19Oct2008: Day 146: Rochester Cathedral

Today I went with my parents to the Rochester Cathedral for Sunday morning services. The Cathedral is a lot smaller than other Cathedrals we have been in lately, but it has a nice choir and it is still much bigger than St. Mark's that I go to other weeks. It was a nice service.

After, we looked around the Cathedral for a time. There is a new mural there that is apparently the first mural done in a cathedral in 800 years, in was completed in 2004. They spent a lot of time figuring out how to make the paint work. As soon as they painted it, then next day white dots appeared on the paint. Apparently, Michelangelo had the same difficulty. The fix was to paint it on special plaster while it is still wet. Then, the paint and the plaster actually bleed into the stone and become part of the stone.

Then we went to have lunch at an ancient Cafe that was right next door.

We walked around and Dad took a couple of pictures of the Castle and then we walked down High Street and back to the car. There was a craft show that my mother wanted to see at a local hotel so we went there and bought a couple of presents for Makenna's birthday coming up on October 27th. Mother bought her a Winnie the Pooh pillow and I bought a book of Faerie Tales. Then we went home.

It was the first time my Dad had driven around besides his trip from the Airport a week ago. It is really difficult to drive over here, especially when you aren't used to a stick shift as there are very few cars with automatic transmissions here. It is particularly difficult to keep to the right, for some reason if you are used to driving on the right side of the road, we tend to drive very far to the left. Inevitablely you end up hitting curbs, but eventually you get used to it and force yourself to stay more to the middle of the roads. The roads are so narrow over here and people park on both sides of the road that you end up having only one lane to drive down and if someone comes up the other way you have to squeeze yourself into an open parking slot or end up backing up. Anyway, Dad did pretty well, but his shifting skills are a little rusty.