Travel Diary Britain ’06 – 8th entry – 24th July 2006

Quite tired and with a slight headache I got up this morning. I actually felt like sleeping until noon but I wanted to get to Canterbury as soon as possible so after some splashes of cold water into my face I pulled myself together, hopped into the car and hit the road. I think I reached the city of one of the Archbishops of England at around ten, although I’m not quite sure of the time anymore and made my way straight to the cathedral which I reached after a short and refreshing walk through the city centre. The city centre is nothing much special but the cathedral is a real gem and so I paid and entered the abbey grounds. After walking around the cathedral once and taking photos from several angles I walked in through the main entrance and here my tripod really proved its worth: never before have I been able to take such clear pictures of the interior of a church. And it was definitely worth photographing, especially the stained glass windows… Now, many people find churches in general quite boring and think that they all look alike but there are those little differences. How ornate is the interior? What motives are shown on the paintings displayed? Who is buried there and what do the inscriptions on their remembrance stones say? And so on.
Anyway, I surely spent two hours having a good look at everything and then I went back out of the city centre when I got a text from Charlie, saying that she was going to Bury and that she’d have time to meet up. Great! So of course I lose no time, get to the car and drive up to Bury St. Edmunds where I arrived some time in the afternoon. I went to the place where we’d agreed to meet and soon we were walking through the centre of Bury. Charlie definitely had some experience at showing people around there and made a really good guide – we walked through the abbey gardens, visited the cathedral of Bury, went to a little corner shop selling a great variety of British jams (I bought some, of course…) and saw the smallest pub in Britain – just big enough to fit some five people in…
After some more walking and chatting we then went to my car and set off for Thurston, to her parents’ house.
Well, that house got me really impressed: it’s a residency built in the early 19^th century, pretty much restored to its original state and absolutely huge! So, we went in and I met Charlie’s mum, we chatted about my road trip, the places I’d been to so far, the places where she’ d lived before and I got an invitation to stay over night! Fantastic, isn’t it? So, while Charlie’s mum went to prepare supper, Charlie showed me around in the house and I met her cat Ugli, her budgie and her sister’s lizard Lizzie. We sat down on the couch to talk and watch telly and Ugli joined us too and time went by really quickly and soon her mum called for supper. In the meantime her dad had gotten home as well and so the four of us settled down at the dinner table and had some really nice pasta and pie. Charlie’s dad and I also had some red wine and well talked about student life in Liverpool, England, Austria, skiing, in other words anything and everything. Later in the evening Charlie took me for a walk around Thurston, we saw her school and the post office which forms pretty much the centre of the place. So it’s a proper small village, not unlike Pfarrkirchen in Austria. After returning from this walk we spent the rest of the evening watching Rain Man in their movie watching room (!) and now I’m in the guest bedroom, about to go to bed. And tomorrow we shall se Cambridge!

The cathedral of Canterbury, inside...

...and outside

Here, almost every single Archbishop of Canterbury got a memorial

I like photographing stained glass windows because they work out so nice on photos

Ruins at the Abbey Gardens in Bury St. Edmunds - the left one's shaped like a chicken and the right one like a tea kettle...

Bury Cathedral

The smallest pub in Britain - only five people can stand inside

Sweets shop in Bury

This is where I stayed over night