Travel: Brighton, Eastbourne & Hastings
Bright and early on Monday
morning, not really before the sun rose as it rises so early in the summer, but
still pretty damn early, we headed to Copenhagen airport for our eight day holiday in England. As usual, I travelled with my parents and my little brother, although he's not so little anymore. We where staying at three different locations, which is why I plan to make three separate blog posts (because I was sooo good at doing that for our holiday in US - note the sarcasm). Still, I'm going to attempt it!
Starting off with a delayed flight wasn't the very best start but thankfully, the pilot was able to minimise the delay by flying a little faster. However, we still arrived over an hour later than we were supposed to. We had rented a car as we wanted to travel to different cities in the south of England and oh, the joy we had with getting the car. It wasn't fun and the car had some stiff gears or something as well as my father having to concentrate as he had to drive on the left side of the road as opposed to the right side which he's used to.
We had originally planned on heading straight to Hastings but thanks to the delay, we wouldn't be able to have enough time to see what we wanted, so we headed to Brighton instead. Honestly, I was a bit sad about this as I very much looked forward to seeing Brighton (probably my second most favourite place of our trip that I wanted to see besides London) and I don't think our brief visit did it justice.
It was gloomy weather, which was annoying, but we persevered. We went down to park by the Pier but the prices for parking were pretty steep and our cards didn't work in the machine and we didn't have any coins. Instead, we found a parking house quite near by.
After throwing some food in our faces, and I mean that literally, because we hadn't eaten since the early hours of the morning and then it had only been a pastry, we went to the Brighton Pier.
It wasn't very overpopulated by tourists, probably due to the weather. It was very windy but I got to recreate a very funny moment from Zoe's vlog of showing Brighton to Connor, Troye and Tyler. It was so windy that it almost sounded like the scatter on the camera when I said "it's so beautiful in Brighton!" while having my hair blown all over the place. I also got a Nutella crêpe on the Pier, so I was more than happy.
We took a stroll around the city and went to walk past the Royal Pavilion Garden and Brighton Dome before heading to the Lanes to look around. Brighton is truly a very adorable little city but due to the ticking of the clock, I felt that we hurried along a bit to quickly. Maybe it was only because I really wanted to look around the city I had seen in the background of PointlessBlogTv's videos so often.
We drove down the coastline in an attempt to find the cute beach huts painted in different pastel colours and I'm sad to say that we didn't manage to find them. In retrospect, I learnt that we did in fact find them but neither of us realised that we did, which is even more annoying. As we drove along the coastline, we passed a row of beach huts but they were only painted in the pastel turquoise colour that dominates Brighton with red along the bottom. Apparently, that was the beach huts as they're only differently coloured on the front. I feel sort of stupid now. However, they still seem too lovely not to include a photo of so I borrowed this photo:
Then we headed on to Eastbourne where we would stay for two nights. We stayed at the Berkeley Guesthouse on Lascelles Terrace and it was a very adorable place. I didn't know that there would be so many guesthouses in the South of England but apparently there is. I thought it quite nice as opposed to a hotel actually. It was homely and cosy.
We spend the evening walking around very close to our guesthouse and stumbled across an old theatre. It had a play called Portrait of Murder just starting the next day and we quickly decided to book tickets. Then we headed to the local pup The Buccaneer and had some nice pup food and beer for the parents as I don't like beer and my little brother is too young.
The following morning, we headed to Hastings after a delicious breakfast in the basement of the guesthouse. Also, can I just comment on how quite the "basement" of such houses are? Half submerged into the ground, so you can look up at the street and quite spacious despite outer appearances. It's adorable.
The weather was still overcast but it's England, so we sort of expected that. We parked near the docks and headed to a lift that moved us up the cliff side to Hastings Castle or rather the ruins of it.
As I've possibly mentioned before, my mother and my little brother are very interested in history and know quite a lot about it. Their knowledge sometimes astounds me. Luckily for me, we got to see a short film explaining everything from the Battle of Hastings and how in its wake the castle was created and subsequently its fate after that. It was quite interesting and I couldn't help feel sad that quite a lot had been damaged when they dug out the ruins.
After having seen the castle, we walked down to a cave that had originally been used as a smuggling place. Now, it housed an attraction dedicated to telling the story of the smugglers and the cave's role through time.
It was interesting to learn more about the whole affair of smuggling, which became so widespread because the taxes of everything increased as England was constantly at war during the 20th hundred. A little poem still sticks to my mind and I'm sorry if I misquote it; "Watch the wall, dear, as the gentlemen goes by," which sums up the people attitude towards smuggling. It became common place and they even called smugglers gentlemen and even the more wealthy turned to buying smuggled goods. Other than that I thought it was interesting how the cave had also been used as a safe place for people to hide during the 2nd World War.
My mother, brother and I was sort of scared first because we had to go through a dark passage. That in itself isn't really scary but it was my father that had chosen this attraction and we all worried that someone might jump out in our faces and try to scare us. It would be just like him to arrange something like that. Thankfully, there were no people acting as smugglers. We encountered a few video stories narrated by "Harry" an old smuggler that was probably supposed to scare us but I can handle videos saying scary stuff better than live action people trying to frighten me.
Afterwards, we walked down the cliff and then we visited a tea house and got tea and shortbread, something you really HAVE to do when you're in England. It's such a quite tradition and although I'm not a tea drinker and didn't even order one on this occasion, I still think it was fun. We also ended up buying the tea my father had which had an aftertaste of chocolate, which might seem bizarre but it tasted quite nice.
After our lunch at the tea house, my mother wanted to stroll around and shop without having us three on her tail. So, we headed back down to the docks where we had a game of mini-golf. I don't know what it is about mini-golf but I really like it for some reason and I'm reasonably good at it. I was actually winning before the encountered a hole where Easter Island Statute like statutes began spraying water at us. Then my concentration was shot to hell and I couldn't for the life of me put the ball into the hole. There went my winning streak and it came back to haunt me and made me lose altogether. Brilliant! Not really. I instead wanted my brother to win but in the end, it was our father that won the game, despite our best efforts of distracting him.
We had a play to see back in Eastbourne, so we headed home. However, we arranged one stop on the way home Yesterday, as we drove to the guesthouse we had passed a supermarket called Waitrose. It might be a very odd thing to want to see but just a month earlier I had done a paper for one of my exams on Waitrose and I really wanted to see it in person after having read so much about it.
A lot of my exam case had focused on Waitrose's new brand "Essential Waitorse" and I was fun to see a lot of the products in person. I also got confirmed that they did indeed have an option for recurring customers to scan their items as they went along, thus saving time in the end. Quite cool.
We headed back to the guest house briefly before we walked down to a local Italian restaurant and had dinner just around the corner from where the play would be. I must admit that I'm not the theatre type, as I can't even recall the last time I have seen a play before this. It must have been years. We had pretty good seats on the third row and close to the action. The play was about novelist that suffered memory loss after having been in an accident. It was quite good although plays have to depend solely on dialogue and they are vastly different from films. I think my brother found it a bit dull but I enjoyed it very much and it had clever plotwist in the ending although I'm proud to say that I had figure out what was going on from an early stage. The play had six actors and they were all very good and natural up on the stage.
We lived literally across the street from the theatre and the walk home was easy. The following morning, we had our last breakfast at the guesthouse and headed our merry way to Torquay.
And with that I'm rounding up this blog post. We had a lovely beginning to our holiday. If I were to sum it up a bit and mention some recommendations or must sees, I guess it would be:
- Brighton Pier is a very fun place with an arcade on the Pier. Also, if you can find the beach huts I would recommend seeing them because they look so cute.
- Hastings Castle because even though there's not much left of it, that location has played a vital part in history.
- Going to a tea house for tea and biscuits (oh so very British but actually very nice)
- I also recommend going to see a local theatre performance. You'll probably be sat mostly with old local people but it's quite fun, especially if it's not something you do often at home.
That surely must be enough ramble for two days. One down, two to go!
Starting off with a delayed flight wasn't the very best start but thankfully, the pilot was able to minimise the delay by flying a little faster. However, we still arrived over an hour later than we were supposed to. We had rented a car as we wanted to travel to different cities in the south of England and oh, the joy we had with getting the car. It wasn't fun and the car had some stiff gears or something as well as my father having to concentrate as he had to drive on the left side of the road as opposed to the right side which he's used to.
We had originally planned on heading straight to Hastings but thanks to the delay, we wouldn't be able to have enough time to see what we wanted, so we headed to Brighton instead. Honestly, I was a bit sad about this as I very much looked forward to seeing Brighton (probably my second most favourite place of our trip that I wanted to see besides London) and I don't think our brief visit did it justice.
After throwing some food in our faces, and I mean that literally, because we hadn't eaten since the early hours of the morning and then it had only been a pastry, we went to the Brighton Pier.
It wasn't very overpopulated by tourists, probably due to the weather. It was very windy but I got to recreate a very funny moment from Zoe's vlog of showing Brighton to Connor, Troye and Tyler. It was so windy that it almost sounded like the scatter on the camera when I said "it's so beautiful in Brighton!" while having my hair blown all over the place. I also got a Nutella crêpe on the Pier, so I was more than happy.
We took a stroll around the city and went to walk past the Royal Pavilion Garden and Brighton Dome before heading to the Lanes to look around. Brighton is truly a very adorable little city but due to the ticking of the clock, I felt that we hurried along a bit to quickly. Maybe it was only because I really wanted to look around the city I had seen in the background of PointlessBlogTv's videos so often.
We drove down the coastline in an attempt to find the cute beach huts painted in different pastel colours and I'm sad to say that we didn't manage to find them. In retrospect, I learnt that we did in fact find them but neither of us realised that we did, which is even more annoying. As we drove along the coastline, we passed a row of beach huts but they were only painted in the pastel turquoise colour that dominates Brighton with red along the bottom. Apparently, that was the beach huts as they're only differently coloured on the front. I feel sort of stupid now. However, they still seem too lovely not to include a photo of so I borrowed this photo:
(Borrowed from Zozeebo's Instagram)
Then we headed on to Eastbourne where we would stay for two nights. We stayed at the Berkeley Guesthouse on Lascelles Terrace and it was a very adorable place. I didn't know that there would be so many guesthouses in the South of England but apparently there is. I thought it quite nice as opposed to a hotel actually. It was homely and cosy.
We spend the evening walking around very close to our guesthouse and stumbled across an old theatre. It had a play called Portrait of Murder just starting the next day and we quickly decided to book tickets. Then we headed to the local pup The Buccaneer and had some nice pup food and beer for the parents as I don't like beer and my little brother is too young.
The following morning, we headed to Hastings after a delicious breakfast in the basement of the guesthouse. Also, can I just comment on how quite the "basement" of such houses are? Half submerged into the ground, so you can look up at the street and quite spacious despite outer appearances. It's adorable.
The weather was still overcast but it's England, so we sort of expected that. We parked near the docks and headed to a lift that moved us up the cliff side to Hastings Castle or rather the ruins of it.
As I've possibly mentioned before, my mother and my little brother are very interested in history and know quite a lot about it. Their knowledge sometimes astounds me. Luckily for me, we got to see a short film explaining everything from the Battle of Hastings and how in its wake the castle was created and subsequently its fate after that. It was quite interesting and I couldn't help feel sad that quite a lot had been damaged when they dug out the ruins.
After having seen the castle, we walked down to a cave that had originally been used as a smuggling place. Now, it housed an attraction dedicated to telling the story of the smugglers and the cave's role through time.
It was interesting to learn more about the whole affair of smuggling, which became so widespread because the taxes of everything increased as England was constantly at war during the 20th hundred. A little poem still sticks to my mind and I'm sorry if I misquote it; "Watch the wall, dear, as the gentlemen goes by," which sums up the people attitude towards smuggling. It became common place and they even called smugglers gentlemen and even the more wealthy turned to buying smuggled goods. Other than that I thought it was interesting how the cave had also been used as a safe place for people to hide during the 2nd World War.
My mother, brother and I was sort of scared first because we had to go through a dark passage. That in itself isn't really scary but it was my father that had chosen this attraction and we all worried that someone might jump out in our faces and try to scare us. It would be just like him to arrange something like that. Thankfully, there were no people acting as smugglers. We encountered a few video stories narrated by "Harry" an old smuggler that was probably supposed to scare us but I can handle videos saying scary stuff better than live action people trying to frighten me.
Afterwards, we walked down the cliff and then we visited a tea house and got tea and shortbread, something you really HAVE to do when you're in England. It's such a quite tradition and although I'm not a tea drinker and didn't even order one on this occasion, I still think it was fun. We also ended up buying the tea my father had which had an aftertaste of chocolate, which might seem bizarre but it tasted quite nice.
After our lunch at the tea house, my mother wanted to stroll around and shop without having us three on her tail. So, we headed back down to the docks where we had a game of mini-golf. I don't know what it is about mini-golf but I really like it for some reason and I'm reasonably good at it. I was actually winning before the encountered a hole where Easter Island Statute like statutes began spraying water at us. Then my concentration was shot to hell and I couldn't for the life of me put the ball into the hole. There went my winning streak and it came back to haunt me and made me lose altogether. Brilliant! Not really. I instead wanted my brother to win but in the end, it was our father that won the game, despite our best efforts of distracting him.
We had a play to see back in Eastbourne, so we headed home. However, we arranged one stop on the way home Yesterday, as we drove to the guesthouse we had passed a supermarket called Waitrose. It might be a very odd thing to want to see but just a month earlier I had done a paper for one of my exams on Waitrose and I really wanted to see it in person after having read so much about it.
A lot of my exam case had focused on Waitrose's new brand "Essential Waitorse" and I was fun to see a lot of the products in person. I also got confirmed that they did indeed have an option for recurring customers to scan their items as they went along, thus saving time in the end. Quite cool.
We headed back to the guest house briefly before we walked down to a local Italian restaurant and had dinner just around the corner from where the play would be. I must admit that I'm not the theatre type, as I can't even recall the last time I have seen a play before this. It must have been years. We had pretty good seats on the third row and close to the action. The play was about novelist that suffered memory loss after having been in an accident. It was quite good although plays have to depend solely on dialogue and they are vastly different from films. I think my brother found it a bit dull but I enjoyed it very much and it had clever plotwist in the ending although I'm proud to say that I had figure out what was going on from an early stage. The play had six actors and they were all very good and natural up on the stage.
We lived literally across the street from the theatre and the walk home was easy. The following morning, we had our last breakfast at the guesthouse and headed our merry way to Torquay.
And with that I'm rounding up this blog post. We had a lovely beginning to our holiday. If I were to sum it up a bit and mention some recommendations or must sees, I guess it would be:
- Brighton Pier is a very fun place with an arcade on the Pier. Also, if you can find the beach huts I would recommend seeing them because they look so cute.
- Hastings Castle because even though there's not much left of it, that location has played a vital part in history.
- Going to a tea house for tea and biscuits (oh so very British but actually very nice)
- I also recommend going to see a local theatre performance. You'll probably be sat mostly with old local people but it's quite fun, especially if it's not something you do often at home.
That surely must be enough ramble for two days. One down, two to go!
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