The One With the English Countryside

So I went to Glastonbury, England not this past weekend, but the one before...yeah I know I'm slacking in the updating department.

One observation I made is that all cell phones (excuse me- mobiles) phones in England are the slide kind, where as Americans are flip-phone crazy. But the phones we were given to communicate to each other are lame black/white screen brick-shaped ones that don't slide or flip or anything. *sigh*

Hmmmm.... let's see, on Friday (of two weeks ago...haha) I managed to miss my first bus to the countryside only because I was ON TIME and waiting but didn't see it leave, so I had to buy a whole new one-way ticket for twice the price of my original round-trip fare. I wasn't really happy about that.

On the coach bus, there were seat belts. It was so weird. I first stayed at an "aunts" (I use that term loosely as she is somehow through extended family a 50-year-old cousin) house in the village of Broughton Gifford.

The next day we drove to Glastonbury... (no, not my lame hometown). Call me a dork, I don't care. But I really wanted to see the famous town my own hometown was named after since I'm in England anyway and I'll probably never get the chance/time again.

Well, Glastonbury, England is a huge hippy town. Their "high street" aka main street is laid out like this:

random spooky magic/mystical shop
charity shop
random spooky magic/mystical shop
charity shop
random spooky magic/mystical shop

... you get the picture.

There were your standard town staples like post office, bank etc sprinkled in between.

We met a cute old man in a souvenir shop who was so taken back by the fact I was from "Glastonbury in the USA" that he gave me some old coins to take back to the US and when I was leaving he kissed my hand like I was royalty. It was kinda weird.

There was a carnival going on so there were many people dressed up in costumes, including a town crier in full Benjamin Franklin attire. He showed me some church and met a couple who had traveled to Glastonbury, CT back in 1993 for our town's 300th anniversary. They claimed they gave our town a wooden chair from here and they knew what Katz Hardware was. As I left, the town crier yelled to everyone on the street, "Hey! this girl is from Glastonbury in America!"

The next day we went to Bath and it was gorgeous with as all the buildings were made of quarry.

The family I was staying with were a couple in their 20's and they had a 4-year-old girl and a 6-month-old. I just don't know how they could do that. The wife is only 3 years older than me and got married at 19. I couldn't see myself having a family of my own in the next 5 years. The kids also needed so much attention 24/7 it took us about 15 minutes to leave the parking lot in Bath. Yeah, not my cup of tea... yet.

On that trip, I found an interesting tidbit about my heritage (of which is a mystery to me). Apparently, before when Pakistan was still a part of India and before Islam was a religion my ancestors were a part of the Rajpoot dynasty who were in the top-tier on the caste system. The Rajpoot family were in the royal family... you see Rajpoot means "son of king" as Raj means "king". Apparently, this resemblance shows in our family's facial features as that family had huge dark eyes and high-cheek bones which we all have.

Well... I was pretty excited to learn I have royalty in my blood!

Cheers!
Farida