Odds and ends

I just looked and I've written 50 posts for you guys. This is pretty good for someone who never remembers to mail postcards and isn't the quickest in responding to important emails.

Today was drop off the visa applications day at the Turkish Consulate. I was expecting a sit down meeting and got the DMV. There were lines and number calling, but all under the "controlled chaos" umbrella. It was actually a bit fun.

Yesterday I went to Canterbury and the week before I went to Bath (which I don't think I wrote about so I will here). Bath was amazing, a lot like Saratoga, to be honest, which isn't suprising since they're both spa towns. The buildings are mostly Georgian and are yellow because of the local stone used (called.. wait for it... BATH STONE! YAAAY!).

I didn't go into the Roman Spa because I've seen them... and they all look the same. And I don't wanna pay £15 for something that lasts 15 minutes that I've already seen. Interestingly, I just described going to a strip club...

Anyway, back on topic. That's the problem with the Romans- there's no real creativity. If you've seen one Roman monument, you've seen them all. There's only so many damn trepidariums that you can look at before you say "yep. that's a trepidarium." Same goes for the frigidarium, except that frigidarium is slightly more fun to say. But not for £15!

Instead I geeked out by visiting a fully restored Georgian house, the Jane Austen museum, and went to high tea at the Pump Room. The Georgian house was great and I want to line my walls with damask silk now! The Jane Austen museum was a blast and I'm going to send a nasty email to Rough Guides Travel Guides for saying it wasn't worth the visit.

Basically it was myself and a bunch of ladies of a certain age the got all bubbly about a 15 minute Jane Austen lecture, a 5 minute movie about the costumes that were used in the new ITV Austen miniseries, and a brief discussion about which movies stayed true to the book. Suprise, suprise, the people that work at the Austen museum haaaaaated the new Kiera Knightly version. So much so that the woman giving the lecture went off on a 5 minute rant about it.

These were my people.

The pump room was awesome because not only was the high tea (meaning little sandwiches and cakes) delicious, but this place was the center of society in the Georgian period. It's where everyone went to be seen and find out the latest gossip. I, of course, made a mess of it.

It was cream tea, meaning scones with clotted cream.. mmm... And in my excitement I ate the scone first (supposed to eat the sandwich) but shattered it into a hundred pieces trying to put the clotted cream on (think consistency of hard butter on a very dry biscuit). So there was small pieces of scone all over the table directly in front of me that were too small to slather clotted cream and jam on.

If you're actually interested in this story other than to laugh and think "oh that Casey, what trouble will she get into next?" don't worry, I managed to eat all of my scone pieces and no one there made me feel like an idiot. For such a fancy place, they were incredibly nice and they just kept filling up my teapot with more tea to the point that when I left my bladder was going to explode.

For as pleasant as Bath was, Canterbury was just eh. The cathedral is amazing, and it was incredible to be going someplace that was such a major pilgrimage site(I did not feel the same about Fatima for reasons I will not go into here)for hundreds of years. In the crypt there's this pedastal with a bunch of sticky notes on it that you can write a prayer and they'll place the sticky note on the altar during mass. Before they collect them, though, they just sit on this pedastal. It was incredibly moving to read the prayers that some people wrote. The most tongue in cheek that I read was "Please let the teachers survive this field trip..."

The rest of Canterbury was pretty boring. It's all high street shops built after the Germans bombed the crap out of the city in the Baedecker Raids. So there wasn't really much to see or do that was of particular interest after the Cathedral.

To sum up- Bath, yay! Canterbury, eh.