Goose Fair in Nottingham

Goose Fair is a very big, super fun, and crazy fair that I have been waiting forever for and now it's finally here!  It happens on the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th of October every year.  Goose Fair has been going on for over 700 hundred years in Nottingham!  No one really knows how Goose Fair got it's name.  Some people say it comes from the hundreds of geese that were at one time driven from Lincolnshire to Norfolk to be sold in Nottingham.  Whether that's true or not, know one knows but however it got its name, I like it.  

When I went to Goose Fair, I was amazed at how many rides, food stands, and people there were.  I even went on some rides.  My favorite ride was called Cyclone.  It was really fun!  I don't know the name of my least favorite ride because I was too busy trying not too puke.  It was bad!  

All in all I did like Goose fair and wish I could go again but unfortunately I can't.  Maybe one day I will come back to Nottingham and go again but until then, so long Goose Fair.  I will miss you!

This is a picture of Goose Fair at night.  Unfortunately, I didn't get to see it at night but I heard it was very cool.

As you can see, Goose fair was packed with people even early in the day.

There were lots of "rubbish" food stands, as the English refer to them, along the edges of the fair.

This was my favorite ride.  It would jerk you around the corners and give you the illusion you were going to fall off.  It would also turn you in a circle when you got to a certain point in the ride.  It was really fun to ride!

This was my least favorite ride.  As you can see from the picture, it even went upside-down, twirled, and went really fast... which would have been fun if I wasn't getting sick.

Lincoln

Lincoln is a smaller sized city in England (population 85,595) that is over flowing with history.  Lincoln began as a  Roman town.  It was conquered by the Romans in 48 AD.  Shortly after the Roman soldiers built a fort in Lincoln but by the late 1st century the people of Lincoln stopped fighting the Romans so the soldiers moved on and the fort was abandoned.  A new town was created on the site and it became a settlement for retired soldiers.  Roman Lincoln grew into a large and prosperous town with 6 to 8 thousand people.  Roman Lincoln reached the peak of it's prosperity in the early 4th century and in the later 4th century it declined.  Roman civilization was breaking down and the last of the Roman soldiers left Britain in 407 AD.

In 1068 William the Conquer built a wooden castle at Lincoln to make sure the townspeople behaved themselves.  He destroyed 166 houses to make way for it.  In the 12th century the castle was replaced with stone.  The keep of the tower was called Lucy Tower after the Countess Lucy.  This castle also had a prison where lots of people awaited trial, faced their punishment (which often was hanging), or awaited the day when they would be released.  It was a harsh prison where women and men had to hide their faces and could not speak to anyone.  Even in the chapel the men and women were separated and could not talk.

 This is the chapel for the prisoners.  If you look closely you can see the doors that separate the men from each other.  Something you can't see is that the seats are slanted so that if a prisoner fell asleep they would fall right off the seat.  Trust me, I tested it. ;)

This is a coffin that was at the front of the chapel.  When the prison was still in use if there was a coffin at the front of chapel it meant there was a hanging that day.

The most famous thing at the castle is the well known Magna Carta.  The Magna Carta was signed in 1215 between the barons of medieval England and King John.  "Magna Carta" is Latin and means "Great Charter".  The Magna Carta was one of the most important documents of medieval England.  It was signed at Runnymede near Windsor Castle.  The document was a series of written promises between the king and his subjects that he would govern England and deal with it's people according to the customs of feudal law.  The Magna Carta was an attempt by the barons to stop a king from abusing his power with the people of England suffering.  The Magna Carta in the Castle is one of the four existing.  The Magna Carta is also important to the United States because some of the rules that are in the Magna Carta are in our constitution.

In 1072, a bishop moved his seat to Lincoln from Dorchester.  He built a Cathedral which was finished in 1092.  The first Cathedral was severely damaged by an earthquake in 1185.  It was rebuilt after 1192 but the center tower of the new cathedral collapsed in 1237.  A new tower with a spire replaced it in 1311.  Unfortunately the builder put it a little to far to the left so it looks kind of funny.

 This is the outside of the cathedral and as you can see the middle tower is too far to the left.

This is the inside of the cathedral.  The chairs are all out in this picture because there was a graduation that day.

Today Lincoln is a very popular tourist destination but not just because of the castle and cathedral.  I like it because of it's monstrously steep hill.  It's actually called steep hill if that tells you anything.

The hill is steeper than it looks.

On this hill there is an interesting old house sitting on a corner.  This house is actually 800 years old making it the oldest domestic building in Britain!  It used to be a Jewish merchant's house.  It has a very decorative door and chimney.  In the Middle Ages, Lincoln had a flourishing Jewish community some of whom were amongst the richest and most influential citizens of Lincoln.  This Jewish house is said to be the home of Belesat de Wailingford, who was hanged for coin clipping which means he was cutting small bits off of coins because coins used to be made out of pure gold and silver.

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.  ;)