ancient adventures and a night of birthday fun!

Our group left K-M yesterday morning around 8:30 to take the first organized program day trip, to Stonehenge and Bath.  Kate and I grabbed a seat toward the front and enjoyed the views of London from the bus...a nice change from the constant walking!  We were all pretty exhausted, however, and I was asleep soon after we left the limits of the city, although not before watching a bit of the English countryside roll by and realizing that it could literally be Minnesota countryside...I guess farmland is farmland anywhere in the world you go!  It made me a bit homesick though...reminded me of the drive to the cabin and I got a bit nostalgic.

Turns out Stonehenge is quite literally in the middle of nowhere, right off the side of a highway...it was so weird to all of a sudden hear Kris, one of our rectors, say, "If you look out the front of the bus it's right in front of us," and to look and just see it there.  We disembarked to a frigid 2-degree Celsius (about 34 degrees Fahrenheit, but it felt so much colder in the countryside!) day of more brilliant sunlight.  Surrounded by fields of grazing sheep and with a few wisps of cloud in the sky, it was definitely picturesque, but there is literally nothing there except the henges themselves (haha), a small café and a gift shop (of course).  After a small snafu regarding where we actually got our passes to enter the site, we were handed our oh-so-ubiquitous audio guides and were off!

I hate to say this and sound disinterested, but after a while Stonehenge was a bit more underwhelming than I thought.  It was sort of surreal to actually see it after having seen so many pictures and documentaries and images of it growing up, but the weird thing is that in person, it's exactly like it is in pictures...a big circle of rocks that nobody knows the what, why and how about.  That was REALLY frustrating...the whole audio guide just kept stressing over and over again that nobody knows what Stonehenge is for sure, why it was built, who built it or how it was erected.  Theories include that it was an ancient sun calendar (reinforced by the position of sunlight coming through the arches each month and a few other rocks' positions), a site of worship, a demonstration of some leader's power...nobody knows though and after a while I got really sick of hearing about that!  Not to mention it was SO cold...Stonehenge is at the pinnacle of a hill and we were exposed to all the wind for miles, and England had gotten a light dusting of snow the night before that made walking an icy, mucky mess.  Needless to say, we were all excited when our hour and a half at Stonehenge ended and we departed for Bath.

After another hour on the bus to Bath, we hopped off the bus and immediately walked to the site of the Roman Baths, the archaeological excavation of a Roman temple and bathhouse that made Bath itself famous.  Weirdly, we were given a random hour to explore Bath itself, so a group of six of us (five girls and Colin!) headed to "The Circus" and "The Royal Crescent," which had been touted to us as the best example of Georgian architecture you could find anywhere in the English countryside.  Apparently both sites had been featured in Jane Austen movies and were very well-known.  We had a good time at both sites for a bit (the Crescent had an amazing terraced field that would have been perfect for a picnic if it would have been about 20 degrees warmer), and then went off to find a pub to get Anne, our birthday girl, a drink on her 21st!  On the way, we happened upon the Jane Austen Centre, and I flipped shit and got really excited before I realized that it cost mega-pounds to go in for what would have been only about 20 more minutes.

Instead, we went to an O'Neills, one of the British chain pubs that ND kids love love, and had a pint (or two, or a few) before heading back to the Baths for our audio-guided (of course) tour.  The place was surprisingly cool, although very done-up for tourists...they had people dressed up like ancient Romans walking around the perimeter of the largest of the baths, which was a little weird but interesting, I guess. I really enjoyed it because I'm a nerd and love history and that sort of thing, and there was a lot about the Roman occupation of England back when it was Britannia, one of the outposts of the Roman Empire.  I wish we would have had more time to stay, learn, and explore, but we had to be back at the buses to depart by 4:15.  Colin and I grabbed a pint of Ben&Jerry's (he had been craving ice cream all day) and made it back to the bus...most popular kids on the trip home, mostly because everybody was jealous of our ingenuity.

The trip back took what felt like FOREVER, mostly because we were all tired, hungry and a little bit travel-worn, and wanted to get back to the flats.  It's so weird that coming back to K-M now really does feel like coming home in a sense, especially after a long day trip like that one!  We ate a quick dinner and got ready to go out for Anne's birthday...after a GREAT chocolate cake and some cider/wine, we headed to the Charterhouse Bar, right down the street and around the corner from the flats.  I spent most of my night conversing (in French!) with Peter's new French friends, Claire and Aurore, who were visiting from Paris for the weekend.  Aurore speaks very good English so she and I spent much of the night speaking Franglais, with her speaking English and me speaking French back.  It was a mutually beneficial night of language practice (and fun!) for both of us!  I really enjoyed meeting them and hope to see more of them over the trip...it was very cool to be able to converse fluently with "real French people" :)

Enough about yesterday, though, today looks like another promising day of sunshine and I am really excited to go explore some more of this gorgeous, enormous, fascinating city I call home for the next few months.  I'll update more later, maybe throw some pictures up as well, but London awaits!