Yeah, lost my signal on Saturday night, so here's Saturday and Sunday's stuff:
Day 2-Wells Cathedral, Glastonbury Abbey, and the Bath Fashion Museum
Wells Cathedral
First thing we did today was mistake one church for another. It turned out that the church we started out taking pictures of assuming it was the cathedral was a smaller church down the road from the real cathedral.
Two blocks later we found the cathedral, which was kind of small as cathedrals go but it was beautiful all the same. I got some lovely pictures in there, saw the world’s second-oldest clock, and walked on some really old stairs.
We found a chocolate shop about a block away from the cathedral and I indulged my bad, sinful side by buying a couple of truffles, which I promptly snarfed down because truffles are a very big weak spot in my armor. Very big. Huge.
Glastonbury Abbey
A brief history lesson. Bear with me-this IS leading us someplace…
For those who don’t know, Henry the Eighth had a lot of wives-6, to be exact.
But while he was still on wife #1, who had been the very Catholic wife of his deceased brother, he was already looking at Anne Boleyn, wife #2. He wanted to divorce the first and marry the second, but to do that he had to get the Church’s approval.
But the Church, having considered the matter, decided they wouldn’t grant the divorce.
Henry, being rich, important, and galdarn it, the King of England already, threw the equivalent of a royal tantrum. He formed his own church, the Church of England (Anglican today in England; Episcopalian back in the States) so that he could get the divorce he wanted.
He also started, in the name of said new religion, destroying, demolishing, defacing, and taking over the Catholic houses of worship for Anglican use (talk about being bitter.) Lincoln Cathedral had the heads of statues and tombs removed; we saw the destruction on our class trip. Durham Cathedral mostly escaped unscathed (probably because it was far to the north), as did Wells Cathedral, which we saw today.
But some didn’t survive. Glastonbury Abbey was one of the casualties of Henry’s purge; it was almost completely destroyed. And that’s where we went second today.
What’s left of it is mostly walls sticking up from the ground. You can still discern the outline of where they stood in the grass when you walk across the grounds, and some of the chapels and buildings are still partially standing.
It’s a very lonely sort of place; it has a sadness to it that I can’t really begin to explain. Maybe it’s the fact that there was some sort of church there for about 1000 years, and due to one king’s anger, the whole thing now feels like a memorial to something that’s been lost. It feels so dignified even in the face of the terrible destruction that must have been done there; there’s something still remaining to what must have been a beautiful abbey.
The crocuses and daffodils were in bloom in the corners of the walls and though the sun wasn’t shining today, we got to see some of what Glastonbury had to offer. I got to see both King Arthur’s (and Guinevere, too) supposed graves, until he was moved in the 12th century by Edward I’s guys, who moved him inside what would have been the abbey at the time. Then when Henry VIII knocked the place over, he also knocked over the tomb that his ancestor had set up. All that’s left is a little square in the ground, marking where the tomb should be.
I deeply regret not getting to climb Glastonbury Tor and see the monument there (supposedly this is the basis for Avalon-you can see the hill that the Tor is on when you’re two miles away from it and Arthur is supposed to have buried his treasures there)
I also am kind of upset that I didn’t get time to search for the Arimethea thorn tree (Joseph of Arimethea supposedly arrived on these shores (some say with the Holy Grail in his possession) and at the first place where he planted his staff into the ground, according to legend, a thorn tree grew. It IS a Middle Eastern thorn tree, so you figure out how the hell the seeds got all the way to England and managed to grow here without SOME assistance)
Anyway, regret not seeing those things, but we only had an hour.
We came back to Bath and Tiffany, being a theatre major in costume design at Millikin where she normally goes to school, wanted desperately to see the Bath Fashion Museum. A whole bunch of us followed behind her, if only to watch her face when she saw some of the dresses they had on display there.
She didn’t breathe for the entire hour we were in there (think me if I got into the Library of Congress. There ya go…) Some of the dresses were really interesting and old, and even if I didn’t understand entirely how they were created or their significance to the history of costume design or fashion or whatever, I was totally there for Tiffany in her moment of GAH! LOOK AT THAT SILK! THAT LACE!
Then we went to a pub because Bethany was near fainting (diabetes) and so while she ate, we watched the Six Nations rugby match start off (Wales vs. Italy; then Ireland vs. Scotland; tonight we’re going to watch England vs. France. This should be interesting…)
I don’t totally understand rugby, having only played it in high school and spent most of the time trying to escape physical injury by running away from those who had the ball (why they put their arms around each other’s shoulders and THEN whoop! the ball goes up and over and they sort of half-tackle, run, slam into each other, and then it sort of ends up as a painful-looking mosh pit/piggy pile onto the poor soul who happens to have the ball, and if the ball does come flying out of the pile and get scooped up by someone, it all happens AGAIN.)
It’s similar to American football, but there appears to be A) a bit more tossing of the ball both between players and up into the air B) more pain to the players, as they don’t seem to wear any kind of protective gear except for teeth gear and something that should be perfectly obvious (there’s a ton of bodyslamming going on and they’re all guys, so…) and C) they seem to get knocked around but they appear to go straight back on the field, even having quick field neurological exams.
We’re going to watch the English hopefully kill the French. Again. Or there’s going to be a lot of angry, slightly boozed, English pubgoers watching the game…
Later on, we went to a pub near the hotel (there were 7 of us). Three of us refrained from really hitting the alcohol (Holly, Tiff, and me), and the rest of them drank some shots and some other drinks but none of them really got anything beyond a buzz.
England beat France in rugby; they were in the lead the entire game but clinched it nicely in the last 30 seconds with one of their guys throwing himself bodily over the end zone line for a touchdown. This was made all the more difficult due to the fact that he had half the French team hanging off his legs trying to stop him doing exactly that, and behind THEM were the English hanging onto their ankles trying to stop them stopping their guy.
Hey, we were watching for the cute guys anyway.
SUNDAY
Today we started out at the Roman baths. The Romans liked the hot springs there; they built a big complex of buildings and used the water bubbling up as a sacred pool to Minerva Salis (Celtic mother goddess or something) and the Roman construction is still holding the water in the bath after 2000 years. Their drainage system for getting the water out to the River Avon is still in operation, too.
It was really neat to see Roman stuff again; the fort wasn’t nearly as fascinating as this stuff was. This stuff was still in some form of use after all this time (we weren’t encouraged to touch the water, as it was untreated and Lord knew what was in it).
We left Bath and went down the road to Stonehenge. For some reason I thought the stones making up Stonehenge would be bigger. They were huge; don’t get me wrong, and I, like so many other people, would love to know how the heck they got those rocks all the way up there and into place.
It was an amazing place, but what really cracked me up about the whole thing was okay, there was Stonehenge, THE Stonehenge. World Heritage Site, everyone in the world knows what it looks like, big rocks in the ground…and what made the thing so quintessentially English was the sheep grazing just beyond the fence where the tourists were walking around the monument. The sheep were completely oblivious to the entire thing; they just kept nipping up bits of grass.
Yes, people, in England, the sheep ARE everywhere.
Went to Salisbury, ate lunch, but due to lack of time, we missed the cathedral there. We’re headed back now; my (ha ha) right arm is still a bit sore but I’m trying not to push it too far. So my report will end here :)
Now the status of my arms...
Despite the anti-inflammatory medication I’m on now, I still am having “flares” up and down my arms. They’re random and momentary; sharp and intense and from ten seconds to a minute long, usually in the area between my elbow and my fingertips, and on both sides pretty equally.
Don’t get me wrong-I have improved drastically in the last three days. They’re far better than what I was dealing with last week, and I’ll keep taking the pills. I was just kind of hoping to myself that the pain would go away entirely for awhile.
I can only assume the inflammation is worse than anyone believed and the pills are still bringing it under control. That’s a positive assumption, thank you very much. If the pills are supposedly to completely quell my inflammation and I am still having breakthrough pain, this is not good, and I may still have to see a rheumatologist over here. This will cost hundreds of pounds that I haven’t got. This may mean steroid shots. And that is not good at all.
I went to see the nurse on Monday morning and she gave me paracetamol, which though I have difficulty pronouncing, is usually helpful in giving me some more function in my right arm.
Pictures will come later today when I'm not in class ignoring everything that's being said...
Cheers,
Bec
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