tales from Canterbury

Part two of the late October Saturday daytrip. If you missed part one, you can see it here.

Still in Kent, we headed to Canterbury. The city is a major site of pilgrimage and has been for hundreds of years, with St Augustine's Abbey, St Martins Church and the Canterbury Cathedral. The cathedral itself did not become famous until Archbishop Thomas Becket was murdered inside in 1170. Becket had been childhood friends with the king, King Henry II, and was thus appointed his church position. Instead of pleasing his friend the king, he stood up for his religion, and the king reportedly said at a banquet 'Who will rid me of this troublesome preist?' to which knights responded by traveling to Canterbury and murdering him. He was later made a saint.

During the Reformation, his elaborate tomb of jewels and gold along with his body were removed. To this day no one knows where they were hidden/stolen/stashed. Now a single candle sits at the spot in the cathedral where the relic would have stood.

Geoffrey Chaucer made the city a place of literary importance by writing 'The Canterbury Tales' in 1387 in the common language English (at the time the language spoke at court was French.)

Upon arriving we immediately found some lunch, fish and chips at the "best" in the city. I support their claim. I have never had a fresher piece of fish. After lunch we found The Canterbury Tales Exhibition, a tour through medieval Canterbury, complete with talking life-size replicas of characters in the story and actual smells of a medieval city. It was too dark (and a bit too creepy) to take pictures. But I do feel I know a bit more about Chaucer than I did before the £6 adventure.

 Because we were running short on time, we immediately headed two blocks back to the cathedral. The gate to get inside is pictured above on the right. It was quite impressive, and goes back behind the large rectangular abbey into a sprawling mass of courtyards and added rooms, both above and below ground.

The candle that signifies St Thomas Becket:

The day we visited happened to be choir practice in the abbey, complete with a choir of over a hundred, a full orchestra, an opera singer and a conductor. As I wandered through the crypts and the passageways and various rooms I felt like I was in a movie with background music. I'm not gonna lie, it was a very neat way to experience the cathedral.

After a long day out of the city, we rode two hours back to London. I realized I really love these daytrips organized by the program, and might have to indulge in a final one to Cambridge. I also want to attempt to get train tickets to the Dover coast to see the great white cliffs. Hopefully I can figure it out!

leeds castle

Saturday I took a daytrip to Leeds Castle (in Kent, not Leeds...) and Canterbury. This posting is dedicated to the castle.

The castle was initially built in 857 AD and subsequent parts have been added since then. The castle sits on two small islands in the river Len, a natural moat. The castle became royal in 1278 as part of the Queen of England's dower - what a queen got when she was widowed. It then gained a reputation as a "ladies castle." It has been held by six medieval queens. Henry VIII used the castle as a country manor, and his first wife (of six) Catharine of Aragon spent a lot of time in the stony fortress.

In the 1920s an American Lady Baillie bought the property and set about restoring the castle and grounds. Today the inside of the castle is partly tailored to her 1920s style and partly to the historic time periods the castle existed through.

We arrived by bus at 10:30 a.m. On the stroll through the grounds to the park we encountered both swans and peacocks famously present on the grounds:

An albino peacock!

Upon crossing over the bridged moat, this is the sight you are greeted with:

Below is a washroom recreated to the time of King Henry VII - this would have been the kind of tub Queen Catharine used. The portrait on the right is of Lady Baillie and her two daughters.

The room to the left is Lady Baillie's personal bedroom. The room on the right is the library.

Outside the castle we wandered around the grounds for a bit. By this time the sky had cleared up and the sun was super bright.

We found a proper English garden that reminded me of a mix between Peter Rabbit and Alice in Wonderland. And a bit further on we found a hedge maze and managed to reach the center where you could climb a stone mound to see the maze you had just come through.

Left to right: Kim, me, Christina, Elena

After tour hours roaming around through the castle and grounds (we all agreed we could have spent the entire day there exploring) we hopped on a mini train/tram and rode the scenic route back to the bus that would take us to Canterbury.

And we also saw this peacock that got really close to us. Pretty neat.

To read about the second part of the day and see pictures of Canterbury, click here.

british library and museum

Today I finally got to go on a field-trip for class! (For weeks I've listened as my friends told me about the cool places all over London their professors have taken them, while I've sat in a classroom being lectured at. My turn at last!)

My professor for Contemporary British Literature met us at the British Library today, just outside the Kings Cross Station. (I'll have to head back there because I missed Platform 9 3/4.) The library had art placed about it, like this book bench. Don't ya wish you had this in your library mom?

They have a room dedicated to various historical texts and recordings, from literature and music to politics and religion. I saw Jane Austen's writing desk and spectacles. I listened to the Beatles' Christmas recording from 1964. I read letters from Queen Elizabeth I to her sister Mary while Mary was basically kept captive in an old decrepit castle. I saw Buddhist texts that were thousands of years old. And oh yeah - I saw the Magna Carta. (The closest thing the UK has to a constitution...) Such a great (free!) exhibit!

After the British Library, our professor led us through Bloomsbury on a literary tour. And we saw the house of William Butler Yeats:

And the site where Charles Dickens' lived for a bit (now it's home to the British Medical Society):

We walked through a peace park. The plaque below is dedicated to conscientious objectors during wartimes. It reads "To all those who have established and are maintaining the right to refuse to kill." This  hit home as members of my family have fought for the right to be pacifists. A statue of Ghandi sits in the middle of the park, and flowers are placed at his feet year round.

This park has special meaning because when the three suicide bombs went off in London a few years ago, one was on a crowded double-decker bus on a street parallel to the park. The bomber had tried to get on the Underground but all stations were closed as two bombs had gone off earlier. He boarded a crowded bus and exploded the bomb in front of the British Medial Society building, blowing the top off of the double decker. The building, usually filled with secretaries and administrative types was on that day, by chance hosting a surgical conference was taking place. The building was filled with surgeons. One of the first to respond to the bombed bus was a trauma surgeon. Eleven people died, but it would have been dozens more if not for this weird coincidence. I got chills when my professor told us this.

Around the corner is a house where Virginia Woolf lived before she married a "Woolf," with her sister Vanessa.

A bit further down the road is the building where T.S. Elliot lived and worked with his crazy wife:

Across from the T.S. Elliot building is this imposing building on a college campus. This used to house the Ministry of Information during the war. George Orwell worked in this building, and despised his job so much that when he wrote 1984, modeled the Ministry of Truth after this institution.

It looks Orwellian, doesn't it?

And just around the corner from the dystopian building is the British Museum. This is the main atrium, with the second largest dome in Europe. (This first is St. Paul's apparently.)

This round building in the center of the atrium is the British Museum reading room. Inside this building is where Marx endlessly researched for his monumental 'Das Capital.' (Which I've read!!) It was unfinished at the time of his death, he was still researching in this room. I was in awe. I could just imagine him, disheveled and crazed bent over economics texts spread over a table in this room. I wonder if people knew what he was up to.

In the ancient Egypt/Assyrian/Greece section I stumbled upon this - The Rosetta Stone!!! See the three different writings that allowed us to translate hieroglyphs?!

There were so many marble pieces on display, taken from Greece by British "anthropologists" and explorers. 

This particular piece really stopped me in my tracks. I remember sketching it from a fuzzy slide shown in my AP Art History class in high school. The way the fabric drapes and flows is particularly notable, considering its made of hard stone. Even though these figures were placed at the top of a temple up against a wall, the figures were formed complete front and back. That's because they were made by the artist for the gods, who have all seeing eyes.

And that concludes my informative literary/historical field trip to the British Library and British Museum!