beautiful and peaceful (weird, I know):

The next day, Karen (my preceptor) had a meeting up by Oxford.  David and I made a quick trip to Oxford and met one of their friends who lived in Oxford and went there briefly during college.  Talk about an old town!  Despite the fact that it's Oxford University, there is no actual university like OSU.  It's more a collection of individual colleges (such as Trinity College, Magdalen (pronounced "maud-lin"), or Christ College) dispersed throughout the town.  Students live in or near their college buildings, some of which date from the 700s.  (Interesting fact: New College dates from the 1300s.) They don't apply to an actual university, but apply to the individual colleges.  Oxford has had a very volatile history in the past, particularly with the townsfolk.  Things are a little less tense now, but they still have gates up. :)  These gates also make sure that those college kids get back before curfew.  Otherwise they have to risk being locked out for the night or having to explain themselves to the porter, a kind of security guard/house parent.

We toured Christ College, where Lewis Carroll (real name was Charles Dodgson) lived and worked for 47 years.  It was move-in day, so kids were moving back to these dorms:

I'm not even kidding.  Under some of those archways, you can see doors, the entrances to the dorm rooms.  Woah.
There was also this beautiful chapel (no great pictures there) that had been threatened by King Henry VIII when he was cleaning out Catholic relics from England, but with a little negotiation, they made it out relatively unscathed.  Also interesting: so much of Oxford remains intact despite the bombings of England in WWII because Hitler intended to make it the capital of his new Germany, so ordered it to be left alone.

What a great little quick weekend!  This weekend: Canterbury and Seven Sisters Park!

Here are a few more pictures from Oxford:

The Bridge of Sighs, totally ripped off from the Bridge of Sighs in Venice.  In Venice, the bridge leads from a court building to a prison.  In Oxford, it's between a library and a college. :)

This is the entrance to/exterior of Christ College.  These buildings have to be washed frequently to prevent them from turning that brown (and then black) color you see here.

Part of the halls of Christ College

The courtyard of Christ College

The Great Hall.  There are pictures on the wall that really look like they are following you when you walk by them.  Creepy.  This room had a lot of things that inspired parts of Alice in Wonderland (which Charles Dodgson created to entertain Alice, the Dean's daughter, when they were waiting for her father to show up for meals.  Her father was always "late, late for a very important date!"

Trinity College

My little weekend away

I started my rotation last week, but ended up with a 3-day weekend thanks to the New Years Eve holiday.  I wanted to take advantage of the extra time and decided to check out a part of England that was a little further away.  Thanks to my trusty Rick Steves guidebook, I decided the Lake District was it for me.  I made my travel arrangements, booked my room at a cute little bed and breakfast, and set out early Saturday morning.

Since I am car-less here (I wouldn't even drive if I did have a car!), my travel was like this: train->tube->train->bus to Keswick (pronounced Kes-ick).  Since it was a Saturday, I just missed the bus at Penrith to Keswick and had to wait about an hour for the next one.  Luckily, since this is England, there never seems to be a shortage of things to explore just steps away:

This was the ruins of a castle of one of the King Richards.  If you look carefully on the right-hand side of the picture, you can see the top of the train station.  This was just across the road from a busy train station!  And yeah, that's a real-deal moat there.  You can also just make out the silhouettes of kids climbing on the ruins.  What a childhood memory that'll be!  Anyways, after a quick poke about Penrith, I was on the bus headed for Keswick.

Keswick is a part of Cumbria, the Lake District of England.  It's a small town (about 5000) and is quite touristy, but also has a pencil mill (? do you make pencils at a pencil mill?) that is pretty old.  When I got there on New Years Eve, they were having a little market that so many places here have on Saturdays.  I didn't really check it out though, and I wish that I had!  Instead, I went for a walk down to the lake, Derwentwater:

Of course, it was rainy and a little chilly - but such is England.  Here at least people were more outdoorsy and absolutely prepared for whatever would be thrown at them (I actually did see people throwing mud around).  People come here to "walk the fells" as they say.  (I had to google what a fell is (tall hill) and a crag (steep cliff or rock face) to figure out what people were really doing.)  Keswick is also incredibly dog friendly.  A number of the restaurants and shops allowed dogs in, which was sweet.

My second day in Keswick, I did two hikes.  I overshot a little bit on the length, but am glad that I did them for sure.  The first was the Walla Crag hike:

Some beautiful views from the top.  I tried to do a video, but it was so windy that all you can hear is the wind howling!  So instead, here's a video just down from the top of the crag:

The second hike I did was Latrigg fell:

Hiking trails here are very different from those in CO.  They aren't maintained, aren't marked, and 3 people can take 3 ways to go up the same trail.  I bought a little pack of trail guides at the Tourist Information, which I am SO glad I did.  Well worth the 3 quid. 

It was at the top here that I knew I had overdone the miles I wanted to do for the day, but as they say, what goes up must come down.  Which means me!  So the hike down felt much longer than the entirety of the rest of the hikes.  However, the bed and breakfast I stayed at served a full English breakfast which consisted of:

-toast (they don't have wheat toast here, they have brown toast)

-fresh fruit

-sausage

-bacon (which is totally different than our bacon! It's all meat, no fat)

-fried egg

-fried bread (gross.  just gross.)

-mushrooms

-tomato

-hashbrown

So I didn't get hungry until like 6pm that night, even after doing 10+ miles hiking.  While not the healthiest thing, better than getting a hunger pain halfway up a mudfield.  

There were a couple of things that I noted on my trip: people in the countryside are much MUCH friendlier than further south.  When walking in the lanes, people will actually say hi to you (both initiate and return a hi).  However, people are still quite reserved and don't really do a lot of conversing with people they don't know.  Spending time in the b&b at breakfast, each group just stayed within themselves...not talking.  Or talking so quietly I couldn't hear them, which is probably the case.  People are very quiet here.

Additionally, people in the country dress more like I do (very casually).  In London and Crawley, I always feel underdressed, even when I am dressed nicely!  People are very fashionable down south.

Anyway, this was the highlights of my weekend away!  I caught the train back to London, which was so very busy I had to sit outside the "loo" because there were no seats anywhere else on the train!  All part of the experience, though. :)