St. George, The Dragon, and some old buildings

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).

The festival was the typical medieval spectaculum you can also get at thousands of places in the rest of the world. However, as we were in England, it was enriched by demonstrations of British warfare history. Quote of the day: "Chivalry is a concept that was invented by the French. We wanted to win our battles, so we didn't ever use this. Kick the guys while they are lying on the ground!"
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. ;)