When the plane finally gets low enough to break through the cloud cover, it’s immediately pleasing to discover that England looks just like, well, England. Patches of green fields punctuated with sheep. Brick cottages with steep rooflines, Tudor houses leaning forward in to the street… even the little subdivision when Mindy lives looks like England – in the modern subdivision English soap opera kind of way.
Yesterday we drove up to Warwick to see the castle – which looks just like an imaginary English castle with an imaginary little town around it outside the walls. Ramparts. Towers. Lush green lawns. Opulent suites above, grim reminders of terror in the dungeons below. In the newest part of the castle there’s a Madame Tussoud’s exhibit, wax figures living out a splendid weekend party in the 1870s. The butler. The Prince of Wales. A well known opera singer and society ladies of the time. It all seems so, well, English, and in the Prince’s suite, there’s a real live human, a rather loquacious gent, who will tell you all about the characters there portrayed and tie there society right through to modern times with reflections on Prince Harry and his dad’s upcoming wedding. “You can see it right through to today, you know, with ‘arry an’ William, can’t you?”
We wandered though the streets of Warwick looking for lunch and settled on The Titled Wig, where we ate leek and chicken pie and chips, of course. After lunch we ended up spending way too much time in the gift shop/ticket office of the Old Hospital – a spectacular Tudor – where the two 70ish gents could not stop talking to us about, well, everything including the Vienna opera ball, the price of gas on the motorway, Tony “Napoleon” Blair, their daughters and wives and where they’d been and wanted to go in America… and so on. They warned us to be on our way because it was getting late and we needed to be on the road before traffic got bad, so off we went, with nary a mention of actually seeing the site at which we were standing.
We stopped at the Tesco on the way home, a giant box of a supermarket, the likes of which we just do not have in Aigen. While there we noted the following inscrutable items: Pancakes, ready-made, in plastic packages, vegetarian haggis, right next to the blood pudding, NOT vegetarian, and a revolting variety of flavored crisps (that’s potato chips to you ‘n me) including chargrilled steak and lamb with mint sauce flavor.
Later that evening we watched a little television. I know that sounds dull, but British television on Friday night is full of profanity and weird little things that you’d never in a million years get past the FCC in the USA.
Here are things that I don’t like about England
- It’s crazy expensive. Yeah, I knew that.
- Being in a car is terrifying. It’s fine to sit on that side if you have a steering wheel.
That’s all I’ve got. I’m having a delightful time.
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