Our Young Adults & Local Sights

Our Young Adults

We are having fun getting to know the young adults with whom we work.  They put on a fine farewell party for the Andrews, the local missionaries who started up the Center for Young Adults here and who now have completed their two-year mission.  See accompanying photo of the group at the party.

Royal Victoria Military Hospital Chapel

Netley Abbey

Netley Abbey

This weekend we decided to go to a church picnic at the last minute when the forecast changed from 80% to 10% chance of rain.  We were late and nobody was there, so we had a pleasant lunch together in the car and took some pictures of the local sights.  The chapel is all that remains of what was once the world’s largest military hospital (Queen Victoria laid the foundation stone in 1856).  The abbey, across town from the chapel, was built in the 1200s for Cistercian monks.  Henry VIII shut down all the abbeys in the 1500s (known as The Dissolution, following the Act of Supremacy by which Parliament made him supreme head of the Church in England) and he gave this one to a friend, who converted it to a manor house.  It was abandoned in the early 1700s.  It is still impressive.

A couple of items of interest about how things work:  we opened a local bank account the day after our arrival by depositing a check from our US bank account.  It finally cleared, eight weeks to the day after we deposited it.  We are told the delay has something to do with preventing money laundering.  It has just about cured us of depositing a US check again. 

The other interesting thing is the TV license fee, a $230 annual fee for each household that watches or records TV programs as they are being shown on TV, whether on TV set, computer, or phone.  Calling up old broadcasts over the Internet is apparently permissible without a license.  We responded that we do not watch TV and have been informed that we may get a knock on the door to see whether we are telling the truth.  The fees go to the BBC.  Please do not pass this news on to NPR.