June 24: Bristol, Bath's ugly twin

In the interest of the hour (and because I have to get up in a very short amount of time) , this will again be a short post. Tomorrow we leave for London, at least the Film and Politics classes do. Laura departs with the Holmes class for Dartmoor. In London the politics class will split from the film class with the politics going to parliament and the film class going to some obscure places.

Today our Jane Austen class went to Bristol. This meant getting up earlier for class and from Nelson house catching the train to Bristol. The train ride was only around 10 minutes. The tour of Bristol itself wasn’t all that interesting and it didn’t actually have a lot to do with Jane Austen either. None of us really thought it would be quite that long either. I’m glad we went so I can say I went to Bristol and saw a few things of interest like the abbey and St. Mary Redcliff’s, but otherwise not that different from a U.S. city. In Jane Austen's time Bristol was a trading city and was not viewed as highly as Bath for that and other reasons. It was often smelly and more dirty as well.

In film we watched A Room With A View which I did my paper on. The quiz we take once a week on the computer after class was incredibly difficult, a drastic change from last week’s quiz. It was as though since we all did so well on that quiz he felt he had to make this one harder but he went to such the other extreme. And there was a typo and one wasn’t even a question it was simply a statement. The quiz is timed so we couldn’t ask him about it, but hopefully he’ll give us credit for his mistake. Other than that we tried to do a bit of shopping, but failed at the store we’ve been eyeing. We hoped to catch the end of the really long match from Wimbledon, but we missed that as well.

The rest of the evening passed fairly uneventfully. We were all pretty tired and we think it might have to do something with the fact that we’ve basically had one day off this entire trip and it’s catching up to us. Well I am off to bed so I can get up in a few hours and go down to catch the bus at 8:15. Oh the joys of being the first group to get picked up. I’ll write when we return on Saturday, though it will be late so perhaps not til Sunday. Have a great crab feast Veaseys!

photos from today (page 4 #72)