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The night in Glasgow was loads of fun. A guy on the trip, Tony drank a fair bit and was quite flamboyant. He pulled me on the dance floor - we were literally the only people dancing. The rest of the gang was getting a real kick out of it. And then Tony decided to propose to me. Sadly I had to turn him down. So that's marriage proposal number 1. Hopefully the next will go better hahaha.
From Glasgow we travelled to Gretna Green famous for marriages - coincidence? Gretna Green is in Scotland but very close to the English border. Years ago there was a law in England that you could not marry before the age of 18 but that was not true for Scotland. In Gretna you could marry without the consent of your parents at the age of 16. And! A blacksmith was the person to conduct the ceremony. Seems a little bizarre by today's standards, but a real neat place to visit.
We continued on into Liverpool. The weather was real rainy, but we'd been so lucky up to that point that it didn't seem to bother anyone. Ally and I went up to the room to get settled in and I didn't realize that my watch wasn't working...we ended up missing the Beatles tour but the people on the trip said you couldn't see much because of the weather anyhow. To shake off our disappointment, Ally and I went exploring. Lots of little shops and interesting people. They have a completely different accent in Liverpool. It's almost like a combination of Scottish, Brittish, and Irish. Takes some getting used to but I liked it a lot. We were all planning to go out to a night club but Ally, Tanya, Rebecca and I called it an early night and caught up on sleep.
The next morning we left for Wales. Our first stop was in Chester which is the last city in England before entering Wales. They hate the Welsh! There is still a law in Wales that says that if you see a person from Wales on a sunday in Chester you can shoot them with an arrow and it's legal! Bizarre. They also have a clock tower in Chester with a clock on four sides but only three sides of the clock have hands - the side facing Wales has no hands. The mayor did this on purpose stating that he didn't want to give the Welsh the time of day. Our tour guide - Anna - is from Wales and seemed to have a good sense of humour about the whole thing.
Chester was a neat little town. Lots of interesting architechure and things to see. They are currently working on digging up an old Roman Coleseum. They are trying to evacuate buildings as they were built on top of the coleseum.
Upon leaving Chester we went to a small town in Wales with a ridiculously long name. I'm not even going to try to pronounce it. They speak an entirely different dialect in Wales. It is still quite prevelent in the northern and middle regions. It sounds like jibberish. The 11 of us who just did the great brittan tour were left in this town while the others continued on to Ireland.
Ally and I led the group on an adventure of a mountain trying to get to a monument that we could see from the road but it was blocked by lots of barbed wire so we had to turn back. We were picked up by another group returning from Ireland and journied back to London.
I'm now in Oxford staying with Betsy. I'm actually meeting her for lunch in 10 minutes so I have to run. I've added photos to my other journals and I'll try to add some more again shortly.
All the best,
Laura
previous travel blog entry
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