God Save the Queen (and to heck with the trees!)

Well, it has been another crazy week. Saturday the international office organized a trip to Windsor Castle. So on Saturday morning pretty much everyone from my flat piled on the bus at 8:30 in the morning (Which is apparently SUPER early for them as they were groggily grumbling for the first little while.) However, the ride was about 2 hours to get there, so most people got to finish up their sleep on the bus. As per usual the day was gray, but it wasn't raining. While driving through the countryside, I couldn't believe the lack of forest over here. Though the hillsides are quite scenic, I feel like the lime-green and yellow patches are just gaps where forests should be. Here's a pic from the bus on our way to the castle.
Once we arrived at the castle we were pretty much let free to do whatever we pleased. We were just told to be back to the bus at 5:30. So we had the entire day. When we walked up to the entrance we were ushered into this security check. This was a full out airport scan. We had to remove our bags and walk through a metal detector and they checked our tickets like 3 times. Crazy! Here are some pictures of the outside as we were coming up to it.
Windsor Castle is big and beautiful on the outside, but is even more crazy cool on the inside. Unfortunately we weren't allowed to snap any inside pictures. We walked through many different rooms and each one was more elaborate than the next. One was covered from (very high) ceiling to floor will old weaponry. They had tons of old sabers and rapiers and armor and then they made these crazy circle designs with old pistols and guns. It was very neat. We then walked through other rooms in the castle such as the Kings bed chamber and the Queens drawing room. All were decked out in crazy elaborate wallpaper, gold trim work stuff and painted ceilings. I am pretty sure I would go crazy if I had to live in that castle for any period of time. Oh and there was a rather high round tower in the middle that we couldn't figure out how to get into. It was surrounded by really pretty gardens and mini waterfalls. We later were told by a guard who took our picture that the tower was where the Queen stays and the flag on top on the tower today meant the Queen was actually in residence! I guess she stays at Windsor castle occasionally. So basically, I was pretty close to the Queen. Here's some of the gardens!
Within the castle walls where was a big Cathedral which apparently holds the tombs of King Henry VIII and his 3rd wife Jane Seymor. The inside was super big and apparently it still holds services there. Just outside the Castle there is a ton of little shops mostly touristy or cafe type places. Actually one of the house there is said to belong to King Georges favourite Mistress "Nell", however when we walked buy it, it was for sale!?. There were also some old pubs and the famous crooked house. Beside the crooked house there is a very short street that Windsor has dubbed the shortest street in England. It doesn't look like much of a street to me, but who am I judge? Here is some pictures from just outside the Cathedral and one of the crooked house. (And I am not in the group photo, I took that one. And half of the people in it are complete strangers (most of the ones on the right). Not sure why they hopped in, but hey, the more the merrier).



So needless to say, we had a long day. We were pooped by the end of it. But it was fun. I will tell you all about Rugby in my next post. (That's right, I'm playing Rugby, much to my mothers dismay). I will leave you with one last picture. The Eaton School for boys is right close to the castle, so we decided to go check it out. (To clarify, this school is supposed to be famous for schooling the young Prince Harry, or someone like that.) On our way we stumbled across another school. I will leave you to decide who was schooled there.