Windsor!

Today, we had our last - but most emphatically not least - field trip: Windsor Castle. The entire trip was absoulutely fabulous; the castle, home to Her Majesty the Queen, was beautiful, inside and out; unfortunately, for privacy reasons, we were not allowed to take photos of the inside, so I'm afraid you'll have to make do with googling them, if there are any! However, I don't think I missed a single angle from outside; here's a couple, so enjoy!

The gardens were beautiful, even this late in the season; the guards amused us with their stoicism. Inside, we saw the most detail-oriented dollhouse I have ever seen, enough to make even Playmobil grow green with envy (if ever possible!).

The St. George cathedral, located within the castle walls, presented another fine specimen of medieval architecture.

Having completed the tour, we all broke for lunch and then went along our merry ways to explore the town itself. A friend and I took a journey down the river Thames - not by boat, but along the shore - to gaze upon the fowl there. Did you know: all the swans in England are owned by the Queen?

After deliberating over ice cream, not once, not twice, but three times (and coming away empty-handed each time), we took ourselves off down High Street (NB: it seems that every largish town in England boasts a High (i.e. "Main") Street, a Queen Street, a Market Street, and a St.-Somebody-or-Other Street, or some combination thereof) towards Eton College (no worries, to those concerned that we were depriving ourselves of edible enjoyment. We eventually settled quite contentedly for tea and scones).

Ah, Eton. This prestigious "college" is not an American idea of "college," or even an Oxford idea of "college," but rather a French idea of "college," or high-school. We were curious to see Eton, maybe some ancient architecture, maybe a rugby game in a faraway field ... did someone say culture shock? We paused our walk momentarily to step into a nick-nack shop, only to be confronted by half-a-dozen teenage boys in tails. Coattails. Vest, tie, collars, trousers, and coattails. Immensely impressed, we quickly ducked out to continue our promenade ... and soon found the entire area swarming with uniformly-clad peers (not the noble kind, the social equal; though I daresay enough of their percentage would have been aristocratic enough for the term to be so used). After discovering that the college buildings were none of them open to satisfy public curiosity, we sauntered back up the hill towards the castle, where we eventually found a little tea shop and sat down to rest our feet.

I would have taken pictures of the uniform, had I not felt that would have been slightly inconsiderate and disconcerting to the young gentlemen. You can probably google up some images of "Eton uniform" and see for yourselves ... FYI, some notable Old Etonians include George Orwell, Bertie Wooster, Ian Fleming, James Bond, Hugh Laurie, Lord Sebastian Flyte, Bear Grylls, Captain James Hook, Captain Arthur Hastings, Lord Peter Wimsey - not to mention the royal princes William and Harry.

After tea, we made our way back to the bus, for an hour-long trip home of eavesdropping on fellow students discussing health care and the second amendment. I could only think to myself what a pain it would be to have to wear an Eton collar, all day long ...