The Ravings of Demented Rabbits

Rock Star/"Water is Best"

And the doings of Thursday and Friday were...many. Starting with how the vast part of Thursday sucked quite a lot, insofar as I was enormously tired and enormously bored because of the three hour gap I have between classes. Nevertheless, we went to the British Museum for Literacy in the ANE, which was about as cool as you might expect it to be, and then a few of us went to lunch at the Hare and Tortoise, wherein much chicken in various forms of plant matter met untimely, yet tasty, ends. Once we actually got it, anyway, because the staff decided that we were obvious losers who didn't deserve to eat before, say, the people who came in half an hour later. Ah well.

After that, I proceeded to fall asleep in the study room at AHA, then in the hall at AHA, and through a complicated process Margalyn decided to first do rap impressions in preperation for her big debut that night (kindly announced by the other Mike in Rome class on Wednesday as "Margalyn's doing karaoke at the Manor on Thursday! Everyone be there!"), then to grab my camera and take assorted random shots of people while we waited for class.

And then for theater class we proceeded to the National Theater, a big concrete structure which inspires profound thoughts in all who witness it, such as "Why God? Why concrete?" In any case, we got the backstage tour, which means all three theaters which make up the National, then all of the prop design rooms, setup areas, practice stages, workshops, and the like. This was pretty nifty. On the way home, though, and it's like 6:30 by this point, and nobody's eaten anything for ages and ages, so we're all starving, we're something like 10 feet in front of West Harrow, two stops from home, when some dog decides to leap out and attack the very much electified track, which means we're stopped in front of freaking West Harrow for like half an hour. We finally pull up to Eastcote, and I'm like "I feel like one of those Robin Hoods from the movies, wherein he goes off to fight with King Richard in the Crusades, and years later he gets back and jumps out of the boat in England and he's like 'Home! Home at last!'" The pizza we had for dinner was most excellent.

As for the Manor that night, well, Margalyn's pretty good at doing Sir Mix-a-lot ("I like big butts and I cannot lie!"), which among other things introduced us to the guy before her, an American named I believe Ray. He came over and regaled us with Navy stories for a while, during which I discovered that Smirinoff Black Ices aren't bad. Beyond that, there was assorted drinking and conversation and loud music, including a REALLY BAD rendition of U2's One. And then we all went home to attempt a few hours of sleep in preperation for Stonehenge and Bath the next day.

In the end, I think I managed about 6 hours, and I was on the upper end of the sleep scale. Woke up at 6:30, in an attempt to join up with the breakfast party that was going to form at the little diner by the tube station in Eastcote. Fortunately, they didn't open, so I had to fake breakfast by going to the little pastry shop in Eastcote. It all worked out somehow.

About here, a long bus ride should be inserted, most of which I don't remember because I was attempting to sleep in my seat. I'll just say that the bus was really nice - everyone had nice bucket seats, and there was a toilet on the bus, which is of obvious importance. At any rate, a couple hours later, we finally arrived at Stonehenge.

Stonehenge is pretty much the middle of nowhere. And by middle of nowhere, I mean taking the widest, flattest expanse you can find, as far as the eye can see, putting up some bigass stones, and then populating it with some sheep. I don't remember any houses at all, though there was this random covered wagon-looking thing. At any rate, there's not much to Stonehenge. You go, listen to their little audio tour, look at the thing, take pictures, and then go buy the "I went to Stonehenge and all I got was this overpriced t-shirt" shirt. This was done, and we all leaped back on the bus in variously energetic leaps, and travelled the hour and a half trip to Bath.

Bath deserves a great big huge plug here, not so much for the baths themselves, but because its easily the best-looking city I've ever been in. The whole place is built from this sort of cream-colored stone, and it's all freaking old. Very picturesque. There's a square in the center of the city with a great big Medieval abbey in perfect condition (which I sadly didn't get to go in), the baths (or the IIRC 18th century facade), and some shops and things. From there, other Mike, Jeremiah, Ella, Maggie, and I proceeded to go find food in this random pub with randomly excellent beef stew, and then all us guys went and got ourselves lost in the city while the girls went shopping. I recommend the getting lost thing - We found ourselves most of the way up this hill, on which was this nifty little park, whereupon we played on the swings like good little children, then took some sweet pictures, since we could see out over the entire city, which was appropriately impressive. And then we got ourselves lost some more, before winding up back in the center square at the appropriate time, passing by a random statue with the inscription "Water is Best"

And then we went into the Roman baths themselves, which were fairly cool, but for some reason not as cool as I had expected, for some reason. And not just because the water is over 100 degrees Farenheit, either. The Roman part of the baths is pretty much all ruins now, and it's all covered up by 18th century construction, which although nice isn't quite Roman. You can see a bunch of the ruins, though, including the hypocaust flooring which kept it all warm, and of course assorted baths, statues, altars, and random artifacts. I tried to take some pictures, but a bunch of them turned out horribly, since we were crowded on narrow catwalks with no lighting and a lot of people. In any case, it was interesting. I would have liked to have spent more time in the city. If you ever get the chance, go there.

And then we leaped upon the bus, for pretty much non-energetic, limping values of leaped, and spent like three hours getting back to London, whereupon we drove through like every area in which people lived just to get back to Harrow-on-the-Hill station, wherein we took the 5 minute ride back to Eastcote, got off, ate dinner, and returned to the Manor for Tara's 20th birthday celebration, wherein much alcohol was consumed (did I mention that drinking age here is 18?), cake was eaten, and good times were had, until most of us fell asleep and left. In my case, I came home to Robin Hood Men in Tights on TV, which of course had to be watched, whereupon I went to bed.

And that, as they say, was that.

Oh. And Professor Garfinkle's kids are really cute. And maintained their cuteness all day. Just thought you all should know that.

Posted by Dwip at April 17, 2004 8:07 AM