Ello chap!
On a bus right now driving across the English countryside (: Two of the Americans who were in my GlobaLinks group in London, Hailee and Paula, and I are making a day trip down to Dover! We really want to see the cliffs and if we have time hopefully a castle or two!
It's about a half hour drive from Canterbury so figured I'd do some blogging ;)
Yesterday was the "Freshers Fair" where all the "societies" set up a booth and had sign ups and gave out information for their club. They. have. so.many.clubs. Seriously a club for everything. I was just walking around saying, yupp there's a club for that. Archery society? Yupp. Polo society? Of course. Pirate society? Ahh yeahh. (Don't worry, Dad. Definitely signed up.) They even had a "real cider and ale" society. Ahhh and guys!! They had a "kent snow" club!! I met some snowboarders and it kind of made my day. Their big trip isn't until January but they said in the meantime they do lots of socials and trips to visit this place with fake snow just to practice a bit on. Pretty excited about that one (: oh and Jakeee they had a parkour club too ;) I also signed up for a couple Christian clubs and a club that goes in to elementary schools in Canterbury to do crafts and read stories and things to kids (: I got to sign up for lots of clubs so between those, traveling, and actual classes, think I'm gonna be pretty busy!
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On the way back from Dover. Holyyyy bologna... Talk about beautiful!! All the pictures you see of the cliffs of Dover do not even do them justice. Heck my pictures don't even come close to capturing how breathtaking they are. Absolutely stunning. While on the coast, we had our first fish and chips!! We were so happy we waited to have our first British fish and chips here because this was the real deal. This fish was literally caught fresh this morning and then prepared right away. You could definitely tell too- they were not messing around. Plus, we got to have it on the coast which was even more legit. Like too legit. (Too legit to quit)
After our delightful lunch, we walked along the magnificent coastline (wow sorry that was a lame sentence). It really was an amazing coastline though. We all wanted to go swimming so we could say we have swam (swum? Swammed?) in the English Channel! We decided we didn't want to be all wet for the rest of the day so just touching the water would have to suffice. I didn't have to worry too much longer about getting wet though because I thought it'd be a great idea to jump the waves which led to my Toms getting soaked... Wet shoes= the worst. But it's alright it was all part of the experience.
We lucked out because it was a beautifullll clear sunny day! That being said, we were trying to see France because it is only a short 20 miles away!! We saw lots of ships but not any shorelines... After we got tired of singing "I see London, I see France" we headed back up to town.
From there, we got on a bus to the Dover Castle. Shout out to our leader in London, Alex, who told us the more things that go wrong, the better your stories are. Well... Hopefully this is a better story then than "oh yeah we went into the castle and it was awesome and super pretty and it was just great". So, our first mistake was going down the road instead of around.. The road took us to a parking lot for the castle, which we thought was promising but we didn't see any way up to the castle...Except for this very treacherous looking path. Looking back on it, we're idiots because that clearly was not the way up to the castle... I mean it was a way to the castle but it was not the intended way up to the castle. I guess our inner mountaineers kicked in and we decided to try it anyway. We literally mountain-climbed up the very steep path only to see no way in to the castle (I don't know why we expected we would see some magical way in when we were clearly not where we were supposed to be...) We continued to walk along the top ridge for a while till we got to a bridge (cuz there was a legitimate moat going around the castle!). Paula decided to parkour it by the electric fence and onto the bridge. She actually made it all the way to the castle doors but naturally no one opened when she knocked. I told her to yell that she was selling Girl Scout Cookies but that didn't work either. After Paula's failed attempt at storming the castle, we decided we had better just head back to the bus and call it a day. Don't worry Alex, the story isn't quite over. While at the bus stop we were approached by a very creepy cat lady, which cat lady's are generally pretty creepy but for some reason cat ladies with British accents are even creepier. She asked where we were from (which we came to a general consensus that if a stranger asked, we would say we were from Canada (thought you'd be proud Jake Wood. I gave out no personal information at all ;P) ). She was getting uncomfortably close and was only looking at our bags, never our eyes. She smelled very strongly of alcohol and kept mumbling about how she had to feed her cat. We non-verbally decided to get on the next bus that came and we'd switch busses at the next stop.
We are now all safe and sound on a bus back to Canterbury. Hopefully it will be smooth sailing from here!
More soon!
Thanks for reading everyone (:
Cheers!
Keep calm and don't try to storm the castle.
E
PS- everyone should wish Jake Wood a happy birthday today((: Hope you are having an excellent one, pal! Sorry I'm not there to celebrate with you. I'll drink some British Ale for ya ;)