Stonehenge, Bath, and the Bod

I feel like a lot of what happened on Saturday can be covered by looking at my photo albums (picasaweb.google.com/elmorelt), but for the sake of refreshing my own memory I'll rehash a few things here. Whoever tells you that Stonehenge is intriguing and/or breathtaking is probably high. It is mysterious indeed that people thousands of years ago wanted to drag these 4 ton stones into the middle of nowhere, but after hearing about/seeing Stonehenge in so many history books and films seeing it in person didn't do anything new for me. You don't even get to "get up close and personal" (as one UGA student put it) with it anymore! It was a cold morning, so most of us took a few funny pictures with the rocks to lighten the mood and generally scurried past most of the numbers posted on the ground that guided our audio tour. If even a historical society can't make heads or tails of Stonehenge, I figure it is best left a mystery.

We drove another hour to see Bath, the town which houses England's only natural hot spring. Jane Austen lived in Bath for a few years, so I was ready to get a bit more into her mindframe as several of us set out for the Jane Austen Centre in a northern area of town. We could see how Bath was a fashionable social center as we walked up rows and rows of shops (including The Disney Store?), and the fancy clothes/small rooms/traffic around the residential streets made Bath for me as well as for Ms. Austen a fun place to visit but nowhere to dream of living. The Centre was pretty small, with only a few decorated rooms, a costume exhibit, and a tea room that we didn't have time to visit, but I am pretty glad that we went. The girl who gave a small talk on the Austen family's time in Bath was enthusiastic in a nerdy but cute way, so I could envision myself having a job like hers if I lived in Bath. Since we were in the neighborhood anyway, we passed through the townhomes known as The Circus and the Royal Crescent--the huge scale of the architecture was overwhelming the the best of ways, and I could have sat on the sprawling grass park in front of the Crescent just people-watching for the rest of the day.

Eventually we did amble back to the center of town, and, upon the advice of a passing group of fellow UGA students, we coughed up the 9 pounds apiece to go in the Roman Baths. Money well spent! I laughed about the balmy atmosphere around the percolating, green pool reminding me of home in Georgia, and even though we were not allowed to bathe we enjoyed taking pictures from all possible angles, listening to the fun/fact-filled tour over the "audio wands" (much cooler than their Stonehenge counterparts), and imagining what the largely unexcavated ruins must have looked like in their prime. We skittered in and out of the abbey next door before we had to return to the bus; the hodge-podge of family crests and tombstones dotting the floors and the walls of the old building made a neat contrast with the vaulted ceilings and hundreds of stained glass windows above. There even was a modern evening service going on during our tour! With what I've seen of England so far, I am constantly impressed by the attitude of renovating and reappropriating history--as weird as it might look to tour the baths with a glorified walkie-talkie, or to sit in a Victorian house typing on a computer, you can never ignore the wonderful history of this place.

We took a bit of downtime once we got back to Oxford (I had to lay down, since even sitting has aggravated what feels like an arthritic hip I've gotten from walking so much!), but then several of us decided to hunt for the elusive Turf Tavern. We found it with little difficulty, but we arrived just after they had stopped serving food at 7:30 and I split off with the group that went in search for supper. We saw a sign for "excellent food" on the side of the King's Arms, a pub on the corner of Broad Street across from the library buildings, and, having eaten two bowls of cereal earlier, I had just to sit and be jealous of my friends' "veg lasagne" and "bangers & mash." I enjoyed my cider with the best of them as we relaxed and chatted along one of the pub's long, wooden tables, and, despite having chugged the last third of my drink on a dare, I think I'll enjoy pub culture in the nonchalant Oxford student way instead of in the debauched Georgia student way for the rest of the trip.

Sunday was our first breather of the trip, even though we ended up walking over a lot of the city again. I cleaned up my room and read most of the morning, and by 2 or so in the afternoon Sarah, Carly, and I wandered into Summertown for coffee and groceries so that we could meet Julianne, Kao, and David in the City Centre to seek the Krispy Kreme soon thereafter. Sarah and I got to Cornmarket Street after idling in the UGA house's backyard for a bit (while she, Carly, and Zach smoked, I looked around the back fence and found a peartree! It's like the Oxford equivalent of the peachtree, since lots of streets are named after the trees but few are actually inside the city), and soon enough we had indeed found the Krispy Kreme in the castle ("Kastle"?). Their hot doughnut machine was broken, but we all enjoyed some of the baked doughnuts and didn't mind having to make plans to return for the real deal very soon.

Dinner at the UGA house was fun and crazy as we tried to cram all 30 program members/staff/families into the dining room for pasta. It took everyone to get enough chairs into the room and enough dishes washed afterwards, but it was neat to see everyone in one place. Dr. Bradshaw, the professor for one of the first seminars and the organizer of all of our tutorials for the trimester, visited and gave a very funny speech inspired by a cat he saw in the backyard. The night was pretty quiet after that, and I tried to get ahead in some of my reading for Dr. Eberle's class, but I had a bit of a scare when I apparently got stung by some insect that had wandered into the library. My ankle swelled incredibly, similar to the infamous "tater toe" incident, and I got a bit lightheaded. Even though I eventually found Gabriel, who gave me some Benadryl, I was a bit shaken. I have to be looking out for myself here! Thankfully Benadryl knocks me out pretty quickly, so I couldn't sit up and fret about it for too long.

To be continued (5:40 p.m.)...

(11:40 p.m. 9/11/07) Or not, I guess! It's been a fun but busy day--going to two seminars, reading, and of course the long walks to and from Keble--so I'll try to get in an update tomorrow afternoon. Lots of love as ever from Oxford! --Lauren