Unless you know and can explain the difference between England, Great Britain, the UK, and the British Isles, you should probably check out this video by CGP Grey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNu8XDBSn10. Instead of being pedantic by clarifying all of these differences, I’m just going to go, and am going to expect you as the readers to understand these differences. The video makes things sufficiently clear, so this is on you.
For convenience, I do call this my “UK trip,” even though I was also in Ireland. However, Ireland was such a small part of the trip that I feel comfortable ignoring my own pedantry and saving a few syllables. “UK trip” is three, while “British Isles” is 4, and doesn’t tell you anything about what was done.
Anyway, let’s start with the itinerary.
2 nights London
1 night Coventry
2 nights Dublin
3 nights Edinburgh
1 night in Yorkshire
3 nights in Caernarfon (pronounced something like “ka-NAR-ven”)
1 night in Oxford
3 nights in Cambridge
And then back to Stuttgart.
Now some overall reactions to the trip as a whole.
[GRUB]
The food and drinks were exactly as good as I would have expected english food and drinks to be – not very. Certainly palatable for a short period of time, but not world-class cuisine. I came back to Germany and remembered that bread had flavor. Within a day, I went out for my first Hefeweizen in too long, and it was heavenly.
Fish and chips are okay, but definitely not the kind of thing you want to have too often. Haggis is far from yucky, but still probably not for everybody. There were some meat pies in Wales that weren’t terrible, but certainly not exceptional either. Guinness pretty smooth, and really easy to drink a lot of, but not really that great next to what I’m used to here. There are also some good English, Scottish, and Welsh ales, but they just weren’t the same.
The best food options I came across were pizza (not English), Chicken Tikka Masala (kind of English, but disguised as Indian), and Chipotle (American/Mexican-ish). The Chipotle was even bland compared to what I’m used to in the US, but I hadn’t had any since July, so I’m certainly not complaining. Plenty of places also had pretty good burgers.
Ritter Sport never costs 1.49, of anything (in Europe), never mind the exchange rates that would make it cost even more. This is a scandal! And I promise I’m not just being bitter for having forgotten to bring any of my own from Germany. Just kidding. I totally am.
[CURRENCY]
The coins were mostly completely stupid, but they did have some redeeming aspects. I might go into more detail later about why the Great British Pound coins suck, but to keep my blood pressure down, I’m going to try to focus on this single really really cool part: The Shield.
This single piece of great design almost completely makes up for the lazy design elsewhere in the same coins.
[ACCOMMODATIONS]
Two weeks was an awfully long time to be moving around and keeping busy. Maybe too long. It was REALLY nice to come back to the comfort and security of Germany. Hostels are far from luxurious accommodation, and the buses (“coaches” as they’re referred to – incorrectly in my opinion) and trains weren’t quite as convenient for outsiders as they are in Germany.I also spent the entire time washing my clothes in sinks with the same bar of soap I used to wash myself. Three shirts and a single pair of pants for the whole time was certainly pushing things, particularly in my desire to stand in front of a sink to do my laundry.
Some of the hostels were nice. The one in Caernarfon was within spitting distance of both the castle and the nearest body of water, and the owners had brought home a puppy two days before I arrived. Edinburgh reminded me of the Harry Potter dormitories, and was full of really cool people. Cambridge had a pretty nice hostel with some environmentally friendly something or other initiative thingy thing (I was excited to go back to Germany at that point, so didn’t particularly care).
There was a wide variety of hostel quality though, and I’ve already mentioned the good ones. London found me at the way-top of a triple-bunked bed, and the luggage lockers did not work at all – but the location was great. The Dublin hostel was full of all kinds of people who were there for the party scene – not my favorite kinds of travelers. The oxford hostel was sketchy and with sketchy clientele, and the staff wasn’t that great at pretending to be friendly or helpful or good at speaking English. And none of these places had consistent internet access that they claimed to have.
That’s probably enough. I’ll focus on specific highlights in a subsequent post. Ultimately, I had a sufficiently good time, though I am not eager to repeat this any time in the near future.
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