Erin Across the Pond: Walking and Pseudo-Museums

Boy, my feet hurt. I went walking around Canterbury today, visiting the Pilgrims' Hospital and the Canterbury Tales attraction. They're not really museums, per se, but they're educational and cultural, so I'm still learnin' stuff. The Pilgrims' Hospital dates back to the medieval period when lots of visitors would come to Canterbury to visit the Cathedral of St. Thomas Beckett. The hospital is relatively small, or at least the parts that are open to the public are small. When you first walk in, you have to go down a half flight of steps, as main floor is below ground level now. You pay your one quid admission charge at the desk there, then go down another half flight of steps into the crypt, which is now full of various artists' works. (I didn't really understand what the art had to do with the hospital.) There weren't any objects or anything left over from the medieval period, so I have to say the archaeologist in me was kind of disappointed. Then you could go up a level to the chapel, which is still in use. Apparently the hospital has residents in wings that aren't open to the public.

After that I went further up High Street to the Canterbury Tales attraction, which--I'm not gonna lie--was extraordinarily creepy. The whole place was like a haunted wax museum. You walked from room to room (all in near darkness), listening to an audio tour read from Chaucer's point of view and staring at the creepy plastic peasants. Luckily, there were two other random tourists going through the place at the same time as me, or I think I would have bailed. I could hear weird noises coming from other rooms, and if I stared too long at any one of the characters in there I started to imagine it was moving. Eep, creepy. I'm not sure it was meant to be creepy, but there you go.

So other than that, I've been keeping pretty busy here. I went to a fruit market this morning and picked up some bananas, blackberries, and grapefruit (proving that I do eat more than just ramen). Last night I went to the sci-fi club and we watched Back to the Future and Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, so that was lots of mindless fun. Also, just tonight I went to an open lecture on Eurojust, which is a legal/investigative coordination between members of the European Union. The speaker talked about coordinating between different governments and different levels of government, and how Eurojust facilitates transnational crime solving. I know that might sound a bit dry, but I found it really really cool. I could tell the moderator was a bit unhappy, but personally I was glad that the speaker ran over time by about half an hour. :)

Here are the pictures from the Pilgrim's Hospital and Canterbury Tales, and I also updated the Canterbury photo album with a few new shots. (I'm not sure why, but some of the dates of my pictures on the Picasa website are all wrong.)