Week 2 Update (Finally)

Hello, Blog Followers!

     I know.... I’m very much so behind on keeping this blog up to date. I got home from Europe, then was home for a few weeks before spending a week in California going to Disneyland with my family, and then I’ve been working and getting my summer jobs sorted out. Oh, and figuring out college stuff (post about that to come later on, because that will be an adventure too!). 

     So without further ado, Week 2 of my European adventure with a few pictures. I will try to get Week 3 and 4 up before too long. :)

I’ll do the same thing as I did last time, with a condensed version and then more detail:

Night of 3/13: Going away party for volunteers, drinking, playing pool, and Mexican food!

3/14: First day working on the pirate ship, The Golden Hind!

3/15: Walk to Cockington, a small village with cottages, with friends. Very peaceful.

3/16: Day 2 of being a pirate and “packing party” with one of my roommates

3/17: St. Patrick’s Day! Sunshine and blue skies on the pirate ship. Fish and Chips dinner and dessert kitchen! Hostel game fun playing Spoons and a lighter game with a new hostel volunteer, Martxel

3/18: Bath with my bestie! Roman Baths, Bath Abbey and Sally Lunn Buns

3/19: English Breakfast made by some drunks in the kitchen in the morning, new volunteers, more pirating, and a very silly variety show

3/20: One Minute Challenge card game fun and a new volunteer, Monica

    And now for the details!

    3/13: The going away party was pretty good, lots of food and good company and conversation. After eating a lot of us went out to the little shed to play pool. I ended up going to bed pretty early since the next morning I’d be working on the pirate ship, but a lot of people went out clubbing really late.

    3/14: My first day of working on the ship went well! I mainly just listened to welcome speeches and gave prizes to the kids that did the little stamp map activity, but I still had a lot of fun with my first day of being a pirate!

    Here’s a picture of The Golden Hind.

    A little bit of history on the ship: The original ship (this one is the 2nd replica to be docked in Brixham) was only 120 tons and had a crew of 70 people not including the captain. In 1577 the captain, Sir Francis Drake, set sail with four other ships from Plymouth with the plan of doing a slave trade trip in Africa,, but what Drake really had planned was intercepting gold and jewels that the Spanish were taking from South America. Once they had successfully captured  twenty six tons of silver, half a ton of gold, and thousands ago coins, jewelry and jewels (you know, no big deal), they couldn’t sail back the way they had come, along the South American coast, because then the Spanish would be expecting them. Thus began the almost three year journey home, adding 36,000 miles of sailing to their journey. The Golden Hind was the only ship of the five that made it back with Captain Drake and 56 men aboard. Pretty good odds for back then!

    3/15: Adventure day! I decided to go on a little walk with some other hostel people, and we chose to go to Cockington! It’s a small village more inland in the Torquay area. When we got to Cockington we walked around a little near the entrance and then headed towards this really old manor that now has a craft centre in it and a little cafe.

    After that there was a path that lead up to a few little shops that we wandered around. After walking through the shops we started heading back and on the way walked into and briefly looked at the old church in town that looked a lot like a castle.

3/16: Day two of being a pirate! Since it was the weekend we got a little more business than in the week, since it’s the off season.

    One of my favorite things on the ship was the list of punishments during the Tudor period. My favorite one is, obviously, that they had a pirate swear jar. :P

    Another punishment that visitors on the ship would tell me was that they would tie someone up with a rope, throw them overboard, and then drag them under the ship without the intention of killing the person. Brutal.

    Since the next day was St. Patrick’s Day, there was going to be a celebration at a pub with a live Irish band. A few people from the hostel had talked about going, but instead me and my roommates ended up staying in. One of them, Alex, was leaving early in the morning, so we kept him company while he packed, laughing and making it fun. And I got a sweater because he was trying to make more room in his suitcase. :P

3/17: St. Patrick’s Day! The only green I wore was a ring that I have, but I didn’t get pinched! I worked on the ship again and the sun stayed out for most of the day! I was really happy about it, so happy that I took multiple pictures of it. Proof of some sunshine in England, not all gray and rainy days.

After my day on the ship was done and Brent was done working at the hostel, we decided to go out to dinner at a little fish and chips shop called Saltwater. A little pricier than the other shop we went to, but I’d say also better quality.

After that Brent wanted to try out a dessert kitchen in town, and oh my goodness it was worth it. I ended up getting the Haribo sundae, and this is what was brought out to me:

It’s strawberry gelato and vanilla ice cream with Haribo gummies piled on top of a lot of whipped cream. Oh yeah! And a strawberry shoelace candy. Literally, I think it was one really long shoelace. I ate around it (since frozen shoelace is very chewy), and when I had finished all of the ice cream I lifted the wad of shoelace up with my spoon and it was the size of a spaghetti meatball.

Once we got back to the hostel we hung out with other volunteers and played a game of Spoons (if you don’t know what that is you should be able to Google it). I kept losing every round because I was less focused on the spoons and more focused on my cards. :P

After a few rounds of that a new guy from Spain named Martxel (pronounced “Marchell”) came downstairs and joined in, and then we decided to play a new game. I’m not sure what it’s called, but basically you’ve got a small but easy to grab object (we used a lighter) in the middle of the table, and then you split a deck of cards evenly amongst the players, without looking at the cards. Someone starts the game by flipping over a card, and then it goes around from there, and you keep stacking cards on top of it until you get the same card as someone else (ex. Two players have 10’s). When a player gets the same card as another player, you want to be the first one to grab the object, and the one that doesn’t get to it has to take the pile of cards the other player has. And if someone flips a king, then anyone can reach for the object and give their pile of cards to anyone. So the goal is to run out of cards, like War. For the most part I ended up with a lot of cards. :P

3/18: One of my best friends was in London for this week, and so we wanted to try and get together! We hadn’t seen each other for a few years. Instead of either of us making the epic journey to London or Torquay, we met in the middle in Bath!

The first thing we did in Bath was get lunch, and then we went to the Roman Baths. A little background on what the Roman Baths are: By the 1st century the Romans had conquered a lot of Europe, the majority of the top part of Africa, and most of the UK. It was in the UK in the city of Bath, that was then called Aquae Sulis, that they found, roughly, a system of hot springs. Around the hot springs they built giant public baths where people would come to cleanse themselves, sometimes going with the belief that they were healing waters. Today some pieces of different temples and buildings have been excavated and put on display for the public, including what the Romans had as far as technology, such as combs, ear scoops, jewelry, and nail clippers. Pictured below is also one of the main baths.

Being at the Roman Baths was a really cool experience, being around all of these 1st-5th century objects that we still have and use in today’s world. Being around all of the ancient objects and ruins that have been found at the Bath site really made me feel...small? Young? Realization of time? I don’t know, it’s hard to describe. It was just really cool being there where so much history and old culture had been before me, before any of us.

At the end of the museum tour there is a place where you can actually have a drink of the spa water, so the three of us gave it a go, cuz when at the Roman Baths! It was very warm and had a strong taste of sulfur, as kind of expected.

After the Roman Baths we went to the Bath Abbey. While I am not a religious person, I could still appreciate the massiveness that it was, all of the architecture and stained glass.

Next on our small list of popular things to do and see in Bath was go to Sally Lunn’s Bun House! The story is that Sally Lunn was a refugee escaping persecution in France (her original name was Solange Luton), arriving in Bath in 1680. She found a job at a bakery and later began baking brioche-like buns (my description would be: light and fluffy with a little bit of crunch, kind of the texture and crunchy sound of toast). The bun is then served cut in half, top halves used for sweet toppings, bottom halves used for savory toppings. Noah and I got the lemon curd sweet topping, and it was gone within 20 seconds. :P

Where the bun house has been since the beginning is one of the oldest buildings in Bath in a little alley.

I wish that it could’ve been a two day trip, giving more time to really explore and know the city, but I’m still glad that I got to spend a day there, well spent with my best friend. <3

3/19: Instead of packing my own lunch for the ship, I was gifted an English Breakfast (beans on toast with mushrooms, a poached egg, and bacon) lunch made by a few people (probably still drunk) that I started to call “Sam and the happy gang”.

Once the day of work as a pirate was done, a few us decided to go to a play!
The Golden Hind is part of a group of businesses that all agree that their staff can go to the other attractions for free. One of the businesses in the agreement is the Babbacombe Theater. The show that is running there right now is a variety show to celebrate an anniversary of the theater. A couple of noteworthy things: we were the youngest people there by 50+ years, most of the audience were in their 70’s and 80’s, and the humor and songs performed were mainly directed towards that audience. For example, they did a Laurel and Hardy skit and a lot of the comedy pieces were mildly racist. Overall, the show wasn’t terrible. But, we were also really glad that we didn’t have to pay the £22 for a ticket.
   

3/20: After another day of working on the ship a group of us started to play a game called One Minute Challenge. There are two decks of cards: mental and physical challenges. You get a point for each challenge you are able to complete in a minute. A lot of the physical challenges were silly, like “imitate a chicken” or “stick out your tongue for one minute”. The mental challenges were really hard though! For example, “name 5 James Bond characters” or “name 5 authors with a first or last name that begins with the letter J”. At a certain point, we kind of gave up actually playing and just tried to accomplish at least one of the mental challenges per person.