After a long holiday spent traveling here, there, and everywhere, I'm back in Bristol and back down to business. Firstly: the break has been fantastic, and there's nothing better than spending time at home with family and friends and traveling to fun and exciting places. Secondly: coming back to Bristol after a couple weeks away has really shown me how much I love love love it here. I just feel all tingly sometimes walking around the city or coming through the door at home because I'm so lucky to be here. Two big thumbs up for Bristol and its lovely inhabitants.
But, back to my whirlwind past couple of weeks. Dee has been over here with me since the 30th, and we've had an awesome time touring the UK and hanging out here at home. We have definitely made the most of every day he's been here -- I can't remember two weeks when I've walked more! We started off spending about 24 hours in London after flying to Heathrow, and jet lag didn't even cross our minds -- we were out and about as soon as we'd ditched our stuff at the hotel in Bloomsbury. We both get a big kick out of all the dandy stuff in Piccadilly, so we headed there first, then headed to Mass at Brompton Oratory and had dinner in Chinatown. The next day we walked more around the center and saw the greatest hits of the Portrait Gallery, National Gallery, and the British Museum before getting the train back to Bristol on New Years Eve. New Years was pretty chill -- we had great pizza at Pizza Express and then came back and had mulled wine and watched about numbers 40-15 of the "Top 100 Most Annoying People of 2007" on the telly. I must be getting old.
It was a good thing we got to bed not long after midnight, because we were off to Cheltenham for the New Years Day races after a run the next morning. Neither of us knew quite what we were getting into at Cheltenham, but it really blew us away. We were probably some of the only foreigners there: it's definitely an old establishment thing, with most of the men in long tweed jackets and hats with binoculars around their necks and the women all poshed up in ladies' tweed, big Russian-style full hats, and (inexplicably, considering the cold and the mud) high heels. The place was packed full of thousands of people, and we saw seven steeplechase races on a gorgeous green course under the hills of Gloucestershire. We didn't put any money on our favorites, but we cheered hard for a horse called Wichita Lineman.
The next day we went to Bath, where we of course toured the Baths, walked up to the Royal Crescent and (major highlight) popped into the gift shop of the Jane Austen Centre to check out the Mr. Darcy range. I bought a greeting card featuring a portrait of Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy that is awaiting installment in a gilt frame to be featured prominently on my wall!
Dee headed off to Cardiff on Thursday while I stayed home to atone for my pretty much complete neglect of my studies over the previous week. I'm in the middle of a lot of good reading right now for an essay on Prudentius' Peristephanon, a collection of poems on the martyr cult of the late 4th century, and loads of revision for my Greek test next week. When Dee came back we had a really nice dinner, provided by one of my housemates, of food she'd smuggled back from Romania -- it is absolutely amazing what she managed to get through customs!
And then, we were off to Paris the next morning! Hooray for EasyJet -- they make it simple to leave Bristol early in the morning and be strolling down the Champs by early afternoon. Wow. It was pedal-to-the-metal sightseeing from there, for four very full days. On Saturday, we checked an item off the top of my to-see list by taking the commuter train to Versailles. We had a sort of odd snafu getting onto a guided tour of some of the various Louis' private apartments, which at one point had us chasing through the palace complex after an extremely passive-aggressive desk worker who insisted a) that we were late for our tour (we weren't), and b) that there was a tour that we could catch up with if we ran like mad people through the palace and round Louis XIV's chapel (there plainly wasn't). Anyway: the apartments were quite impressive when we got to them two hours later! Other highlights of Paris included some very nice dinners in the Latin Quarter and a visit to the Museum of the Middle Ages, part of which is housed in an old Roman bath complex -- very neat.
The past couple of days has been more or less a marathon tete-a-tete with Plato (see, I learned some French while I was away) while Dee has seen more of the southwest, including Oxford. Sadly, he's off tomorrow morning, and even more sadly, I've just realized that the essay I thought was due Friday is due in tomorrow by noon, so our time together has been even further shortened (so why am I writing this blog entry right now? That is a very good question indeed!). Anyway, I'll get back to it. Sorry for the ridiculous length of this entry! To compensate for my wordiness, here are some pictures to go along with it. Happy New Year to all!
No comments:
Post a Comment