Canterbury

Today Jared and I went to Canterbury. It was not an arranged trip. A couple days ago Jared and I bought bus tickets and we just went. When we got there, we got a map, and charted our course. It was quite fun. We did three things. The first, was visit the Canterbury Cathedral. Second, we went through the Canterbury Tales tour. Third, we visited the Canterbury Castle.

So on the way to the cathedral, we ran across this tower:

It is apparently what remains of the church where Christopher Marlowe was baptised. For those that don't know, Christopher Marlowe was a contemporary of Shakespeare- aka he wrote plays around the same time period. Actually, he died about 6 weeks before Shakespeare's first play. Some people think that Marlowe actually published under Shakespeare's name and that Shakespeare didn't actually write any plays. But that's a different story altogether.

Anyway, the Canterbury Cathedral is incredibly famous. There were two significant things about it that made Jared and I get on a bus for 2 hours. The first is that it is the Cathedral that Geoffrey Chaucer went on a pilgrimage to and in the process came up with the Canterbury Tales. The second is that it is the site of the tombstone of Prince Edward of Woodstock- the Black Prince.

This is the tomb of the Black Prince. It is a bronze figure, with his head resting on his helmet (and his feet on his dog). It was quite cool.
Me standing by the tomb. You can't really see it because of the guard cage, but you get the idea.
Around the outside of his tomb are his two arms. The first shield is the Shield of War. It is his coat of arms (and obviously that of his father, King Edward III). The second is the Shield of Peace. This has become the symbol for the Prince of Wales (I think Prince Edward was the first Prince of Wales).

After we finished at the Cathedral, we went to a place called The Canterbury Tales. Basically it was a cheesy audio and visual walkthrough of the Canterbury Tales. Super abridged- like, telling the story, but without any of Chaucer's words. It was cool in that it was a fun way to familiarize one's self with the Tales without reading them.

After the "tour" we went to the Canterbury Castle. It sounds a lot cooler than it was. It was basically a prison when it was still intact. And now it's just kind of a hollowed out keep. Even though it lacked the grandeur of the other castles we've been to, it was still fun to run around and take pictures.

We pretty much spent the rest of our time wandering around the shops and stuff. We stopped by the Marlowe Theatre and poked our heads in, but there's not much exciting in a theatre when there's not a show going on. Then we returned home. Unfortunately there were traffic problems, so after we were already 45 minutes late and showing no sign of being remotely close to the destination station, Jared and I just got off and walked the rest of the way back to school, as we had to get to the shows we were seeing before the curtain went up. And thus was Canterbury.