Over the evening you have to drink three of each and the par number tells you how many sips you may at most use for finishing. Winner is, whoever stays below par or who can still stand straight at the end of the day.
Kids: Don't try this at home.
I start to gather a backlog of things and photos and it's time to write more stuff in order to catch up.
Sadly moving on, we crossed the road and stood in front of Westminster Abbey. First shock - they take a 10 pounds admission fee. However, my English Heritage Young Persons Membership card helped me here, as it was accepted as a replacement for my missing student ID and I got to pay the reduced fee.
Interestingly, Lord Wellington is known to have said "It's victory or Westminster Abbey for us!" at the beginning of the Battle of Trafalgar. Poor Wellington was wrong. He won the battle, but was shot by a French sniper - and they buried him in St. Paul's Cathedral.
On we went through St. James Park, where (as a matter of signposts allover) you are allowed to feed the ducks, the swans, and the pidgeons, but not the pelicans. Probably pelicans are a pest and they try to get rid of them this way - sucessfully, as we didn't see any pelican there. Our way lead us to Buckingham Palace, where we were to take the usual photos, although anyone will agree that there are much nicer palaces in the world.
After all these touristic activities we spent one and a half hour to search for a reasonable place to eat and then kept walking along river Thames. We lost Malo for a while as he went to see Tate Modern, while the others of us decided the weather was much too nice to lose time watching some blue rectangles over green circles on a white canvas. (Yes, I'm prejudiced...) Walking along the river we learned that museums close pretty early here. Shakespeare's Globe Theatre hat just admitted the last group of people at half past 4 and when we finally reached St. Paul's Cathedral, we only were allowed a quick glance at the inside before being thrown out by the security.
Question: How many Starbucks cafes are in 3-minute walking distance of St. Paul's? Answer: Three! After this experience I wrote a sad e-mail to Starbucks Germany and requested a shop to be opened in Dresden, too. However, they thanked me for my interest and had to admit that there were no such plans for the year 2008.
Just back from Dublin (pronounced Dubb-Linn if you'd like to be local), capital of the beautiful Republic of Ireland (pronounced: Oi-Länd). Will take some time before I write more about this. Just one thing for short: I know now, why Ireland is not that good at football - they don't seem to have enough dogs.
The trip to Sutton Hoo in fact had been a makeshift, because British car rental companies are closed on Sundays and we needed to rent the car for the whole weekend. The real purpose of all this had been a visit to St. George's Festival in Wrest Park. The first problem when getting up early Sunday morning: it had rained all night and still did not seem to stop and we were set up for a whole day out in the countryside. That's why we spent the first hour after meeting at the Microsoft building just drinking coffee and discussing what else we could do. Finally, we decided to go to the festival anyway - in England, you can't just stay at home because it's raining.
After an hour of driving on the left side - in the meantime I had gotten quite used to it - we arrived at the park and ran into the arms of a guy who tried to convince us of becomming members of the English Heritage Foundation. This trust runs around 400 historic sites around England (some of the most famous ones being Dover Castle and Stonehenge) and for only GBP 32 I became a one-year member of the trust, which gets me free admission to all of these sites. It already saved me around 13 pounds of entrance fees on my first day. Additionally, the guy believed me being a student without having an international student ID and a week later I could use my English Heritage Student Member ID even for getting lower admission fees at Westminster Abbey (although lower had a complete new dimension in this respect, but more on London later).
Twice a day, they also ran the final showdown between the handsome and powerful English St. George on his white horse, an evil arab with Scottish accent and the dragon. Making the crowds of children happy, St. George beat them all and secured the lifes of poor English villagers. After eating horrible English food (in fact the first time I got real bad food here), trying out fudge (extreeeemely sweet) and getting bored, we decided to spend the afternoon visiting some other places and went to Rushton Triangular Lodge and then onwards to Kirby Hall (both of them of course run by English Heritage, so I didn't need to pay admission fees...)
The Triangular Lodge was built by a rich English Roman-Catholic (yes, those guys existed) who had been thrown into prison for his beliefs. After getting out of jail, he wanted to show the world that he was still a believer and built a house symbolising the Holy Trinity. The house has three corners, three floors with 3 rooms each, triangular windows and icons, but is empty otherwise, so there is not that much to see inside. (And by the way: someone on the Wikipedia page took my picture and switched the sun on...)
Kirby Hall was a mansion used by varying English nobles until the mid 19th century and wasn't used afterwards. Today, people are trying to reconstruct the building and keep the interesting French-style park in good shape. Another remarkable quote relates to exactly this park. The Hall's museum explained everything about its creation and as young European intellectuals we were of course aware that it had a strong resemblence to parks all over France. (Or maybe our intellect did not help us as much as Malo, the French guy in our rows, telling us that all the time.) Interesting though, that the Kirby Hall Museum did not acknowledge the park being French but rather as having been "inspired by Continental influences". I guess, there must be some tensions between the French and the English. ;)
The most important thing we discovered that day was that wind and rain brought from the nearby North Sea had about 1.400 years time to wash the ancient burial mounds to the ground and they did succeed overwhelmingly. As a result, visitors basically see a large area of green grass with tiny ripples that you would not recognize as being graves if the guide didn't tell you so. The only thing that really looks like a mound and where one may be able to believe in the stories of ancient kings buried with their boats, armory and other belongings is the one on the photo (which is the most spectacular landscape photo I took that day). And guess what: it has been rebuilt by the last team of archeologists digging around in Sutton Hoo after they finished their work in the 1990s.
From the comments in my blog and personal communication I know that there are really people reading my blog and I feel a bit bad because I did not post anything about last weekend's trip through East Anglia up to now. Unfortunately, my mobile broadband is extremely slow uploading pics (took me 2 minutes to upload this one), but I think I can upload some of last week's photos from work.
King's College Chapel is a really impressing cathedral belonging to (who could have guessed?) King's College. I also tried to take some pictures inside, however it was too dark and my hand was too shaky. I'll try again, if I'm in the mood to spend another 5 pounds for the entrance fee.
This photo was taken inside King's College. Of course no one is allowed to walk on the beautiful English Green - except senior staff members of the college and their guests.
Another view on river Cam.
Yesterday I took a day off, doing the laundry, cleaning the house and being a tourist. And where else should a football-loving tourist go on a mostly sunny Saturday afternoon in England than to watch a football match?
