Next leg of trip
Alright everyone (the 2..maybe 3 people who read this..) I'm going to post a bit about the next portion of our trip, and maybe condense it a bit.
Rye
After leaving Dover mum drove the manual car (!!!) to a lovely town called Rye. It's a very ancient city, really really neat place. We had a pint at a super-old pub called The Mermaid Inn, and the next day we wandered around and shopped, went to the cathedral and climbed to the top. Views were fantastic!
We liked Rye very much, they had old cobblestones! So old they were kinda rounded/pointy, and hurt to walk on. After Rye we went through Hastings, which looked like this:
I began driving, and our life expectancies were severely elongated. We had an automatic, but it was still quite probably the shittiest car I've ever driven, our beloved Chevy Kalos http://www.topgear.com/drives/CB/A4/new/. Really really a rubbish car. But we had to embrace her, as I drove nearly 750 miles in it. So we went from the coast to the inland Salisbury.
Salisbury
A beautiful city, really, and one of my fondest moments with a car. I laid eyes on the Fiat 500. Say/Think what you will, but I loved it! http://www.topgear.com/drives/B3/XX/ Cutie! Nice interior, James likes it, etc. Ok, but Salisbury is a seriously architectural town, the cathedral has the tallest spire in England, if not Britain.
They also have Stonehenge and the Old Sarum, which is the original settlement in the area. Old Salisbury, basically, a little to the side of the modern town. It had Norman, Saxon, Roman, etc., and a cathedral. It's a mound now, with some visible walls and grassy mounds that used to be walls. All in all great for nerdy archaeologists.
The cathedral ruins on the right. They were having a super-nerdy reenactment that day. Bless them.
Now, we did go see Stonehenge, but I won't bore you with photos, cause who hasn't seen one? I will however, rant.
AUDIO TOURS ARE THE DEVIL!!!
You walk into a beautiful cathedral, a stunning Roman ruin, a Druid masterpiece of standing stones, even an art museum, and some cockney British chick screams, 'Get your tour here! Have you got your tour?!' She is referring, of course, to the hand-held sticks that vaguely resemble technology and spout information into your ears as you walk around like a zombie, in the way of all normal and sane people. Not only do these sad excuses for communication turn the users into oblivious statues that are somehow always in my way, but the supreme travesty and crime against humanity of which they are guilty is the theft of countless jobs for History, Archaeology, Anthropology, Classics, Architecture, Art, and Religion students and graduates.
Now, I will admit a bias here, in that I was a student of three of those areas, and have many friends in all of those areas. However, the problem is not diminished by that tidbit of information. Even if the tour is written by one of these knowledgeable people, it is then recorded once and never again. On any given day I saw at least 70-200 people with these devices against their heads. Say a tour group would consist of roughly 15 people. That's 5-14 tour groups, and at least 2-5 tour guides that could have been employed, in one location alone. Not only that, we're losing personal communication and interaction, as well as the ability to ask questions and have them answered with evidence carefully defined for us by a learned guide.
I will admit this: they come in many languages. That is surely a positive. But, isn't it also keeping bilingual people from working? If you had a tour guide fluent in Italian and English, Brava! They would be able to take over at least some of the tours, and if you hire more bilingual people the benefits for all involved would continue to manifest. Each tourist would most likely return home with stories for loved ones of how considerate St.Paul's was, since they had a tour guide that spoke Japanese. International relations, business, trade, simply everything, would improve.
Someone stop me if I'm wrong here, but I can see primarily negatives with 'Audio Tours' (aka the Devil, and that may even be too much of a compliment for them) and the effects I saw firsthand.
Rye
After leaving Dover mum drove the manual car (!!!) to a lovely town called Rye. It's a very ancient city, really really neat place. We had a pint at a super-old pub called The Mermaid Inn, and the next day we wandered around and shopped, went to the cathedral and climbed to the top. Views were fantastic!
We liked Rye very much, they had old cobblestones! So old they were kinda rounded/pointy, and hurt to walk on. After Rye we went through Hastings, which looked like this:
I began driving, and our life expectancies were severely elongated. We had an automatic, but it was still quite probably the shittiest car I've ever driven, our beloved Chevy Kalos http://www.topgear.com/drives/CB/A4/new/. Really really a rubbish car. But we had to embrace her, as I drove nearly 750 miles in it. So we went from the coast to the inland Salisbury.
Salisbury
A beautiful city, really, and one of my fondest moments with a car. I laid eyes on the Fiat 500. Say/Think what you will, but I loved it! http://www.topgear.com/drives/B3/XX/ Cutie! Nice interior, James likes it, etc. Ok, but Salisbury is a seriously architectural town, the cathedral has the tallest spire in England, if not Britain.
They also have Stonehenge and the Old Sarum, which is the original settlement in the area. Old Salisbury, basically, a little to the side of the modern town. It had Norman, Saxon, Roman, etc., and a cathedral. It's a mound now, with some visible walls and grassy mounds that used to be walls. All in all great for nerdy archaeologists.
The cathedral ruins on the right. They were having a super-nerdy reenactment that day. Bless them.
Now, we did go see Stonehenge, but I won't bore you with photos, cause who hasn't seen one? I will however, rant.
AUDIO TOURS ARE THE DEVIL!!!
You walk into a beautiful cathedral, a stunning Roman ruin, a Druid masterpiece of standing stones, even an art museum, and some cockney British chick screams, 'Get your tour here! Have you got your tour?!' She is referring, of course, to the hand-held sticks that vaguely resemble technology and spout information into your ears as you walk around like a zombie, in the way of all normal and sane people. Not only do these sad excuses for communication turn the users into oblivious statues that are somehow always in my way, but the supreme travesty and crime against humanity of which they are guilty is the theft of countless jobs for History, Archaeology, Anthropology, Classics, Architecture, Art, and Religion students and graduates.
Now, I will admit a bias here, in that I was a student of three of those areas, and have many friends in all of those areas. However, the problem is not diminished by that tidbit of information. Even if the tour is written by one of these knowledgeable people, it is then recorded once and never again. On any given day I saw at least 70-200 people with these devices against their heads. Say a tour group would consist of roughly 15 people. That's 5-14 tour groups, and at least 2-5 tour guides that could have been employed, in one location alone. Not only that, we're losing personal communication and interaction, as well as the ability to ask questions and have them answered with evidence carefully defined for us by a learned guide.
I will admit this: they come in many languages. That is surely a positive. But, isn't it also keeping bilingual people from working? If you had a tour guide fluent in Italian and English, Brava! They would be able to take over at least some of the tours, and if you hire more bilingual people the benefits for all involved would continue to manifest. Each tourist would most likely return home with stories for loved ones of how considerate St.Paul's was, since they had a tour guide that spoke Japanese. International relations, business, trade, simply everything, would improve.
Someone stop me if I'm wrong here, but I can see primarily negatives with 'Audio Tours' (aka the Devil, and that may even be too much of a compliment for them) and the effects I saw firsthand.