Visitors!

Sorry for the recent lack of posts; I’ve been quite busy giving my parents a  whirlwind tour of the south of England in five days; we started in Oxford and then visited Bath (you have to pronounce it with a long a or else the Brits just will not understand you) and Blenheim Palace (this is where Winston Churchill grew up. It’s absolutely exquisite!). I felt like I had so much to show them in Oxford alone; we spent Thursday running around all the colleges, museums, and libraries (no, I didn’t make my parents tour the libraries; they wanted to see them. I promise!). Even after spending just one day in Oxford, my parents now understand why I love this place so much and have accepted the fact that I will not be returning at the end of term. Just kidding, Holy Cross. My parents also really enjoyed Bath; we took a tour of the Roman baths, so I was happy as a clam. One area of the exhibit testifies to how popular these springs were throughout the centuries. The water level is at the original Roman level, but the orange stain around the walls indicates how high the levels were during the Medieval period; to top it all off, the room is decorated with Victorian wall hangings and architecture. It’s lovely, really. After our extremely rapid tour of Oxford and the surrounding areas, we headed into London for two days. Yes, we managed to see a majority of the sites in London in a mere forty-eight hours. I think that that might be a record. We even managed to see a play in the West End (for the record, Billy Eliot is a fantastic production)! It’s a good thing that we were walking everywhere, though; I think we ate lunch and dinner at a pub every night that my parents were here. I can’t believe that I’m saying this, but I really don’t think I’ll ever want to eat fish n’ chips or steak and kidney pie again!

Having both Carleen and my parents here made me realize just how acclimated I’ve become to England. Granted, I don’t speak with a British accent or anything (my British friends still make fun of the way I talk, actually), but there are just some things that have become second nature to me now and I don’t even think about it anymore. For instance, the entire “order your food at the bar” system in most English pubs baffled Carleen and my parents at first, but it doesn’t really phase me anymore. Sure, the first time that I wanted fish n’ chips from the Eagle and Child (no, I don’t love that place just because of the Tolkien affiliation…), it was a tad weird, but now I’ve acclimated to the system. I haven’t forgotten my American roots (believe me, my British friends will tell you that the opposite is quite true), but I’ve just acclimated to the culture here; now I don’t even think of the differences between the two cultures.

I don’t have anymore visitors for quite some time now, so now it’s back to finishing some research, planning my epic tour of Medieval sites around the UK (oooooh yes. Lindisfarne is on the itinerary!!), and (guess what?!) dancing. Am I predictable or what?

Until then, please enjoy the photos below of my visitors and the places that we explored.

Colleen

This entry was posted on Friday, March 26th, 2010 at 3:03 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “Visitors!”

1. Jaime Reinmiller says:

   March 11, 2011 at 7:36 pm

   Howdy just wanted to give you a quick heads up and let you know a few of the images aren’t loading correctly. I’m not sure why but I think its a linking issue. I’ve tried it in two different web browsers and both show the same results.

2. cmcurr11 says:

   March 13, 2011 at 5:48 pm

   Thanks for the notice – I think it has something to do with the switch in servers that happened a while ago. I’ll see what I can do to fix it.