Week 3 Recap by Nora Germano

Greetings from London! We seem to be settling in here at the Metrogate House. We’ve located the nearest grocery store, tube station, Starbucks, and cheapest place to eat. That last one is The Sandwich Shop, just down the street where you can get a baguette sandwich and a complimentary apple for a £1.50. I’m pretty sure everyone on the trip has eaten there at least once so far.

We’ve hit the museums, the markets, the parks, and identified our favourite pubs and clubs. We’ve also taken our first classes: Diaspora Studies, Social Welfare in the UK, Contemporary England, and our Service Learning/Internship class. As dutiful college students, we have also already been complaining about the reading.

Our first major field trip was today. We saw Stonehenge and Bath. We had an 8 am departure so naturally many of us were sleeping on the bus for the drive to Stonehenge, but once there we startled awake by the bitter cold. I had longjohns, wool socks, boots with lambswool lining, a t-shirt, a wool sweater, a scarf, a long coat, a hat and gloves and I was still freezing! We were given a free audio tour. (Prices here are weird- food and clothing is super expensive and most museums are totally free). It was interesting to here about how Stonehenge was built and theories about why it’s there. I enjoyed seeing it simply as a feat of engineering—the stones was approximately 50 tons a piece and the nearest stone is 30 miles away. I think that’s what I found most striking about Stonehenge—the fact that it is this immense, obviously humanly created thing just sitting on a hill surrounded by miles of open countryside. (Actually, our tour guide said that the area used to be totally forested. I’m not sure what happened to the trees…)

After we saw Stonehenge we went to Bath, which was originally a Roman city built in 48 A.D., although the city that stands today was built in the 18th century. We were given a chance to walk around and find ourselves some lunch, so four of us went to Sally Lunn’s, the oldest house in Bath. From the Kitchen Museum in the basement we learned that Sally Lunn was a French refugee who arrived in bath 300 years ago and started baking a special bread known for being rich, light, and slightly sweet. These became famous as ‘Sally Lunn Buns’. We got the chance to try them and they were quite good. You can even buy them to give to friends and family, but unfortunately for those of you back in the States they’ll only last about four days.

After lunch we went into the Roman Baths and did an audio tour of that as well. We were given free reign to explore until 4 pm, but I got tied up in trying to listen to ALL of the commentaries and so had just enough time to when I was done to sample the Bath water (insert laugh here) and then pop into the Bath Abbey for a look around.

The water was warm and tasted very irony. We found out that there’s 43 minerals in it!

Bath Abbey was beautiful. Huge stained glass windows, inscriptions and memorials covering the walls and floor (people could be buried there until 1908), and I had the fortune of going in while an elderly woman was playing the violin.

All in all, it was a long day but I think we enjoyed ourselves. Next up: classes Tuesday and a trip to the Freud Museum on Wednesday.