Thursday, June 3, 2010

Thursday, June 3, 2010

Canterbury!

Enchanting place, that one. After a nice lunch at Pizza Express with Heather, Emily, and Nick, the group took a tour of the Cathedral of Canterbury (the equivalent of...Temple Square for the Anglican Church, you might say, since that is where the head Archbishop resides), which was quite nice. It was an actual tourguide, which really made the cathedral come to life for me. I loved being able to ask him questions and get his take on things. There is a ton of history in that cathedral. My favorite stories from the cathedral:

When Oliver Cromwell was ridding England of all fancy piety, he had his men break all of the stained glass they could reach in the cathedral. They had fairly tall ladders, but could not reach all the windows, such as the ones a few stories up. So the top windows are from the 1200s and the bottom ones are from the 1600s. Beautiful stained glass. I'd say it's just as pretty as Saint Chapel in Paris, but the entire sides of the cathedral aren't covered in glass like Saint Chapel is.

The other story had to do with World War II. The Luftwaffe dropped tons of incendiary bombs on th cathedral and they actually had employees who would stay up there and kick off the bombs. Pretty incredible stuff. And amazingly enough, the cathedral was totally untouched through the war.

Really gorgeous place. Tons of history.

After, we went to an abbey that was totally destroyed in the bombings. It was cool. Really pretty. Not too much more to say about that.

And we went punting on a manmade canal and it was pretty. And then we went to a sung Eucharist at the cathedral. The choir was....well, bad.

And back to the flats to....well, I don't really remember. Must not have been terribly momentous.