Once again, I realize that it has been a while since I made a post, but we have been very busy traveling from London to Edinburgh and we haven't had particularly good internet while we've been traveling.
Early Thursday morning we boarded the bus, departed London, and began our journey towards Edinburgh. The first stop on our trip was Straford-upon-Avon, the town where Shakespeare was born. It was a very small and quiet town, especially when compared to the hustle and bustle of London that we had become used to over the previous two weeks. We arrived in Stratford in the early afternoon and had an amazing brunch and afternoon tea. Then we started exploring the city, which didn't take very long, as it is a tiny city, but it was interesting to see some of the Shakespeare related sites and enjoy the sunny day in the countryside. That evening we had tickets to see another Shakespeare play that was being performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company. This time we saw the play
As You Like It. The show was good, but we were all very surprised by how modern the production was, especially as compared to the performance in London at the Globe Theater. After the show, we returned to our hotels and called it a night as we had to get up pretty early again to continue our journey through the country.
On Friday morning, we had a quick breakfast in the hotel before once again boarding the bus.
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| Dove Cottage |
Our destination for Friday was the Lake District and more specifically Dove Cottage in the city of Grasmere, one of William Wordsworth's homes in the area. The house was quite small, but the area was incredibly beautiful. At the house we also met with a Wordsworth historian who manages the library at the house which today is a collection of as many of Wordsworth's drafts and early publications as they can find. It was amazing to see how much time and thought went into Wordsworth's editing process, he was truly never done with his poems. After we left the house we had a quick lunch in the nearby town, then re-boarded the bus to head towards our hotel for the evening.
Once again on Saturday morning, we boarded the bus and set off for a long day of traveling. Our first stop of the day was another of Wordsworth's houses in the area, which was only about ten minutes from Dove Cottage, Rydal Mount. This house was significantly larger than the previous one, as he moved there to accommodate his growing family. The landscaping at this house was even more incredible than at Dove Cottage.
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| My Friends Ashley, Jamie, and I at Rydal Mount |
At Rydal Mount there was roughly four-and-a-half acres of gardens that were all incredibly lush and green. I spent most of our visit just wandering through the gardens and admiring the area. After we finished at the house, we once again had some lunch in Grasmere before boarding the bus that would finally take us to Edinburgh. The bus ride was kind of long, but we still managed to arrive in the early evening, which left us some time to get dinner and start exploring the city. We found a nice place for dinner and then started to wander, but unfortunately most of the shop were already closed as it was getting late, so we returned to our new dorms and decided that we would do more exploring on Sunday.
We didn't have anything official planned for Sunday which meant that we got to sleep in, which was wonderful after several days full of traveling and not getting enough sleep. After we woke up, we got some breakfast, then headed out to explore our new city. While Edinburgh is the second largest city in Scotland, it is still incredible small compared to London, which means that we can pretty much walk everywhere. After wandering around for a while we found a nice place to get some lunch, before setting off to explore more of the city. Over the course of the day, we were able to pretty much cover the entire city and we saw many of the most famous sites in the city.
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| Edinburgh Castle |
For dinner, we found an amazing Indian restaurant where we had what was probably the best Indian food of the trip. The food was so good that we are actually planning on going back again before we leave this weekend. We were incredibly full after dinner so we returned to our dorms and called it a night. It was very nice to have a relaxing day after so much traveling.
Today was our first scheduled day in the city. We started out by visiting the Surgeons' Museum which is part of the Royal College of Surgeons here in Edinburgh. For centuries the college has set the standards for surgeons in the region as well as serving to teach new procedures and new surgeons. Through the years, the college has also collected numerous specimens and other artifacts that it has assembled into a museum to show how surgery has evolved through the years from the days before sterilization or aesthetics all the way to the present day. It was particularly interesting to see how much military necessity has fueled the development of the surgery throughout history. After we had finished with the museum, we had a bus tour of the city, which didn't add a whole lot to our experience as we had already walked the city over the past few days, but it was still interesting to get a different perspective and to hear some more information about what we were seeing. Once we got off of the bus we got some lunch before returning to our dorms for an afternoon nap. Feeling refreshed from our afternoon nap, we headed out to get some Chinese food for dinner which was decent, but not the best we have had so far on the trip. After dinner I did some much needed laundry before calling it a night.
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