After breakfast, we tried loading blogs again in the lobby until a blonde lady with a French accent came to collect us for our courtesy bus ride to the Victoria train station, where we had to board another bus that would take us off to Windsor and beyond! The bus was very full, and the only place Nicole and I could get a seat together was at the very back in the aisle. Luckily, when the guide told a passenger by the window that the bus was going to be completely full, he decided to go sit with his family rather, and we were able to move over to his seat.
It turned out that the bus had actually been over-booked, and one passenger didn't have a seat at all. It turned into an argument between the guide and the girl with nowhere to sit. Eventually, the guide offered a free trip on another tour to any person or couple that was interested, but wouldn't give it to the girl being inconvenienced because she formed part of a group of three. Even after she had a seat and the couple taking the free tour had left, the fight continued with the girl threatening to report the guide to the manager and the guide telling the girl to just leave if she wasn't happy. It was a super awkward start to the tour.
Eventually, we got underway, and the guide began telling us about London as we drove through it. It quickly became evident why Mr Congeniality was able to be a tour guide despite his evident lack of people skills: he could speak a second language. We had a lot of Asian people on our bus, and he repeated everything he said to us in Mandarin for their convenience. What was interesting about that was that some of the words he used while speaking to them were either English or very strongly Anglicized, like spa and sauna, as if there isn't an equivalent word in Mandarin.
It took us a full hour to get to a very foggy Windsor Castle, which is actually more like a small village than a mere castle. It seems that each royal family adds to it in their own style, and the current royals still occupy part of it today. We got to see the older part of the Castle, much of which has been recently refurbished after it all nearly burned down in a massive blaze a few years ago. You'd think that the British would be very good at extinguishing fires by now, especially in the home of the Royal family, but apparently they are slow learners (after the great fire of London and all that).
After we'd gone past the station that had been built for the Queen's Platinum Jubilee and herded like cattle through the group tour section, we were given free audio guides that walked us through the Castle grounds, Princess Anne's doll house, and the state rooms. The doll house, which was never intended for children and only ever as a display, is a miniature replica of the palace at the time with everything made as originally as possible and to scale. It had full electricity, working plumbing, and even silver cutlery and crockery in the dining room. It really was fascinating to see.
The State Rooms were lavish displays of wealth in rich gold and crimson tones, filled with collections of art and tokens from around the world that the royal family had collected over time. One room alone was dedicated to china collection, with one elaborate and patriotic display that showed off the best of Britain (with pineapple stems, oddly) having bankrupted the company that had donated it to the royal family. The audio guide called it a "noble disaster."
Besides small amusing anecdotes like that, however, the audio guide tended to drone somewhat in its flat British accent. What's more, the audio guide has an unusual taste in detail, pointing out the most mundane things in bits of furniture, or taking us from portrait to portrait to yet another portrait, while glossing over the things that actually did seem interesting. We began to form the impression that the audio guide would find something to say about anything at all if you let it.
This was most evident in Stonehenge, where we arrived after another hour-long bus trip, where the free audio guide proceeded to go into less than fascinating detail about the moss on the stones. The droning audio guide also proved to have an affinity for making things up, as it would go into surprising amounts of detail about the personality and trade skills of the people living in the area who built Stonehenge, as well as providing large amounts of insight into how the stone circle had been built with enormous and heavy rocks from 30km away, while reminding us continuously that no one actually knows how it was built. Nicole eventually just gave up when the audio guide decided to go into the mathematics of Stonehenge...
It was bitterly cold there, and there wasn't a great deal to see, so we rushed through it a little bit in order to get to the cafe at the entrance next to the souvenir shop and get something hot inside us. We had two very tasty British delicacies: bread pudding and a cheese scone. As we ate it, while waiting for our bus to get going again, Nicole began her lamenting about how disappointing she'd found Stonehenge to be, which continued even after we had got all the way back to South Africa. A few "mysterious and magnificent" rocks (terms the audio guide used every few minutes) were not as impressive to her as the Brits like to believe it is. She referred to them merely as "a pile of rocks," and even wanted to use that term as the title for this blog to emphasise her disappointment.
What was far less disappointing, at least, was the beautiful city of bath, which is completely made out of stone by the Romans. Although Nicole expected the actual Roman Bath ruins to be bigger, she was impressed by the old city and its hot spring. Back in the day when they were trying to take over the world, the Romans used to hang around the baths, exercising and getting massaged. It sounds like a pretty good life. Again, though, the audio guide tended to drone on a bit about absolutely anything it could find, and as Nicole says "could do with some editing."
The water of bath was said to be able to cure any and all illnesses, so I drank a little in the vain attempt to finally cure my cough. It was not very pleasant, and Nicole delighted in taking photos of my face as I attempted to finish the small cup (getting me back for the cough syrup tasting photo shoot the day before). She, surprisingly, could not be tempted to try the water at all. "You want me to drink it after you've made that face?" It wasn't that bad, though, just luke warm and not a normal taste for water. It's filled with iron, at least, so at least I got something out of it. It didn't cure my cough, sadly. Not even a little bit.
Because we'd gotten into the habit of ignoring the audio guide for the most part, and also because our Contiki tour through Europe had made us used to seeing sights in a hurry, we breezed through the Roman Baths with time to spare. We would've waited out the remainder of the time on the warm bus if it had been where we'd last seen it, but we ended up wandering the streets of Bath instead. Along one of the streets, we found a fudge shop that sold a delicious selection of fudge. We couldn't resist, and walked away with cherry brandy, salted caramel, and ginger fudge (three different kinds, not one odd mix of all the flavours). It was the yummiest thing we got to eat while in the UK.
Perhaps one of the strangest features of the place, and this is evident in some parts of London as well, are the windows that were bricked up in a time when England had a "window tax" for the amount of windows on your house - "daylight robbery," as our guide put it. He could be funny, when he wanted to be. Actually, his sense of humour was so dry that sometimes it was hard to tell when he was joking and when he wasn't. For example, he told us that due to the rainy weather, all the wooly mammoths in the area had shrunk and turned into sheep (funny). He also told us that farmers heated the pig pens because pigs feel the cold the way humans do (not sure if he was being serious or funny, since the Brits clothe their horses in winter, so anything is possible with them).
Three very long hours later, which I spent catching up on my blogging while Nicole napped, we finally arrived back in London. It was already dark by then, and we were not dropped off at the hotel, but had to make our own (expensive) way back on the underground. Since Nicole and I had not enjoyed the day as much as expected, she wasn't keen on our original plan to have Tesco sandwiches for dinner, which was what we'd had for lunch on the bus. (They had a great meal deal going on where you could get a sandwich, soft drink, and packet of chips or a chocolate for only 3 Pounds.
Instead, we decided to grab a pizza at the pizza place at the hotel, which made that yummy jalapeño pizza, while I continued to get no joy from the wifi in my attempt to upload blogs. Eventually, we headed back to our room and found that the cleaning lady had tidied up our chaos a little bit while we had been out. We spent what was left of the evening watching a fun show called Mr Selfridge, about an American man that decided to open London's first department store, despite the many obstacles in his way. Londoners really seem to love period films, mini series, and plays or other productions. Bed time followed, since we had a big day of London sightseeing ahead of us where we intended to get as much done as possible (the way we'd done in Paris). We needed to be refreshed for that!
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