Ok so today was quite the day. I had another field trip with the study abroad students to Rochester Castle (one of the last mostly intact medieval keeps in England) and Fort Amherst (a Napoleon-era fort consisting of hundreds of meters of tunnels inside a chalk cliff). Long story short we did a lot of walking and saw a lot of stone walls...and took lots of pictures.
The fort was actually more exciting than the castle (shocking, I know), as our guide was extremely knowledgeable and told us all sorts of creepy tidbits about how incredibly haunted it is ( I will never go in there alone). Apparently they hold a Halloween Haunted "House" every year and one year they had a boy dressed as a monk on a bungee cord jumping down an air-vent thing (see picture) and on his last jump of the night he climbed all the way up to the top where a Napoleonic soldier appeared. All the people at the bottom of the hole/in the tunnels heard was a blood-curdling scream and then whimpering "Help me down! There's someone else up here!" Creepy right?
Our guide also told us that he is in charge of turning off the lights every night (worst Job EVER!) and has seen various Napoleonic soldiers wandering around (all of which he has run away from quickly as possible). Apparently there is also a mother and daughter who hang around a door and follow guests down a passageway, 2 miners killed in a cave-in, and a woman who kneels to pray at the angel stone (along with various Napoleonic soldiers killed in sieges) who haunt the tunnels.
Some other cool things we saw on our tour were the bathroom facilities (ew!), a tutorial on firing a mini-cannon which I don't remember the proper name for, defense mechanisms, and booby-traps/"dead"-ends. It was a really awesome tour.
After our tour was over and we returned to Canterbury a friend and I baked GF/DF brownies for our flatmates (they were quite possibly the best brownies EVER!). Then a few of us nestled down with tea to watch Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone = pure English bliss.
I had a nice chat with my sister via Facebook, and around 10pm some new friends visited our flat which was loads of fun. We did gymnastics, I learned to ride this weird skate-board thing, we had GF cookies (not biscuits, I learned the difference), and we talked them into walking 7 miles to Whitstable (a coastal town with the best Fish'n'Chips in England) tomorrow (although I just learned that they're taking the bus).
That's my day in a nutshell. I have to be up in 5 and a half hours to prepare for the 2.5 hour walk to Whitstable and I am hardly tired at all (hopefully that will change soon).
Yesterday I did laundry and organised my room. My jeans are still drying. Oh, I also went to a gathering of the Christian Union and we watched PITCH PERFECT!!!!! Twas awesome :)
Oh tonight I also booked my first trip with 5 other girls to WALES!!!! If you cannot tell I am super excited. Last exciting tidbit - HARRY POTTER WORLD on Monday, not gonna lie, I will definitely be getting some Gryffindor gear :)
P.S. the rest of the pictures are on Facebook!
No comments:
Post a Comment