White Bread and Awesome

Today (26/10) was an interesting day. I’ve eaten nothing but various versions of those triangular sandwiches the English love so much (9 of them, in total) and breakfast, which was also toast. Not my most healthy day ever. On the other hand, we had a guided tour of the older parts of Canterbury, and of Canterbury Cathedral. That building is by far the coolest one I have ever seen. It rocks. Everything in it is incredibly detailed and beautiful, and I’ve never seen stonework with that kind of detail before. Also, our guide was an elderly woman, who was also awesome. She liked Henry VIII (or, well, she liked talking about him, I don’t think anyone actually Liked Henry VIII) and she was great fun. She also showed us something called "the dunking chair" (sp) which was originally used for checking if women were witches or dead. It was a chair at the end of a long pole, out over the river. What they did was that they tied the girl in question to the chair, popped it into the water, waited until they got bored, and then brought her up again. If she by some miracle was alive, she was burned at the stake. So far, pretty standard. The funny thing happened after they had stopped with the witch hunts. Then, the chair was mostly used on nagging wives. It had a similar idea, except they were only kept underwater until they learned their lesson. Every once in a while, one realizes that we have actually come rather a long way on this whole gender-neutrality issue.

On the down side, my hostess (Geraldine Irons, that name rocks), doesn’t have an internet connection, and for some reason I can’t figure out how to connect to the two wireless ones I can reach from here, which is a shame because they both have very good signal strength. It just says that I have an "invalid IP address", and I don’t know how to fix that, since it’s already set to dynamic. Annoying, is what it is. I plan on getting a pass card for the university tomorrow (there hasn’t been any time yet) so that I will be able to check my mail, and post this. Hopefully, after that, I’ll be able to use Skype in the Wi-Fi zones the university has on campus some time.
Now I’m in my room, having just fixed my adapter for the power plugs. It didn’t fit originally, so I spent some time cutting bits of plastic off of the adapter it with a razorblade. Not entirely sure if that’s the best plan, but it works anyway. I’ve never used a razorblade without anything to put it in or hold it with before, so it was a novel experience, but it was the only sharp blade my hostess had in her house. If I hadn’t been able to fix it, or find a new, better one, I wouldn’t have been able to use the computer, which would have been rather terrible, since it took a bit of effort and space (not to mention air-plane weight ratios) to bring it.

After the tour, I went to a nearby pub with Longshanks and four other guys, and Longshanks managed to order one of the coolest appetizers I have ever seen. It was fried potato skins with bacon and cheddar. So it was basically a few thin bits of hollowed-out potato, which was made unhealthy by frying it, and then further unhealthy by adding glorious bacon, and then they covered the whole thing in unhealthy cheese. It was great. It was quite expensive, though, at £4.75.

28/10: I can post this now, I finally found time and opportunity to register an account at the university ,as well as a computer I could access without having gotten my pass card. I'll keep you updated as I go along, now it's time to go downstairs and have another Cider at the Student Union (which is on campus, by the way. Half of the guys got overly excited about the idea of taking a pint between classes).

Cheerio.