Portsmouth: A place to get cream tea disguised as a naval base

 Today the weather was nice and warm and we took a drive down to the south coast to a place called Portsmouth, which is traditionally known as the home of the Royal Navy.  There is a rich amount of history here (liked by me a little more than Hannah), as you can see just by the buildings when walking around the area meant for tourists.  Along with the tourist area there is also an active RN base here with some modern ships that call this place their port. Some of the main attractions here include the HMS Victory, which is the warship that Lord Nelson won the war against Napoleon in, the HMS Warrior, which was the world's first ironclad ship, and the Mary Rose, which is a wreckage from the 16th century that is still being preserved and was brought up from the bottom of the harbor.

(Sadly no pictures of this) We parked the car and walked down to the main drag on harbor, where there were places to eat including pubs, fish and chips, and some places on the seaside for ice cream and such.  We chose a pub, mainly because I didn't feel like I had finished my exploration of traditional British food :) I had a pint of the local brew and Hannah got a pear J20, which is a juice drink, really rather good stuff.  The beer was nice.  One thing I like about the beer over here is that it is served flat, without the fizzyness that you get from the American crap.  Really smooth to drink.  Hannah got a vegetarian paella, which was a ricey and tomato-tasting dish with loads of other veggies inside.  I had a bite or two and enjoyed it.  I got a very traditional dish called beef and ale pie, kind of like a pot pie british style.  It went very good with the beer and the gravy it was smothered in really hit the spot.  With this we were ready to hit the sights!

HMS Victory gun deck

 We made our way first to the HMS Victory, which is likely the most popular ship to see, given that it is commonly referred to the flagship of the Royal Navy.  This place was fun to walk around.  In some areas you couldn't help but feel like a gunpowder covered drunken sailor in one of Nelson's crews.  The guns seemed to be purely authentic, and very heavy indeed.  You were able to pick up cannon balls which weighed about as much as a child (one can only imagine what it was like to throw em around like they had to in the Battle of Trafalgar), and see some of the tools that they used to amputate people's arms and legs after they got battered up..  Anyways this was a great little detour from what we had seen for the past couple weeks and walking around the ship really was pretty awesome :)

HMS Warrior, first ironclad ship

 The next ship we were able to tour was the HMS Warrior, which was the world's first ironclad ship.  This ship was left wrecked on the Falkland Islands before fairly recently when it was hauled back to England and restored into its beauty you see here.  Obviously walking around one could see the improvements in technology in this ship not included in the last, mainly including a steam engine, and plenty more space (this ship was quite LONGG).  This was another sight to see and it was funny how Hannah and I both noticed that one of the rooms smelt just like root beer, and another one of the rooms smelt like cream soda :/  Strange..

And everyone said... AMEN

Walking off of the Warrior, we had a little bit of time to kill before our tour of the Mary Rose, so we stumbled upon a familiar and highly drool-inducing sight: CREAM....TEA.  Needless to say we took full advantage of that and ordered it right up (8 pounds for the both of us, whereas at Harrods it was 15 pounds per person, do the math).  This was my favorite cream tea so far when it comes to the scones.  They were a lovely buttery and fruity flavor, and the clotted cream was nice and cold this time around which I was particularly fond of.  When it comes to the tea, I can say I've had better.  It wasn't the flavor at all, to me all English tea is similar, but it was the fact that we only got one small cup and not a pot between us.  So if you take portion of tea out of the picture, then you can say this was the best cream tea so far :)

The reassuring sight of clotted cream

Mary Rose wreckage being restored

Next we were on to the Mary Rose tour, which was going to be the last stop of the day.  This ship was very different.  It was discovered at the bottom of the harbor in 1982, where it was watered down constantly with a preserving fluid for 30 years, and it was finished with this process just earlier this year, which was when the exhibit was opened.  This ship was owned by King Henry VIII, and capsized during a battle with the French in the 16th century.  This ship had many MANY little trinkets discovered along with it which were kept perfectly preserved by being under the silt on the seabed for hundreds of years.  The collection housed many tools, clothes, and even some human skulls that were preserved just fine, and for one skeleton they even had a wax reconstructed body that I found rather creepy..  Meandering around for some time we were able to see the decks of the remains of the ship, which were drying from the watering and will be able to stand on in the next 6 years or so.

After this last tour we headed back to where we were staying in Guildford, but along the way we stopped at a McDonalds (totally a piece of British tradition), because I felt that I had to try one of the plain burgers to see if it really does taste the same all around the world.  It does :)  A big thing in Britain too is Coronation Chicken, and at this McDonalds they had a coronation chicken snack wrap, which I got for Hannah to try, given that she's had the actual dish a number of times before.  She liked it.  I thought it was pretty good too considering it was my first bite of it ever :)  More to come soon!