Weekend Travels

--Tudor Style House in Winchester--

--Cowes, from the ferry--

--The crypt at Winchester Cathedral complete with flooding and creepy statue--

--Random government building/surviving part of Winchester Castle--

I had the good fortune of meeting Dr. Bingham's son, John, and traveling onto the mainland this weekend. John is 18 and about to head off to medical school and it was great to be able to have someone close to my age to talk about topics not appropriate for the 40 and 50 year olds I work with. We discussed the differences between our two countries on a number of subjects including health care, politics, gun control, abortion, racism, music, clothing, transportation, alcoholism, food, history, medical school admissions, and the organization of government. Though our cultures are very different on a number of issues the same general system of ethics and values runs underneath our differences. For instance, while we differ on the last point during a pregnancy in which a woman can have an abortion, our moral constraints are the identical and we use the same terms to arrive at our own respective conclusions.

It was especially hard to explain to John what people in the States without insurance do when they get sick. He had a tough time wrapping his head around it and was also amazed at how expensive our system is. At one point he commented that they never think about how much medicine costs because they can get in an accident, rack up thousands of pounds of care, and not pay a penny for it. What was really interesting was when we took turns addressing the weaknesses we thought existed in each other's system and then letting the other either agree or argue for why that perception was incorrect. On my end I found that medical professionals here don't make that much less than we do in the States and that, assuming you have the money for it, you can utilize the private sector if you want to avoid the wait list. As for John, I had to convince him that we don't just leave poor people in need of an emergency on the street to die. He also had never heard of our public Medicare or Medicaid as I knew very little of his private sector.

John and I took a ferry on Saturday from Cowes on the island to Southampton where the Titanic set sail. We then took a train up to Winchester, the old capital of England, and saw King Arthur's round table (not the real thing I think) and Winchester Cathedral. The cathedral was built on a flood plain on unsuitably soft rock and actually sits on a body of water 9 feet under so it's had quite a hard time remaining stable the last 1000 years. Sometime in the early 1900's a diver had to actually spend an entire year switching out the old concrete for new to stabilize the church. The crypts (see picture) were actually underwater which was eerie and smelly as you can imagine.