EPIC BRITISH ROAD TRIP: DAY 5 Brighton, Dover, Canterbury

We planned to stay outside of Brighton - some advice I picked up reading Brighton Rock - but there were only 3 more round abouts until the seafront… We miraculously found a spot to park near some eateries, did not know parking was not encouraged in Brighton (£25 for 24 hours). I then paid £13 for a chimichanga and phoned the husband for a hotel search for the evening. This WORKED in Bath. I sat by the Roman Baths, he rattled off rates, ratings, and features, I picked one: golden. This did NOT work in Brighton.

The 18 hours we spent in Brighton were THE most disastrous of our journey - and yes, this is the same day where my companion forced me to drive down a footpath and I posted a photo of a bottle of wine, 1 glass…

• Remember this for the rest of your life: Never stay at the Royal Albion hotel in Brighton. Do not. All those things you read in the comments section of a 4.0 (on a scale of 10) hotel on Booking.com happened. Piss. There was literally piss. It was like bad Eastern Europe in there. 
  
• The Hotel York, however, next door is FANTASTIC. However fantastic, Hotel York could do little to fix the angsty-angst between my travelling companion and I at that point. If you go any time soon and it still smells of whiskey, that’d be my travelling companion. … We had the hotel hold our bags, one of which was a litre of whiskey, a jar of honey, and a lemon (hot toddies for my death flu); this will be important later.
• Brighton Pier is an … interesting place. Its a place where dreams have gone to die, and tourist come to feast on those dreams and marvel at the uncanny. There’s like a replica Taj Mahal, which is apparently called the Pavilion, next to a massive park where the Lady Boys of Thailand currently are on tour. FUN.HOUSE.ofacity.
• My travelling companion put her Canadian bank card into a cash point, and - not joking - it kept it. Yeah, that stuff happens, I guess, even after you tell your bank you’re travelling and have no prior trouble with your card. Seeing as how she had generously offered to foot the bill for our 2-week long journey, … we had a problem.
• Seeing as how the day had gone, and after we made a cash plan, we needed to ‘git out of Dodge’, as it were. We teased the attendant back at Hotel York about taking nips off our whiskey. Travelling companion goes to toilet, almost runs into white haired guy; this will also be important later.
• I head to the toilet, and when I come out, travelling companion simply has her hands over her mouth and is shaking her head no. I simply asked her to call a taxi, wtf?
  
• Apparently when the white haired guy came out of the toilet, she moved our bags to help him past. The whiskey, jar of honey, and accompanying lemon fell to the floor and shattered across the vast hotel marble lobby. Yup.
• We basically check that we are okay to run o-f-t and duck outside to wait for our cab. …the taxi queue begins at the side of our hotel, so we look like extra geniuses.
  
• After many taxis pass, a van pulls up. Travelling companion does hands over face again and quietly panics, ‘OH MY GOD’. I ask what, but she’s not speaking. We get in the taxi, I make chit chat for a mile or so: “Are you from Brighton? What have the Welsh done with all of their vowels? Its cheaper to get drunk where we are from; oh you don’t drink because of cirrhosis?”, etc.
  
• We step out of the taxi, and my travelling companion informs me that the taxi driver is the white haired man who caused the whiskey drop at the hotel, and we had to “get the fuck outta here before some more weird shit happens.”

Classic holiday.

The bottom photos are Dover, which, like Stonehenge, is totally ‘missable’ like the drunk in Wales (WHO IS STILL TEXTING ME!) and the older Australian couple on Brighton pier instructed. Those pictures are political economy at its finest. How they’ve managed to make a national attraction (the White Cliffs of Dover) out of massively smoggy European port is BEYOND comprehension. …LOOK AT THAT LORRY RAMP! Its all messed up at a 50 degree angle! This isn’t right for a holiday in the South.

…then I drank a bunch in Canterbury and apparently woke my travelling companion up at near 3 am looking at my phone, talking about getting a hold of ‘the clients’ (I’m an academic…), and demanding biscuits.

… this all happened.

They say the Olympic torch will come within 10 miles of 90% of Britons.

…

island.crazy.

I love chandeliers. 

My mum collected and sold antiques, and we had an EPIC one in our vaulted, wooden ceiling at home. So here are some amazing chandeliers in the “Assembly Rooms” in Bath - where the Museum of Fashion is - which I think is just a posh (it IS Bath) way of saying, place that made Jane Austen pissy.

In all reality these “rooms” are fantastic.

Strangely enough there were three members of ‘the fuzz’ waiting in one of the posh rooms, all on their iPhones, all ignoring each other. I think their ladies were in the Museum of Fashion; THE GIFT SHOP IS FABULOUS!!!

The last chandelier was reconstructed from FIVE that were destroyed during wartime bombings. Epic repurposing.

thank you.

unicefuk:

‘This is a film about the reality faced by many of us in the UK. We made it because we need to expose the hidden poverty amongst children and young people of our age.’

UNICEF’s Report Card 10, published today, warns that previous success on fighting child poverty is at risk due to government cuts. Many children in the UK live in poverty, but what does it actually mean day to day?

This video was made by students at St. Kentigern’s Academy in West Lothian, Scotland, to raise awareness of what poverty is really like for children in the UK.

Find out more about the report here