York was my favorite place we visited through the month. It was the perfect mixture of trendy, historical, slightly tourist-filled, and not overwhelming for me. Our day traveling there, we stayed in our first Youth hostel when we arrived. At first we were apprehensive of the idea of staying in hostels, but it quickly grew on us.

The Ghost tour that we went to in York was one of my favorite things we got to experience. It was amazing to hear stories from all different eras throughout history all happening in the same town.

According to John Blair, England from 300-700 AD was real time of transition. This was easy to see in York, as there was architecture left from Roman establishments as well as medieval, all built in a short time frame. This is not the kind of history we experience in America, where everything is only a few hundred years old.

My favorite part of York though was attending Mass at the Shrine of St. Margaret Clitherow, and later finding out that her actual home was not where the Shrine us, but rather what is now a Harry Potter Potion Store. The employees graciously showed us girls the priest hole that St. Margaret used to hide priests from persecution during the reign of Elizabeth I.

I was very sick on our fourth day o/f the trip, so unfortunately I was unable to go on our excursion to Roman Bath or to watch Magic Box. But on our fifth day, we were blessed to go to Exeter for a free day. Us girls found an awesome restaurant and had some cocktails, and then we met up with our professors to go to the Cathedral there. Seeing this authentic English village made me wonder what it was like in older times. I believe that it was likely to look like some of the slum villages in the “Housing Problems” documentary. However, now it seems to be a very gentrified town – perhaps more upper-class.

Exetur Cathedral is the first place I noticed that previously Catholic aspects of the church (statues, images of saints, etc) were destroyed in the British reformation.

On our third day at Buckfast Abbey, we spent the morning and afternoon taking classes with our own Dr. Brodeur and some of the professors at the School of Annunciation. Dr. Brodeur gave us a very helpful lecture on the background of Roman Britain and its founding. One of my favorite parts of this to learn was about Queen Boudica and how she single-handedly reclaimed independence from Caesar in the first century (p. 26, Roman Britain) for her Kingdom in the north part of the country. My favorite lecture of the day was by one of the Annunciation professors who talked about Catholic culture in the UK, and the struggles of apathy and lack of community that Catholics in the country are facing.

After a fantastic dinner (pictured below) at the Northgate house where us women were staying, we gathered to watch Hot Fuzz, our first film of our Art 116 class. While British humor is not especially my favorite, I could appreciate Hot Fuzz for the example of modern British comedy that it was. In particular, I thought that the acting in the film was very believable – for example, you could believe that these actors really were the characters playing the goofy parts that they were.

Our second day in the country was jam-packed. We went to Stonehenge and Salisbury. Stonehenge was one of the sites that I was most excited to see, so I was pleased that we got to go right away.

Stonehenge is what we now believe to have been a place of death-honoring for the ancient Celtic-Druids. In “Roman Britain”, Peter Salway explains, “Celtic is convenient as a term to refer to the religious cults that originated in the pre-Roman Iron Age.” It is believed that extremely large pilgrimages of people came far to Stonehenge to honor their dead and pray to their gods. This practice is similar to what we did by visiting in a group with many other travelers.

Salisbury was so beautiful. It was the first British “village” that I really got to experience. In fact, I got to meet up with my friend, Daisy, who lives in Salisbury while we were there. We went to Salisbury Cathedral, built in the medieval era, which was just breathtaking

My first day in Great Britain was amazing. I had gotten in while it was still dark around 3:30am due to a major flight delay. We were staying at Buckfast Abbey in the southern part of the country (Devon) – and I woke up to go to Mass that first morning. I walked out of the doors of the Northgate House and was amazed by how GREEN everything was. The grass was bright and soft and there were flowers and butterflies everywhere – it seemed like something out of a Disney movie.

Mass at the Abbey was lovely. It was a recently built Church, with Medieval architectural influences. According to John Gillingham, medieval architecture is “heavily influenced by French models”. One of the most interesting pieces of this church is that it had “choir stalls”, where the monks who lived at the Abbey sat for their prayer. Choir stalls are situated at on either side of the “nave” (the main part of a church), and face each other so that the monks can better join together in prayer.

After Mass, we went down to Dartmouth, a little town at the base of the river Dart. This was probably one of my favorite places we went. It was a beautiful seaside town, with loads of shopping, eating, dogs, and beach houses. Dartmouth is actually the original site of where the Mayflower took off in 1682.

Dartmouth was also where I had my very first British milkshake – which was not what I expected – instead of a thin ice cream, it was like a thick milk! The group also went to a pub together for the first time, which was a neat experience of British character. As we walked in to the pub, an older gentleman pointed at each of us and said, “American, American, American…” It made us wonder what stereotypes of Americans that the English believe and how they could tell us apart from one of them aside from our accents.

Overall, Day 1 was amazing!