When the accommodation was first booked for Canterbury, it was merely a means to an end. We were attending the Whitstable Oyster Festival and Whitstable was fully booked. We started looking around for alternative locations and Canterbury seemed like a good a place to stay as any. It was a 20 minute drive from the festival location, I could then add another English town visit to my list, and it had some tourist attractions I was interested in seeing. Turns out, I HEART Canterbury. It was an appropriate mix of cultural, historic, and quaint. I wanted to try all the restaurants and cafes. Take all the pictures of buildings. Visit all the museums and tourist sites.
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| An old Roman courtyard undulating from time and movement of the earth |
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Once arrived in Canterbury I started thinking about the one thing I knew about this place; The Canterbury Tales. Then I realized, I don't actually know anything about The Canterbury Tales and Geoffrey Chaucer. Lucky for me, someone had put together The Canterbury Tales Museum; highly cheesy, purely for tourists, and I loved it. A small selection of the 20 plus stories written in Middle English at the end of the 14th century are told using dioramas and audio from the storytellers on a pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral. Was I the only one who hadn't read this? Has it passed by anyone else's knowledge?
While living in England, I hadn't often thought I could live in any other city that London, but the more I wandered these streets and conversed with the locals, the more I could see myself settled in this town. Besides, it's only an hour away (on the express train) from central London.
Fun travels!
