“No one has built a hence like that since then!... no one knows what the heck a henge is, but we’ve got one!”

As Eddie Izzard so valiantly put it, yes, England has Stonehenge. Last weekend BU packed us up onto a bus at 8.45 in the morning, drove us two hours south of here, and plopped us in the middle of a field and said “LOOK. LOOK AT OUR ROCKS.”

At least they're nice rocks?

Granted it was a gorgeous day and yes, those rocks are cool. When I told people I was going to see Stonehenge, I got a lot of “it’s just a bunch of rocks” (coughFalloncoughcough) but... it was just one of those things that I had to do. Yes, I’m aware about a gazillion people a day go look at Stonehenge and yes, more people than I can even fathom have been through those rocks. Nowadays you can’t even touch the rocks or go near them; you just kinda watch them from a distance with a rope in front of you. And you walk around them look at them from every angle, attempt to take witty photos—

I'm holding it in my palm. GET IT?

It took us far too long to plan this photo out.

—and then you get back on the bus and go someplace else. For us, it was Salisbury to go look at some churches and eat some delicious foods. But it was still a breath-taking experience. It was a beautiful, cloudless day, you could see the countryside for miles, and since it was so early, the place wasn’t that crowded and we enjoyed a nice wander around the perimeter. There were a lot of sheep and crows hanging around, which was weird. Since the only method of fencing they had to keep people from frolicking in the stones was a thin black rope, we assumed that they were there to attack whenever someone crossed and made a break for it.

But this is a structure that has lasted longer than half the world’s countries have been around. This structure was standing here, presumably in one piece at some point, since before most countries had names. Or national identities. They were just roaming pacts of people who were vaguely different from one another and fought on a basis of “you kind of don’t sound and/or look like me.”

This continent is a lot like high school.

The point is, this is a vital piece of history. I’m sure that someone’s entire life career was formed just because this monument is still standing and we still don’t know what the hell it’s for. I’ve seen everything from aliens built for rituals to it was a farmhouse, and each theory is just as crazy as the last. We were even joking that it was built the way it’s standing now, and it was never one concentric circle.

"HAHA SCREW YOU ALL!" - Stonehenge

 It’s also another piece of the ancient world I’ve always wanted to see. First Pompeii, then the Rosette Stone, now Stonehenge. That’s like... three things knocked of my non-existent ancient world bucket list. (I should really make one of those.) Salisbury was nice though, once we were done marveling at Stonehenge. It had a nice church, an original copy of the Magna Carta (all Americans should be excited about that!) and a little market where Saiya bought a hat. All in all, good day.

I'm smiling so giddily because this is right before I made a break for it.


Not really.

Even the New Town looks Old

Who’s done a horrible job of keeping up this blog? THIS GUY. I STILL haven’t written about Oxford, oy. Dunno if I’ll get to that, to be honest. Blargh. Not gonna lie, been having too awesome of a time to actually write anything. That and utter laziness. But I digress. Look! A real entry!

Anyway, roughly a week and a half ago, myself and Saiya embarked on a whirlwind tour of Scotland in two days. We took a night bus on Thursday night, from 11 p.m. until 8:30 ish a.m., and arrived on a cloudy morning in Edinburgh, toting our backpacks of stuff. We got a little bit lost but eventually found our way to the hostel, the Castle Rock Hostel in Old Town, Edinburgh. It’s a small, cute little building that’s right across the road from Edinburgh Castle. Legitimately directly across.

This photo was taken from next to the hostel. Yep.

Since we couldn’t get into our rooms for a while yet, we stashed our things and went exploring. We met Sir Walter Scot, up in his little Gothic tower, looked at a LOT of cashmere and wool, and climbed a mountain-hill. Yes, I said mountain-hill. It took some time and effort but the views were absolutely breath-taking. At first we just hung out around the bizarro Greek arch thing that was on top of the mountain and ogled New Town from up above.

Then we climbed to the other side... and were greeted by mountains.

It was beautiful. Just beautiful. We literally just sat there and stared for a while, and I think, for me, it finally sunk in—we’re in Scotland.

Scotland, by the way, is magnificent. I’ve never been in a place with such an infectious joy for heritage. Everywhere you go there are stores selling Scottish things, hundreds of St. Andrew saltires hanging from every window, bagpipers on every other corner—

and just... so much friendship between everyone. The town is extremely walkable, we figured it out in about half a day and we knew exactly where we were going. We wandered the Royal Mile, looking at scarves and pretending to be Scottish. Well, in my case, anyway.

As if you wouldn't buy whiskey with your name on it.

 The museums are all gorgeous and free, filled to the brim with Scottish history that I didn’t realize I didn’t know. Scotland is just kind of glossed over in history (albeit not nearly as much as Wales) and even though I’ve taken three English history courses, I learned more about Scotland in those two days than I have up until that point. In addition to the beautiful museums, we also had beautiful churches and a gorgeous castle on top of a hill, looking out over all of Edinburgh, in all its Gothic glory.

Although the nightlife was something to be desired, it was a really awesome trip. Also, I had haggis. Haggis is quite delicious. And yes, I am aware of what it is. Still delicious. They don’t serve it to you looking like that, and even if they did, well... probably still would eat it.

Haggis, neeps and tatties.

Maybe if I had actually written this after I went, I would have been able to talk more about it. It was beautiful, everything was delicious, the nightlife was... eh but the hostel was nice, at least? But the bus ride was awful. Awful but worth it. 

In Flanders Fields, the Poppies Blow -- Ieper, Belgium

I’m aware I have yet to write about Oxford, but this weekend was just... one of those weekends and I have to write about it now. Meanwhile, I’m listening to the 5^th Season of Doctor Who soundtrack and it just makes me want to go on more adventures.

Anyway, this past weekend I went to Ieper, Belgium with my WWI/WWII class, on a field trip. (Yes, you wish your field trips were this awesome.) We got up at the crack of dawn to leave Harrington Gardens for a 9:30-ish ferry across the English Channel to Calais, France, where we took a bus into the Belgian countryside. We checked into our little hostel on the edge of the city and from there... it began.

The reason for going to Belgium in this class was to see Flanders Fields, where a great deal of WWI was fought between 1915 and 1918. And by a great deal, I mean most. Ieper was a town that happened to be on the edge of the farmland that was used as the battlefield, and was utterly demolished by bombs and shells. Completely and utterly flattened, without even a tree left standing. The city was rebuilt, brick-by-brick, by way of German money, years and years after both world wars had ended, but it was eventually re-built to it’s former beauty.

And what a beauty it is.

We went into a museum dedicated to the battles of WWI, where we followed along the chaotic footsteps of the Great War. It had recreation trenches, fake bombs exploding, and there’s one room where the floor lights up, and you’re standing just inches above body parts, barbed wire, mud and poisonous gas. All fake, of course, but I jumped when I saw a hand poking out at me. It was a beautiful and sobering museum, and my entire class wandered it’s halls in a sort of awed silence at the photos and the stories we were witnessing.

Afterwards, we went to the Menin Gate, which is their Korean Wall, except about seven times as big and about a zillion times more depressing.

This is probably about 1/25th of the entire thing. And there are four of these in the entire city.

They have a ceremony to remember all the people who went missing during the first World War, where they play the European version of Taps and lay poppies everywhere. The entire town shuts down for a few minutes and there’s so much quiet you can hear the canal lapping even though there’s no wind to move the surface. It was amazing.

Afterwards, once we were properly depressed, we engaged in the local culture by drinking Belgian beer and engaging with Belgians. We had eaten a nice, fattening dinner of pasta and cheese at a local restaurant, where pasta was the only thing we could decipher on the menu because it was in Italian as opposed to being in Ducth like everything else was. I’m somewhat convinced Dutch is just a made-up language because it seems to make absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Someone just mashed a keyboard and called it language.

After a very strange night involving Jack the American, fruit-flavored beer--

Sinfully delicious. And cheap.

--and coaster maps, we went on a tour of all the cemeteries dedicated to the fallen during WWI and the battlefields that remained. We were one step ahead of big tour groups, which was thankful because they were slow-moving whenever they caught up with us. We went to a British graveyard, a German graveyard, and an Allied graveyard, all three of which had gigantic monuments and meticulously cared for gardens and greens. We went to a bio fuel plant where, smack dab in the middle, was a preserved trench from 1915, nearly exactly how it was save for the sandbags being made out of concrete for preservation reasons.

 

It smelled horrendous, it was cramped, short, awkward, and around every corner I expected to see a rat or something. I can’t even begin to imagine trench warfare, and I’ve now been inside the very same trench many men’s lives depended on.

The most amazing place we went to, however, was the last cemetery we went to, the Allied cemetery of Tyne Cot, all the way out in the cornfields. It had once been where the Germans were stationed, and where they gunned down hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers over the course of three years, turning the beautiful fields to blood and dust.

It was one of the most incredible sights I’ve ever seen.

And every single time I saw a headstone that said “Unknown Soldier”, I thought of the Menin Gate, and how that soldier’s name was probably chiseled into the wall, never to be placed with a body.

There were several times I thought I was going to cry. You learn about these wars over in the States and they’re a very popular topic to learn about but, seeing it first-hand, in the place it was fought... it’s something else. Standing someplace and looking up at the buildings and thinking “none of this was here near 100 years ago” is kind of terrifying. A city hundreds of years old, built over centuries, developing culture and language, turned to rubble in mere days over what, exactly? It’s the same with seeing remnants of WWII; London has many buildings still damaged from the Blitz of 1940, and the Second Great Fire of 1944.

All in all, Belgium was an amazing experience, and I’m so thankful that this class exists, because I’ve never learned so much about that time period in our world’s history in my life. Ik zal terug zijn, België.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields. -John McCrae, 1915