Bathing + Stonehenging

          

After a week busy with schoolwork and our first essay, we all welcomed Thursday's high table and the three-day weekend with open arms. Knowing that we would have to kick it into gear this weekend to finish our papers that are due Monday, we all made the very most of Thursday evening. I don't think it will come as a surprise now that dinner was, you guessed it, delicious! We had a duckling orange entree and a beautiful strawberry pastry dessert. I swear, every single person in attendance looked fabulous and the night seemed extra special because we celebrated four birthdays that have happened since we arrived. We followed up dinner at the campus pub (I stayed away from the darts matches) and dancing at the very cool "Thirst."

Even though we didn't have class the next morning, breakfast was still served at eight-thirty and we were on the road by nine, en route for Bath and Stonehenge. While at the oh so lovely Bath (aside: Sally loved to make fun of the US pronunciation - bæth v. the British baahth), we checked out some of the first townhouse architecture of the eighteenth century Georgian style, toured the extensive museum of the Roman Bath, and received a lesson on Medieval architecture in Bath Abbey. The day certainly merged the two tracks! Class is always more enjoyable when the classroom is the very space about which you are learning. In our free time, I enjoyed a delicious sandwich from the chain Pret A Manger and longed to be a rich world traveler as I perused the store All Saints Co (they even had the black, leather pants that keep appearing in my dreams!).

 

 

The excitement continued: we ended the day with a trip to Stonehenge. I had been hearing that this experience would be perhaps a bit of a letdown. You know, since it is so ridiculously famous one might build it up to be "the best thing ever!" when in actuality it's "just a bunch of rocks." Welp, that was definitely not the case for me. I found the site to be even more fascinating looking at it, walking its circumference, discussing its origins right there, in person. Why were the people of prehistoric Wiltshire building some sort of rock formation at this spot in 3000 BC? What made Stonehenge so important that people carted these giant rocks (some of them weigh as much as 45 tons) more than 100 miles? Were they worshiping a sort of sun god, which could explain the way in which the sun shines through the circle and points to one of the altar stones on the day of the summer solstice? How many abled bodies labored to create this formation? Suffice it to say, I think Stonehenge is totally worth the hype.

After a day of traveling the area, journeying from 2012 to 70 AD to the 12th century to 3000 BC and back again, we took down twenty-eight pizzas from none other than Pizza Hut. A successful day.



listening to: That's Why God Made the Radio by the Beach Boys
(especially: "Strange World")