2016 July Canterbury, UK for a few days

If you've never been forced to read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales(the link is a side-by-side original and modern English version of the prologue),  I recommend looking into it. I had to go through it in an AP English class in high school. The tales are about pilgrims en route to Canterbury Cathedral to view Beckett's bones, and their ridiculous and bawdy life stories.

1: Whan that aprill with his shoures soote
2: The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,
3: And bathed every veyne in swich licour
4: Of which vertu engendred is the flour; 

[Geoffrey Chaucer, d. 1400]

Cathedral from afar (walking to the uni)

Canterbury is a town of about 30,000 and about 2 hrs from any London airport. Münster is a similar distance from the Düsseldorf airport. Factoring in the flight length and showing up early etc, it's not much longer to take the trains (Münster to Cologne, Cologne to Brussels, Brussels to Ashford Int'l, then local trains to Canterbury). 

So, I took the train! Yay chunnel. 

Towards and through the chunnel, our train-car was full of screaming babies, so I turned to my seat-mate and offered her some fancy chocolate and asked her about the purpose of her trip. She was going to London for a conference on setting syllabi for international primary schools; i.e. those aimed at multilingual kids, with some kind of international standard they're developing (to help people who move countries, I suppose).

I got to Canterbury and walked around town a bit. There are a lot of older preserved buildings. All that remains of the wall (well, on the side of town I was on) is one gate, which stands out.

view along street to gate

the gate from the other side; former jail to the right

If I had turned around and looked slightly to the right, I'd've had also a picture of the Freemasonry Museum. I didn't make it inside the cathedral, but made it to the museum and had a guided tour (it's very tiny, the tour was really the feature). It was great, and odd. Freemasons aren't masons, but they did sponsor the traineeship of a bunch of actual stonemasons who've then gone on to work on the cathedral restoration.

The first night I had dinner at La Trappiste (pretty good, if pricey, and AMAZING beer selection). Their beer menu was lovingly written. Made me feel a bit nostalgic for craft beers.

my lambic

I can't make the pic any bigger, but click to actually read the descriptions:

beer bible page

I didn't manage to find time (and reasonable weather) to take a punt on the Great Stour, but I appreciated the view adjacent to the place selling tickets for such a tour: 

right next to the place where you can take boat tours on the Great Stour

another view of the same building

Due to the chunnel/eurostar connection, Canterbury seems to be a popular weekend or day-trip destination. I heard a lot of French spoken in the street, to the point where I was sitting outside eating lunch at a restaurant and told the French family in front of me (deliberating the menu, in French): "C'est très délicieux, mais très lentement". 

Ah. Could someone remind me what comic this is clearly plagiarized from? (placemats at the tasty-yet-horribly-slow place):

Is it xkcd?

I wanted to write to said comic and let them know.

Nearby amusement:

the jokes just write themselves...

That Thursday (the last full day there, also the most exhausting), I made it to the vicinity of the cathedral, and took some pictures. The half-timbered homes are both cute and a horrible construction (terrible insulation, etc). I like how there are a fair amount of architectural things which people like as old/quaint/whatever which were just symptoms of people not knowing how to build properly (half-timbered homes, flying buttresses, e.g.) .

view of cathedral from by the restaurant where I had dinner

half-timbered homes facing the gate to the cathedral

'

gate to the cathedral

cathedral (closed during mass)

cloister

surprisingly old aged people (80, 84, 74) for the 1600s and 1700s.

In general, Canterbury was quaint,  full of tourists and some decent food. For a place of 30,000 people, it's pretty lively. The weather changed almost constantly, probably due to its proximity to the ocean. I was woken up by seagulls at least once, so don't forget your rain jacket if you visit.

a nice picture of a picture of Kent