Today I went to to Avebury, Stonehenge and Salisbury for a school trip. The bus came at 8:15am and took about an hour and a half to get to Avebury. Avebury wasn't that special...it was a henge with a line of giant rocks dating from about 4500B C spread from Avebury to Stonehenge, each about 10 meters apart and also stone circles. They weren't all there because throughout history people have taken them down for various reasons; some because the Church claimed it was devil worship, some to build other things, some because they were in the way, etc. In any case, we had to walk through a big field that had a lot of sheep in it (I hate sheep) so I wasn't that happy. The part that really annoyed me is that no one knows how or why people built the henge and put up the rocks. Archaeologists call it "ceremonial and ritualistic," meaning that they have absolutely no explanation for it. There are theories, but none of them are concrete enough to divulge into.
Additionally, we learned that Stonehenge isn't a henge. A henge is circular earthwork that has a ditch in the middle and a mound of ground on the outside. Avebury was a henge, but Stonehenge is a proto henge, there is a ditch on the outside and a mound of ground on the inside.
After that we drove to Stonehenge, which is about 45 minutes away. Some of the stones from Stonehenge came from Avebury, once again they don't know how that happened. The rest of the stones came from Wales. Also a mystery how that happened. While we were driving we saw this huge mound of ground, Silbury Hill. It's the largest man made hill in Europe, made around 2400 BC. I think the guide said it's about 100 feet high and is basically a 60 degree angle slope. No one knows why or how it was built. In the 90s they tried cutting into it to see if there was anything valuable inside or if it was a burial mound, but they didn't find anything. They ended up just screwing the mound up and had to put thousands of pounds into fixing it about 10 years later so that it didn't collapse.
We got to Stonehenge around 12:45 and we had an hour and a half to look around. Stonehenge was much smaller than I thought it would be, the circle part of it I guess. The rocks were huge, at least 15 feet high and I think they said weighed 7-12 tons. It was so cool to be there and see it for real. It started to be built around 3000 BC, but once again no one knows how or why. They had a lot of paintings on the walls in the visitor center depicting people building Stonehenge, but all of the men were wearing loincloths. I have no idea how anyone would have survived there wearing just a loincloth because I was absolutely freezing. It was a beautiful sunny day but Stonehenge is basically in an open field and the wind was biting cold. Maybe the temperature was extremely different thousands of years ago, but I wouldn't have even been able to take my coat off today. Also what about their feet!? Weren't they freezing!?
Anyway we walked around Stonehenge in a complete circle, you're not allowed to touch anything. Of course I took tons of pictures, once I upload them I'll share them. There is also a stone on the outside, not part of the circle, that has some fancy name but if you stand there for the Summer or Winter Equinox the sun rises perfectly over Stonehenge...even though I know nothing about Stonehenge really, the way it's built and shaped it has to be some way of predicting the weather or the seasons or the harvest or something. Either that or it's some religious/spiritual worshiping ground. I've also heard that it was used for human sacrifice.
Our next stop was Salisbury. It was established as an official city in 1220, but both the Romans and the Saxons lived there at one time. It definitely looked like an ancient city, the roads were tiny and the buildings were small. We didn't have much time there, only an hour and a half, so we went to the Salisbury Cathedral. Guess what I saw at the Salisbury Cathedral?? The Magna Carta! There are four original Magna Cartas in the world and I saw one of them today :) This one is supposedly the most well preserved. They had it under a glass case and you obviously couldn't take pictures. It was only one page long and the writing was so tiny! It was in this fancy calligraphy so I couldn't make out any of the words, though it was written in Latin. It looked remarkably well preserved for being written in 1215, the page was only a little brownish-yellow and the script was jet black. It was so neat that I got to see that.
After that we wandered around the Cathedral some more and took some pictures, then went to look for somewhere to eat. We stopped at a cafe and they ran out of Italian paninis so I didn't get anything to eat, I just shared Kate's fries. Then we got back on the bus and it took us three and a half hours to get back because of traffic, even though it should've only taken two.
Yesterday was just as exciting as today! Around 1, Kate, Sammie, Erin and I went to Camden Town. Camden is different than any place in London I've been to yet. It has a big outdoor market with tons of clothes, purses, food, scarves and basically everything else that you want to buy. I bargained all by myself for the first time. I got a shirt that and I almost bought a coat but I wasn't paying 20 pounds for it, so I didn't get it. I don't know how to describe the area though. It wasn't trashy or low class, but it definitely wasn't posh and upscale like Oxford St was. There was a wide variety of people there too.
I had quite an exciting experience because I got my nose pierced! There were a lot of tattoo parlors everywhere so Kate and I explored a few of them before we picked one called 'Chrome.' I've wanted to get my nose pierced since senior year of high school but was always afraid to. Earlier in the semester I told my friends here that I wanted to do it and Kate said she would do it with me because she's had it done before and liked it but knocked it out by accident.
We filled out our forms and picked out our jewelery (a titanium stud that has a clear crystal in it) and paid 20 pounds each. It was so cheap! We had to go one at a time, Kate went first because I was nervous. I didn't think I would be that nervous but I was kind of freaking out before. Once I did it it wasn't that bad. The girl who did it was super nice and picked out the perfect spot on my nose. I was expecting it to be a gun for some reason, but she pierced it with the actual nose stud. It felt like it took forever compared to when I got my ears pierced and it hurt for a longer time than my ears did. My eyes watered really bad and it did hurt, but not enough for me to actually cry. I'm so happy though it looks sick. It hurt for a while after but now it's fine. We bought some salt to put on it to clean it.
We did some shopping after that and then came back to Mile End. We went to the Greedy Cow for dinner and I got a delicious banana milkshake. Afterwards I hung out with some people outside by the canal. Yesterday was really fun :)
Thursday night after dinner we had some people over to our flat for a flat party. Our flat is the perfect size because it's pretty big and our kitchen is perfect for everyone to hang out in. After that a couple of us walked toward Whitechapel to get some chicken and chips.
That's about it, I think I might watch a movie tonight but we'll see.
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