Nobody wants to celebrate Independence Day over here

--Stonehenge--

--Somewhere in Bath--

--Hot Spring that Supplied the Roman Baths--

Fun British Phrase of the Day: Bibs and Bobs-synonymous with "odds and ends", used when going out to buy random things or when saying that you have a little bit of this or a little bit of that to complete at work.

This weekend I made the epic journey up to Bath which is really only a few hours away but not exactly the easiest place to access from the island. The train ride, however, was well worth the inconvenience as the countryside turned more and more Welsh as I traveled north. The rolling, light green hills of southern England gave way to the rugged, darker mountains, with streams snaking through them. Every few miles or so there was a random, massive medieval castle perched up on a mountain with a town almost hidden in the valley below it. The city of Bath was beautiful as you'd expect and I especially enjoyed the roman bath museum with the bubbling hot spring and 2000 year old temple built to support it.

I saw a Boston Tea Party-titled cafe and went in to have some tea and make jokes about taxation. Unfortunately, they didn't get them and when I explained they weren't very amused. Everyone else who remembered the holiday wanted to celebrate it with me and were really open to playful jabs about our breaking from their empire. From what I've seen, the Brits seem really relaxed about their past atrocities to mankind and make jokes all the time about how they screwed up their colonies or gave us a "freedom complex." Not to say that it is necessarily a good way to handle it, but much better than our style of avoiding it or denying those topics altogether.

Bath was an infant compared to Stonehenge, which I saw along with Salisbury on the way back. I think I'd become desensitized after a lifetime of seeing photographs of the rocks but it was amazing up close. I didn't realize how large (45 tons) the stones actually were and the history and myths behind the 5000 year old monument were really interesting. Whatever the meaning of the arrangement, the location itself felt special. You could see burial mounds and additional monuments for miles around.

After checking out the cathedral in Salisbury w/ the Magna Carta and oldest clock in Britain, I headed back to the Island. All together, I used 11 forms of public transportation today without a hitch. I'm becoming more and more European by the day. Still, I can't wait to get back home and resume driving down the driveway to get the mail.

On the way up to Bath I was catching up on the British Medical Journals I've been given and was startled at the number of references to the US system. The 60th anniversary of the NHS has stirred discussion as to whether or not the founding principles still apply today. Some it seems, value the economic ideals of efficiency and competition that (arguably) frame our system. They also argue that a tax-driven system is no longer compatible with consumerism b/c patients will demand more and more expensive or experimental treatments. Correctly, I believe, they also demonstrated that as the population balance shifts towards the elderly you'll have less working, tax payers to support the retired persons who are using more of the system. At some point people will stop wanting to raise taxes to support others which is an argument that comes into play with our own Medicaid and Social Security systems.

However, one author noted that when genetics advances to the point where we're able to predetermine risk of cancer or other diseases, that an insurance-based system where patients pay according to their risk will inevitably collapse. Only a taxed, universal system that can share the risks and avoid slamming people who happen to end up w/ certain genes would survive. This is something we've talked about in school but I hadn't seen it applied to this level yet.

Hopefully, at the end of this summer, no one will ask me my definitive answer for which system works better b/c at this point I still have no idea.