"What are men compared to rocks and mountains?"

The immortal words of Jane Austen...especially relevant this week as we got to explore outside of London (not that London isn't amazing, of course). But that will have to wait until Thursday. Wednesday was much more business as usual. We started off with a walk through the East End. The West End is famous for its theatres and for being the playground of the wealthy, but the East End has always had a bad rap in London's history. It started as the area outside of Roman Londinium, so it's always been separate and sort of mysterious. Later on it became an industrial center, full of slums, with overwhelming poverty and violence. Pick up a Charles Dickens novel--you'll see. In the Victorian era it was home to Jack the Ripper, who both made it famous and further degraded its reputation. The East End was also Cockney territory ("'ello, guv'nah," rhyming slang, and all of that), but it's been home to immigrant communities for hundreds of years. The Huguenots moved to the East End from France in the eighteenth century to become weavers, and a sizable Jewish population grew there during the Russian pogroms of the nineteenth century. In the past twenty or thirty years, however, these groups have moved farther out of the city and the Bengali population has exploded. The area around Brick Lane is called Banglatown because of the enormous concentration of Bengali immigrants who live there. The community has remained very close, with a tight center on religious and family values. Now, however, young "yuppies" are starting to move into old warehouses that have been turned into apartments, which drives up real estate costs and forces poor immigrant families out of the area. There you go, more than you ever wanted to know about the East End.
We had a class discussion (imagine that) after a quick lunch at a nearby pub, and then we had an awkward amount of free time. Professor Qualls doesn't really seem to have a realistic idea of how long it takes to eat lunch or how long it takes to go anywhere productive in the city. We wanted to go to the Tate Modern, but there wasn't time before we had to be at St. Pauls, so we got distracted by the Olde Sweet Shoppe instead. Good decision.
At 5 we attended Evensong at St. Paul's cathedral, and I got to sit in the choir stalls (called the quire, no idea why). The singing was beautiful, although everything involved so much pomp and circumstance. Following prayers, some of my friends and I hit up a grocery store to buy ingredients for dinner. Our favorite grocery store is called Sainsbury's, which is middle of the road. I've noticed that grocery stores are much smaller here than they are at home, I think because people tend to buy more fresh food here and therefore go to the store more often. For example, the only frozen vegetables available in London seem to be peas. I don't know why peas have been given this honor, but there you go. Anyway, I made avegolemono soup, and we had bread and grilled peppers. We had to fight the other group for the kitchen, which was a fairly political battle, but in the end everything worked out, and I got to have my favorite soup. After clean up we had dessert and cider in the garden, which turned into the hotel staff (who were having a fairly rowdy gathering already) giving us free bottles of wine, which led to drinking wine with Professor Qualls and Carol Anne in the kitchen until the wee hours of the morning. Good times. Tired times, but good.
Thursday, of course, was our earliest morning thusfar. We got on a coach for the two-hour ride to Stonehenge, which I was very excited about. I wasn't disappointed. Even though the walking path is literally ten feet from the highway (and by highway the Brits mean a narrow two-lane road through the countryside) and there were a gigabazillion tourists there, everything around the henge was still tranquil. I knew that Stonehenge was an engineering masterpiece, but I didn't know how sophisticated it actually is. First of all, the inner circle of stones was built around 3500 B.C., and the outer stones were added a few hundred years later, around 1600 B.C. Wow. Second, about one-third of each of the standing stones is actually buried underground. Third, the sun rises through a different space every month of the year--Stonehenge is a calendar. So incredible. I've come to the conclusion that the only rational explanation is magic.
After our brief time at Stonehenge, we piled back onto the bus and drove through the Salisbury Plains. I wanted to see the chalk horses in the side of the hills, but our road didn't take us that way. Before too long, though, we were descending into the city of Bath, which is absolutely beautiful. It looks like an old European city, with cobblestone streets and beautiful Georgian architecture in warm stone. So, so pretty. And it's legendary Jane Austen country (she lived there for several years, and although she didn't write very much there, Persuasion and Northanger Abbey both feature parts set in Bath. It was the fashionable place to be). We started off in the Roman Baths, which were built around 60 A.D. Bath is home to the only hotspring in the United Kingdom, and the Romans built the baths and a temple to the goddess of the springs there. It's maintained its popularity as a destination for people to go and take the "healing waters" of the spring.
We wandered through the museum and saw the Roman ruins, then Liz and I found our way to the Pump Room of Jane Austen fame. This was the place for all sociable people to see and be seen during the day in Georgian Bath. It was here that people formed acquaintances so that they could be invited to dinners and parties later. So Liz and I sampled the famous water, which was hot and tasted kind of nasty. Not sure about its healing powers, but I think that once is enough!
After the baths, the rest of the afternoon was ours, so Liz and I almost ran to the Jane Austen Centre, where we spent a lovely afternoon going through the exhibits and the gift shop. We also had proper afternoon tea in the Regency Tea Room run by the Centre.
I had a great time in Bath, and I definitely hope to go back. We didn't have time to see anything beside the Jane Austen Centre (again, Professor Qualls's concept of time is very different from mine), and I would love to see the Crescent, the Abbey, and the Fashion Museum, as well as just exploring the beautiful city. Check out my facebook for more pictures of Bath, because there are a ton!
Since Thursday was also Stephenie's 21st birthday, we caved and went to Hard Rock Cafe with her for dinner and drinks (21 is still exciting, even if it is in England), so it was a really fun end to a great day.
Friday was the Day of Museums. In the morning I visited the National Portrait Gallery and saw surprise! Cassandra Austen's portrait of Jane, along with the first part of the collection. I liked being able to put faces with names of various historical figures (like the entire cast of characters in Elizabeth). But we only had an hour or so there before we had to meet at Westminster Abbey for a guided tour, which was phenomenal. The Abbey is gorgeous, of course, and there are so many famous people buried there! I looked down once and realized that I was walking on David Lloyd George's grave, so I hastily stepped to the side. Probably walked over Charles Darwin. Who knows. Fun fact (or maybe not, you may be sick of these): every English monarch since William the Conquerer in 1066 has been crowned on the sight of Westminster Abbey. It was built in 950 by Benedictine monks, then Edward the Confessor made it a church in 1042. That didn't survive, so Henry III built a more magnificent church that included flying buttresses (I mean, how could you go wrong?) in 1216. Edward I was therefore the first king to be crowned in the actual church.
Lunch was in St. James Park, by Buckingham Palace, where we had to awkardly observe other people and take pictures for a class assignment. After our anthropological stint we visited Winston Churchill's War Rooms, the underground cement bunker where he directed World War II. When Churchill and his cabinet left the bunker in 1945, they literally just up and left all of their papers, pens, etc. on the tables (I guess I would too after being underground for the better part of five years), and those rooms have been preserved just as they were. It was really cool to see, and they have sound clips from meetings and even a phone call between Churchill and President Roosevelt.
Kaitlin and I hurried back to the National Portrait Gallery (by way of Big Ben) after the War Rooms, where we finished going through the collection. You'd think that two and a half museums (I count the Abbey as half a museum) would be enough, but no, we had to go to the British Museum before dinner to see certain artifacts. We're still working with the series "A History of the World in 100 Objects," and last night we saw the Rosetta Stone and a few other objects. The Rosetta Stone makes sense to me, but one of the other objects was a collection of clay cow figurines from Ancient Egypt. Really? Maybe I was just out of patience. The British Museum annoys me, because I feel like it says, "Oh hey, we stole a bunch of random stuff from all of these other cultures because we're the biggest, baddest, most imperial nation ever, and now that we don't have an empire anymore we're just going to stick all of this stuff in cases with little tags." Job done.
Today was less museum-heavy (thank goodness). We started out with another classroom discussion, this time about Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. For lunch we went to Borough Market under London Bridge, which is the oldest produce market in London. There were amazing amounts of food there, and it all looked so good! After lunch Professor Qualls led a walking tour of Southwark, which is on the South Bank of the Thames. Basically, the North Bank, where the Square Mile is, decided that everyone who was deemed "unworthy" could live on the South Bank of the Thames, so all of the criminals, prostitutes, dock workers, and *gasp* actors were shipped there. The Elizabethan theatres, including the Globe, were all built on the South Bank, in the red light district no less. The South Bank had become synonymous with entertainment and debauchery, as well as crime, by Shakespeare's day. All of London's major prisons were here, too, including Newgate and The Clink, which was so notorious that it has given its name to all other prisons. Lovely place, really. Now it's been cleaned up, and the late 1990s saw major efforts to develop it in time for the new millennium. This is when the Millennium Bridge, the new Globe Theatre, and the Tate Modern came into being.
Speaking of the Tate Modern, I visited it after our walking tour was done. I have come to the conclusion that modern art and I are just never going to get along. Ever. I came, I saw, I shook my head in confusion, I left. We had a lovely barbeque (although British people haven't seemed to have mastered the art of grilling in the thousands of years of their existence) courtesy of the hotel, and I decided that a quiet evening was in order. More museums tomorrow!
Author's note: If you're bored to tears by my random tangents into British history, let me know. I just find it all so fascinating, and I want to share what I'm learning with you.