well, it's been a good month or so now, and i'm definitely feeling settled. perhaps even a bit too settled. i'm taking a british life and culture class which is great because we take all kinds of organized trips to historical and beautiful places that i doubt i would have gotten to on my own. our first trip was to brighton which is a really artsy town down on the beach. it reminded me a lot of santa cruz; loads of vintage shops, tattoo and piercing places, rock n roll kids...it's where the mods and rockers had their wars back in the 60s. i also realized that an old graham greene novel that's been on my shelf for ages, brighton rock, takes place there. shows how far i got in that book. i really enjoyed that trip and have since made some friends from there and am planning a trip back to stay for longer.

next was stonehenge, and it was as epic as could be expected. we went on a misty morning and our professor, philip woods, told us all about its pagan history on our drive there so we were excited when we got there. we took a quick lap around, went to the gift shop (of course, lila and i had to fulfill our desire to purchase stationary at every possible stop) then hopped back on the coach to head to the city of bath.

bath was incredible. it is one of the only sites of naturally occurring hotsprings in the uk, so royalty often visited a long time ago and it became quite a fancy spot. all of the buildings have limestone faces because they wanted to make sure the city had a uniform appearance. bath now is home to the world's highest rated spa and it looked magnificent. very modern, glass building, but still retains some limestone elements so that it's not breaking the rules. we saw huge old monasteries and walked on cobblestones and through ancient roman baths. all of a sudden i felt like i really am in europe. there is so much history in just that one small town that is older than the whole of the united states.