Canterbury and the Preceeding Two Weeks

Over the last two weeks, my primary concern has been the completion of several essays. As a result, I have not done too many interesting things, other than hanging out with the CU crowd. I did visit the National Portrait Gallery a few weeks back, however. It was fairly interesting – and as the name suggests, it is portraits (and quite a few busts) of famous people from British history (although today, most of them are not especially famous – I know my history fairly well and I have never heard of about 2/3 of them).

Another night, a group of us from the CU went down and ate dinner near the Thames and then took a stroll along the riverfront, which was enjoyable. The light on the water is quite a sight. The next day, Lara (our friend from Germany, who, sadly, is now back in Germany because her au pair program ended), Whitney, and I went to a large street market by the Thames, called the Borough Market. It was just alright, but that is just me. I am not really the shopping type.

The most interesting event over this time period was my trip to Canterbury. This last Saturday, I organized a trip and visited the city with three of my flat mates (they had never been there either). Canterbury is about a 90 minute train-ride to the southeast. I had wanted to visit it while I am over here, as it is one of the more famous locales in Britain, being one of Christendom’s most important pilgrimage sites and the inspiration of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The town is very quaint – many of the buildings are hundreds of years old and the old town still has most of the medieval walls up (and a moat and drawbridge). We first visited the cathedral, which is an amazing structure. It is huge – much more massive than other cathedrals that I have visited (and I have been to quite a few now). The layout of the inside is quite interesting too – parts of it rise up substantially and give it a unique structure – one has to see it to understand. One of the highlights was to see the exact spot where Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was slain by the knights of King Henry II, as it is one of the more infamous events in British history. Exploring around the chapter house and the ruins around the cathedral was also quite cool. There was also a funny cat that wandered around the grounds, which we jokingly nicknamed the Canterbury Cat.

After touring the cathedral, we went and ate lunch at a local café. I had a traditional English breakfast, and I have to say, I love English food. People can make fun of it all they want; I enjoy most traditional English dishes. After lunch, we wandered around town more, went and climbed around the ruins of the old Norman castle, and walked along the walls of the city. By then it was starting to get very cold in windy (it already had been, but now it was getting worse), so we caught the next train home (and just in time, it started pouring right as the train departed). Overall, it was a fun day trip.