The White Cliffs of Dover

The White Cliffs of Dover are a very famous attraction along the Southeast coast of England.  They were actually voted the most popular stretch of coast line in Britain!  There are many reasons for this.  One reason is that on a clear day you can see 21 miles across the English channel to France!  When I went there I was lucky enough to be able to see France in the distance.  It was very cool!  

Believe it or not England didn't used to be a an island.  It used to be connected to France!  England became an island about 500,000 years ago when a giant ice burg melted and made a huge gouge in the land.  The water wore away at the soft chalk which now makes up The White Cliffs of Dover, making England an island.  The water is still eroding The White Cliffs of Dover and 2-5cm on average are lost each year, but more than a meter can be lost in one large cliff fall.  As sea levels rise the cliffs will probably retreat more quickly.  There is a nice little trail going from one end of the cliff to the other that I went on.  It goes right up to the edge of the cliff with no railing to keep you from falling off!  While I was walking on the trail I saw a part of the cliff that looked on the verge of falling off!  It was kind of scary considering that piece was part of the trail and we had to walk over it to get to the other side.

At the end of the trail there was a lighthouse called the South Foreland Lighthouse.  The South Foreland Lighthouse had the very first electricity-powered lighthouse lamp! It also had the transmission of the first ship-to-shore and international radio message!  That's pretty cool for one little lighthouse.

 This is a picture of the very famous White Cliffs of Dover.  If you look closely at the cliffs you can see the trail I was on.  Scary!

This is a picture of the South Foreland Lighthouse.

An Unwelcome Visitor

I may have found the very first thing about England that I absolutely don't like.  It all started September 7th.  My mom was going into the kitchen to get some chocolate bannanna bread when it happened.  A little, or maybe not so little, visitor came racing right up to my mom's feet! She thought it was a mouse because it was running so quickly.  She screamed and jumped towards the door.  However, the visitor wasn't the least bit afraid of her because it just sat there staring at us.   It was then we realized that our visitor was not a mouse after all but rather the creepy, crawly, monsterous GIGANTEA!!!!!!!!!

This spider's scientific name actually is Gigantea if that tells you anything about its size.  We have now seen two of them in our home!  The second one I saw when I was going up the stairs to bed one night!  I nearly fell down stairs upon seeing it!

This spider is a part of the Tegenaria family.  It's bite is not dangerous to humans but it does penetrate the human skin.  It's also the fastest spider in England!  The reason we're seeing so many of them right now is because the male Gigantea spiders only come out in August and September because they are looking for a mate.  The rest of the time they are hiding in basements, attics, behind cupboards, in floor boards or really any place rarely disturbed by large animals or humans.

After the second sighting of Gigantea, my dad spent an evening sealing all outside entry points into our home.  Hopefully, we've seen our last sighting of this fast, monsterous looking spider so we can get back to enjoying all the other aspects of England! :-)

William Shakespeare

A little while ago I got the chance of a lifetime to go and see William Shakespeare’s home town, Stratford Upon Avon, take a few tours of the town, and see a few of William Shakespeare’s plays!  William Shakespeare is a very famous play writer who lived from 1564 to 1616 in Stratford Upon Avon.  Nobody knows the exact date of William Shakespeare’s birth but they do know when he was baptized.  William Shakespeare was baptized on April 26 which is why they think he was born April 23 because babies usually are baptized three days after they were born.

William’s mother was Mary Arden.  William was one of eight children.  Only five of the eight children survived until adulthood.  By the age of four or five William was enrolled at a grammar school called The Kings New School in Stratford where he learned many of the things that helped him become a great author.  His school lasted 9 hours each day.  William was taken out of The Kings New School at the age of 16 because of his dad’s financial and social problems.  Nobody really knows what happened or what William Shakespeare did between the time when William was pulled out of school and when he became a play writer.  There are many theories but none of them have ever been proven.  What they do know is that on November 28, 1582 William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway.  William was 18 and Anne was 26 and pregnant.  They also know that one year after they got married, they had a baby girl named Susanna and two years after that they had twins named Judith and Hamnet.  Hamnet died at age 11.

Seven years after William Shakespeare had Judith and Hamnet, William was recognized as an actor, poet, and play writer.  His recognition occurred when another play writer referred to him as “an upstart crow” in A Goatsworth of Wit.  A few years later Shakespeare joined up with one of the most successful acting troupes in London, “The Lord’s Chamberlain’s Men”.  In 1599 the troupe lost the lease of the theater they performed in.  Luckily, they were wealthy enough to build their own theater across the Thames, south of London, which they called “The Globe”.  The Globe opened in July of 1599.  When King James I came to the throne in 1603, the troupe was designated by the new king as the King’s Company. 

Shakespeare entertained the people of England for another ten years until June 19, 1613, when a canon fired from the roof of the theatre for a performance of Henry VIII set fire to the thatch roof and burned the theater to the ground.  The next spring the theatre was rebuilt in a more modern and fairer way than before.  Even though Shakespeare had invested in the rebuilding of the theatre, he retired to the Great House of New Place in Stratford that he had purchased in 1597, where he continued to write plays until he died in 1616 on his 52^nd birthday.  

In his lifetime, William Shakespeare’s wrote 37 plays.  Even if you've never read any of Shakespeare's plays, you've definitely used words or phrases that he created.  Some of these words include:  watchdog, eyeball, puking, skim milk, aligator, bump, zany, rant, gloomy, gossip, caked, buzzer, critic, outbreak, hurried, and so on.  Some familiar phrases are:  all's well that ends well, break the ice, dead as a doornail, a dish fit for the gods, elbow room, faint hearted, for goodness' sake, knock knock!  Who's their?, and so on.  Shakespeare invented these words and phrases for his play when he could not find descriptive words good enough to get the the point across to the audience.  In his lifetime, Shakespeare invented over 1700 words and phrases that we commonly use today.

So far I have seen three of Shakespeare's plays!  The plays I saw were all very well done and fun to watch!  I can’t decide which one is my favorite because they all had something different that I liked!  In A Comedy of Errors, the cast had set it in modern time and it was very funny!   Much Ado About Nothing was also set in modern time but they were interactive with the crowd, which made it very fun!  The final play I saw I actually got to see in The Globe Theater while standing up because that’s what people who were watching the play did when William Shakespeare was alive.  This play was called As you Like it.  I liked this play because It was very funny and the actors were great because there were a couple of times when really loud air plans would go by and the actors would stop everything and look up at the sky at the exact same time because in Shakespeare’s time they didn’t have air planes.  They also did this with pigeons because they would keep landing on the stage so the actors would scare the pigeons off by jumping next to them or sometimes even calling them names.

 This is a picture of me in The Globe Theater.  As you can see there are lot's of people standing on the ground getting ready to watch the play.

As this plaque says, this is the birthplace of William Shakespeare.

  This is William Shakespeare's grave.  William Shakespeare wanted to be buried under the church because in William Shakespeare's time, people would sometimes dig up graves to get any valuables that might have been buried with the person.

Bath

Bath is a city just west of London.  It is a very popular city for tourists because of the well known Roman Baths.  The reason the Roman Baths are so popular is because they are heated by an underground spring that is 115 degrees Fahrenheit which, as you have probably guessed, makes the water very warm.  This was also important because heated water didn't come in until the late 18th century.

Another reason for the bath's popularity is that the water was said to have healing powers.  When we visited the Roman Baths they had a fountain set up where you could drink the water and"get healed".  The water was warm, tasted like metal, and I don't feel any different so I wouldn't drink it again.

Oddly enough the Romans weren't the first people to find the baths.  The first shrine was built by the Celts and was dedicated to the goddess Sulis whom the Romans associated with their goddess Minerva.  In 836 BC the British King Bladud discovered the springs and built the first baths.  After that the Romans invaded and they believed that some of their gods, such as Minerva, had given them the hot baths and it's healing powers.  The photos below of the baths represent the roman time period since they were the last ones to use the baths.

After the Romans left to go to war, as I talked about in my Hadrian's Wall post, the baths were forgotten about and covered up by silt until they were rediscovered in the late 18th century.

This is a picture of the Roman Baths.

This is a picture of my sisters and I touching the water which I guess we weren't supposed to do because the girl in the black pants and blue shirt on the far right in the picture is coming over to tell us that they don't "recommend" we touch the water.  Keep in mind she never really told us not to.  ;)