Shrewsbury
So last week we took a program excursion to Shrewsbury, a small, quaint English town near the Welsh border. And yes, before you ask, virtually every time someone said ‘Shrewsbury’, or I saw the word ‘Shrewsbury’, or I thought about the word ‘Shrewsbury’, I would giggle to myself and mutter, “The Shrewsburys taste like… Shrewsburys!”
The thing about London is that it is big – bigger than Portland and Seattle combined, although smaller than Los Angeles and the Moon. Having lived in London for nine weeks now, I’ve come to assume that if I want to be somewhere, it’s very far away from where I currently am. When I want to go to class, I have to spend an hour on the Tube. When I want to go to a specific pub, I can expect plenty of bus riding, walking, and frequent stops to ask for directions. Much like LA, nothing is close to anything else – unlike LA, in London you don’t have Eva Longoria throwing herself at you to take your mind off of your travels.
This is also true to some extent in small towns in the United States. While Salem, with its six figure population, is not necessarily a small town, it’s considerably smaller than London, yet you still have to do a good bit of driving if, say, you want to go to Wal*Mart. Which, in Salem, is about the only thing to do once you run out of meth and your house has been towed.
On the first day in Shrewsbury my group checked into our hotel and then spent a few hours sightseeing, walking through various parks and across bridges, looking at historic buildings, and all the other tourist stuff I’m getting pretty sick of after so long on the road. At around six we reached the outskirts of town and the professor in charge dismissed us for the evening, right as it began to rain.
It's not raining in this picture, but you can tell it wants to.
My housemate Tom and I agreed that any pub hopping we did wouldn’t be much fun without our umbrellas, so we resolved to head back to the hotel to pick them up. I was dreading a half hour trudge through a typical English downpour, but Tom took one look at the map, led us down two sidestreets, and we were back at the hotel in the center of town. It took us five minutes.
That’s how small Shrewsbury is – land area-wise, that is. Population-wise there’s about 40,000 people in Shrewsbury, but unlike American towns like Reedsport, which have one tenth of Shrewsbury’s population but spread it thin across the Oregon Coast like hardworking folksy marmite, everybody in Shrewsbury lives really close together, making it incredibly convenient for people who are walking from point A to point B. A lot of this can be attributed to the fact that, as a medieval city, it behooved Shrewsbury’s residents to stick together because walking was as good as it got.
Full of wizards and Hobbits.
Shrewsbury and the surrounding countryside are basically the small English town and countryside you saw on that show or in that movie. The show or movie doesn’t matter, because I’ve seen a lot of quaint English towns on TV and in movies and they all pretty much look like Shrewsbury. Jeeves and Wooster, Band of Brothers, Billy Elliot, Withnail and I,, and, of course, Hot Fuzz - at one time or another, somewhere in Shrewsbury looked exactly like what I’d seen on screen. It’s like this shit is based on reality or something.
As seen on TV.
On the second day we rented bikes and took a 20 mile ride through the breathtakingly gorgeous, Lord of the Rings quality countryside, navigating around cars on roads barely wide enough for one car and generally doing our best to absorb the surrounding countryside without hitting a pheasant or some other sort of quaint animal and going over the handlebars.
I'm not the sort of nerd who has LOTR quotes memorized. Talk to me when we tour a spaceship.
We were passing through some tiny little town, basically just a crossroads and four thatched roof houses, when we spotted an old churchyard with a cemetery and spontaneously decided to pull over and have a look. Wandering into the cemetery, the first thing we saw was a lanky kid roughly our age, holding a leafblower and wearing a T shirt with “VERNONIA WRESTLING” written on it. As in, Vernonia, Oregon.
We promptly struck up a chat with him and it turned out that not only had he spent his final year of high school studying abroad in Vernonia, but he’s going to attend the University of Oregon next year, and also appears to be quite the promising track athlete.
Again, we were about ten miles outside of a pretty small town, riding through a much smaller town, and by only serendipity and chance did we happen to notice the churchyard and unanimously agree that we wanted to visit it. In so doing, we just happened to bump into a future classmate.
Before we mounted our bikes and departed once again, I asked him the one question that I’m sure was burning in everyone’s minds.
“So, you had the entire United States to study abroad in… Vernonia?”
He shrugged sheepishly and explained that he hadn’t had much choice in the matter.
That makes sense.
Truman Capps thinks it’s amazing how the English countryside looks nothing like Southern California.
See, Dad, it’s from this movie called Super Troopers about a bunch of really horrible cops who do silly things, and then this guy… Look, I’ll just explain it when I get home.
The thing about London is that it is big – bigger than Portland and Seattle combined, although smaller than Los Angeles and the Moon. Having lived in London for nine weeks now, I’ve come to assume that if I want to be somewhere, it’s very far away from where I currently am. When I want to go to class, I have to spend an hour on the Tube. When I want to go to a specific pub, I can expect plenty of bus riding, walking, and frequent stops to ask for directions. Much like LA, nothing is close to anything else – unlike LA, in London you don’t have Eva Longoria throwing herself at you to take your mind off of your travels.
Oh, hey, did I ever mention that I actually met this lady? I did? Do… Do you, like, want to hear it again?
This is also true to some extent in small towns in the United States. While Salem, with its six figure population, is not necessarily a small town, it’s considerably smaller than London, yet you still have to do a good bit of driving if, say, you want to go to Wal*Mart. Which, in Salem, is about the only thing to do once you run out of meth and your house has been towed.
On the first day in Shrewsbury my group checked into our hotel and then spent a few hours sightseeing, walking through various parks and across bridges, looking at historic buildings, and all the other tourist stuff I’m getting pretty sick of after so long on the road. At around six we reached the outskirts of town and the professor in charge dismissed us for the evening, right as it began to rain.
It's not raining in this picture, but you can tell it wants to.
My housemate Tom and I agreed that any pub hopping we did wouldn’t be much fun without our umbrellas, so we resolved to head back to the hotel to pick them up. I was dreading a half hour trudge through a typical English downpour, but Tom took one look at the map, led us down two sidestreets, and we were back at the hotel in the center of town. It took us five minutes.
Sidestreets™, from the people who brought you Alleys.
That’s how small Shrewsbury is – land area-wise, that is. Population-wise there’s about 40,000 people in Shrewsbury, but unlike American towns like Reedsport, which have one tenth of Shrewsbury’s population but spread it thin across the Oregon Coast like hardworking folksy marmite, everybody in Shrewsbury lives really close together, making it incredibly convenient for people who are walking from point A to point B. A lot of this can be attributed to the fact that, as a medieval city, it behooved Shrewsbury’s residents to stick together because walking was as good as it got.
Full of wizards and Hobbits.
Shrewsbury and the surrounding countryside are basically the small English town and countryside you saw on that show or in that movie. The show or movie doesn’t matter, because I’ve seen a lot of quaint English towns on TV and in movies and they all pretty much look like Shrewsbury. Jeeves and Wooster, Band of Brothers, Billy Elliot, Withnail and I,, and, of course, Hot Fuzz - at one time or another, somewhere in Shrewsbury looked exactly like what I’d seen on screen. It’s like this shit is based on reality or something.
As seen on TV.
On the second day we rented bikes and took a 20 mile ride through the breathtakingly gorgeous, Lord of the Rings quality countryside, navigating around cars on roads barely wide enough for one car and generally doing our best to absorb the surrounding countryside without hitting a pheasant or some other sort of quaint animal and going over the handlebars.
I'm not the sort of nerd who has LOTR quotes memorized. Talk to me when we tour a spaceship.
We were passing through some tiny little town, basically just a crossroads and four thatched roof houses, when we spotted an old churchyard with a cemetery and spontaneously decided to pull over and have a look. Wandering into the cemetery, the first thing we saw was a lanky kid roughly our age, holding a leafblower and wearing a T shirt with “VERNONIA WRESTLING” written on it. As in, Vernonia, Oregon.
We promptly struck up a chat with him and it turned out that not only had he spent his final year of high school studying abroad in Vernonia, but he’s going to attend the University of Oregon next year, and also appears to be quite the promising track athlete.
Again, we were about ten miles outside of a pretty small town, riding through a much smaller town, and by only serendipity and chance did we happen to notice the churchyard and unanimously agree that we wanted to visit it. In so doing, we just happened to bump into a future classmate.
Before we mounted our bikes and departed once again, I asked him the one question that I’m sure was burning in everyone’s minds.
“So, you had the entire United States to study abroad in… Vernonia?”
He shrugged sheepishly and explained that he hadn’t had much choice in the matter.
That makes sense.
Truman Capps thinks it’s amazing how the English countryside looks nothing like Southern California.