I Ride A Coach Around Kent

We spent thirteen hours on the road yesterday, visiting various important and significant sites that are outside the range of London's tube or buses. A two-and-a-half hour drive took us to Battle. Battle is this little town built on the ancient battlefield of the Battle of Hastings. We walked around the fields and hills where the Normans, under the leadership of William the Conqueror, defeated the English troops and killed King Harold. English gained a lot of its "almost synonyms" because of this--basically it assimilated thousands of French words because the Normans were in charge. Years later they built an abbey on it, and we got to walk around in the stone ruins. We detoured down to Dover to get a brief glimpse of the white cliffs from our bus. The cliffs are white because of the chalky composition of the rocks, and they served as a landmark for fighter planes during the World Wars. The pilots knew that once they saw the white cliffs, they were safe. They're very beautiful, but the best way to see them is from the actual ocean, so we didn't get the best pictures. There's a nice big castle in Dover too, high up on the hill. This too we only saw from the bus, but we had a long way to go and a pretty important destination: Canterbury Cathedral! The Archbishop of Canterbury has always been a significant position in the Church of England and there is a magnificent Cathedral right in the middle of the town. Canterbury is something of a pilgrimage site because Thomas Becket, a devout archbishop who fought for the rights of the church, was martyred there. King Henry II made some offhand comment to his knights about the archbishop running mad, and they took ths as a call to arms and rode off to Canterbury to take care of the problem. Thomas Becket was declared a saint almost on the spot and Henry II, who definitely hadn't wanted his friend dead, was forced by the pope to pay for indirectly casuing the smartyrdom. The cathedral is beautiful, and we were allowed to take pictures this time, so I got plenty on the hone camera. Especially of the stained glass windows. And the high ceilings! There really isn't anything like these cathedrals in the states; they're so beautiful and old! And today? Well, today we mostly wandered around Kensington. We found Portobello Road! That's...about it. It occurs to me that this was a bit of a boring ost, but it's a true one nonetheless. :)