I SAW STONEHENGE!!!!

I was pretty excited about it... if you can't tell. Between my trip to Bath on Saturday and my trip to Salisbury and Stonehenge on Sunday, I simply didn't have time to write about it until now. It was a busy weekend for me, but I got to see a lot more of England than just metropolitan London.

Saturday morning, a group of fifteen of us all left Regent's College for Bath. I really don't like traveling in such big groups because it's really difficult to coordinate and it's always slow going. We worked it out though. The skyline of Bath that you can see while pulling into the train station is beautiful - spotted here and there with steeples and spires of churches, rows of houses nestled in the hills. Bath definitely represented more of the small town feel. In some ways in reminded me a lot of Salamanca: it's a small city filled with sandy-colored stone buildings, many of which are medieval, and it has common plaza areas where people just hang out. In fact, one of my favorite parts of the day was sitting on the stones of one of these open areas (they don't officially call them plazas), eating ice cream, and watching the hustle and bustle of the people while listening to street performers play classical guitar. It wasn't the typical touristy thing to do, but I enjoyed it immensely.

We did, of course, fit in the more touristy attractions at Bath as well. This included the Roman Baths and the Fashion Museum. The baths were really cool to see. I was amazed at how intact they still were and that, if the water wasn't polluted and nasty, I could have jumped in and used it as a swimming pool. I was really fascinated to learn just how intricate the bath house was, and that in Roman times it was so much more than just a place to was off - it was a social and spirtual center, which included (of course) the baths, a "healing pool," a temple, and a large plaza.

The fashion museum was also a lot of fun. It has the largest collection of antique and historical clothing of any museum, and all of it is juxtaposed alongside more modern and contemporary fashion. It's really bizarre and interesting to see the contrast between historcal and modern, as well as to see how clothing and fashions have evolved through the centuries. Hands down, though, the best part of the museum was the room where we got to try on hoop skirts and corsets. I never realized how skinny I (or anybody) could look with a corset on! It took quite a bit of work to get that sucker tightened up though, and I now understand why women used to requre maids to help them get dressed in the morning and why it wasn't uncommon for women to faint when their corsets were too tight!

Other than that, we just meandered around the city to enjoy its general feeling and character. I wish I had known where Danny had been living all semester, because I would have looked up the address. As it was though, I had to settle for where my own fancies (or, rather, the fanices of our 15 person group) took me. At the end of the day we took the train back to London.

On Sunday morning I got up early again to make a day-trip to Salisbury and Stonehenge. This time, however, it was much easier to get a move on since I went with only two other girls from the program, Meg and Evan. Salisbury is an even smaller town than Bath, though is not quite as pretty to my opinion. We got there and walked through the rain (which I am starting to get sick of) towards the medieval part of town with Salisbury Cathedral. Our day was unfortunately a little broken up, because of our bus tour to Stonehenge smack-dab in the middle, so that we got to the Cathedral, but didn't have enough time to really look around and resolved to come back later. Before the bus tour though, we also grabbed lunch at a place called The Slug and Lettuce, where I tried duck for the first time, and probably the last.

The best way to get out to Stonehenge is to take a bus from Salisbury; since we wanted the full experience (and because we get a student discount) we decided to take a tour bus. It was nice because we actually got to see a lot more than just Stonehenge through the tour. We saw Old Sarum, which is basically a hill that was built up with ledges like a layer cake and that used to have an old castle on top of it. We also saw a dozens of burial mounds scattered everywhere across the farmland that we were passing. It boggles my mind that they're just there - and no one pays them much mind. Our tour guide informed us that we were also in prime crop-circle territory, though we didn't run into any of those. And then.... out of nowhere... was Stonehenge! It runs like this: farmland, farmland, some sheep, more farmland, farmland, farmland, Stonehenge, farmland, sheep, farmland, burial mound, farmland, etc. It was nice to have the tourguide with us giving some of the history of the stones and pointing out some interesting features, otherwise I would have been looking at a circle of rocks, desperately trying to recall that discovery channel special I saw two years ago. There are many theories about what it could have been used for: a calendar, sacrifice, fertility rituals... the list goes on. I could almost feel the druids around me.. (just kidding). The tour guide did pull out the handy-dandy dowsing rods, which he claimed (and then demonstrated) that they would cross when he passed the east-west line that cuts through Stonehenge. I was unconvinced.

After Stonehenge we were back in the city of Salisbury to do our sightseeing there. The first priority, obviously, was Salisbury Cathedral, which is the tallest church in the UK and which houses the oldest working clock in the world. It also houses the best preserved copy of one of the four oringinal Magna Cartas, along with a translation book by Geoffrey Chaucer, and the seal of John Donne. Being the literary geek that I am, the Chaucer artifact excited me more than the Magna Carta. The church itself was built on shale foundations, which is architecturally unsound. This means, that in order to prevent the shale from crumbling underneath the church - then making the church itself crumble - the foundations must always be kept moist. Lucky for us it was a rainy day and there was no threat of crumbling. The church also survived the bombings of WWII (most churches in England didn't) because, with the tallest spire in the UK, it was used by German planes as a navigational point.

We tried to go into a few other museums and places of interest in Salisbury, but, being late on a Sunday, they were all closed. We did, however, get to look at a smaller church in Salisbury with a famous Doomsday painting on the wall. It was small and peaceful and intimate. Finally, after two long days of travel, we trekked it home to Regent's where I spent my evening reading Boswell and went to bed early.