Over the past few weeks, we rented out a car and traveled around England to learn more about our British side of the family tree, because, for all of you who don’t know, my dad is from England.
First, we stayed in an area of England called ‘New Forest’ with our cousins for around a week. We got to experience the countryside and the famous green tunnels (which are just roads surrounded by trees to give the appearance of being in a green tunnel) and even get to see old thatched homes. I was surprised by how luscious and tranquil the surrounding landscape was as before arriving in this country I always had an image in my mind of England being a rainy, damn, and overall depressing country but in those moments I felt as though I might have been wrong this whole time… until it started raining. The weather in England is, in short, very fickle. It would constantly change from cloudy skies to pouring down cats and dogs to, very rarely, sunny and I would soon learn that the English people couldn’t agree more. A very popular subject in my British cousin’s household was, in fact, the weather. When you greet someone, you will most likely sprinkle in a sarcastic joke like “Lovely weather” because of the near-constant downpour of rain, or in other cases, you can do the exact opposite and complain about how your brand-new shoes just got muddy due to the rain. The weather has been integrated so deeply into the British people’s lives that it has become a staple of the people, the driving force that drives people onward to achieve their dreams, or this might just be a big misconception. The truth is, neither I nor anyone, will ever know the answer to this question.
Back to the topic of staying with our cousins, we went to Stone Henge! For those of you who are living under a rock, Stone Henge is a worldwide spectacle, sometimes even believed to have been transported from a different planet by aliens. It is constructed of giant boulders which create a ring in a sort of ritual-esk way. Years ago people were able to get up close and touch this monument but as time passed sadly, it started to erode, so as a last resort, it had to be closed off by the public for good. Fun fact, a lot of the world-renowned Unesco World Heritage site is comprised of old tombs and walls, which date back far longer than the actual Stone Henge itself! After leaving Stone Henge, we then went to a port that housed many famous ships dating back to the 14th century. There we could see what it was like living inside the ships back in the day and we even got to see a recovered shipwreck which was only just recently discovered after nearly 600 years buried under the ocean’s surface and miraculously perfectly preserved due to the sediments mummifying the sunken ship.
After we said our goodbyes to our English relatives, we rented out a car and went on a road trip around the UK, first exploring London and then heading north past the Cotswolds, up past Shakespeares’ birthplace, past Liverpool (where we visited some of my dad’s architectural works), all the way to Scottland where we stayed in a friends house for a week before heading back down, passed New Castle (where we had disgusting Asian food), all the way back to London where we dropped of the car and rushed to the airport (where we nearly missed our flight by around a minute).
If you want to hear in more detail bout our adventure in the UK, then I might post another blog so stick around for a part 2!