Wednesday came to me with mucho things to do. If I was a normal student I would have slept in till eleven but alas I had to be up at nine to meet people at 9:30 am. A group of us walked to Worcester Forgate Street (the train station near us) to buy tickets to go to London on July 7th. Missy me is officially going to the Red Carpet premiere of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II. I'm super excited about this. I'm keeping my hopes up and hopefully they won't be shot down so suddenly.
At noon on Wednesday we boarded the coach that would take us to Stratford-upon-Avon. The birthplace of Shakespeare. I love Shakespeare and most of his plays. My favorite, of course, is Romeo and Juliet. Although when they showed examples of the movie they used the modern version of Romeo and Juliet with Leonardo in it which annoyed me. I don't like that version. Stratford is very tiny, city wise. I'll bet anything Stratford is smaller than Ball State's campus. Even one of Sid's friends, Tom, agreed with that statement.
Our first stop on this trip was the birthplace of Shakespeare himself. A museum of sorts. We saw some of the homelife stuff that came from the house and maybe from his daughter's house. We also walked through a remodeled version of his home, his real location of the home is at another museum called 'the Dig'. The reason for this is because the real house collapsed many years ago and archeologists continue to dig for history of his early life.
When we exited the house there were 3 actresses in old time dresses acting out scenes from Shakespeare's plays. They were amazing. I couldn't imagine memorizing all those plays and performing them in the heavy dresses in the hot weather. After this we headed towards the Church which held Shakespeare's remains and the remains of his family and other important people. We walked through town and even some of the parks, which were beautiful. Walking along the river was also an experience.
We made it to the church and just like normal churches it had stained glass window and pews that would be used to have an actually mass. I definitely took pictures of everything and they had posters that displayed and described Shakespeare's birth, wedding, death, funeral and so on. They were an interesting read. Shakespeare was buried next to his daughter and his wife , I can remember.
Walking through the city we saw many sites. We stopped at the 'Dirty Duck', which is a pub where celebrities were often seen after hours. In one room there were a bunch of pictures that had some of the pictures and autographs of some celebrities that stopped in for a drink. After the pub we needed to go to the restaurant where we would get dinner. Fish and Chip. :)) Yum. We stopped along the way at a milkshake place called 'Moo Moos' They probably had a million different Milkshakes. Definitely too many to memorize and name here.
We ate fish and chips and then we had about an hour to kill before the play we were seeing that night. So a few of us walked to the theatre and sat by the river. As soon as we sat down a swan started making it's way towards us. It was freaking scary. Luckily it stayed in the water like we hoped and just decided to sit there. The next time we looked up we noticed about 50 swans heading in our direction. Scary. But they ended up swimming by a ways but there were still a few that hung around.
We watched the Merchant of Venice that night in the theatre. Patrick Stewart (the guy from Star Trek) played Shylock in the play, so it was pretty exciting to see that and a celebrity in front of me. Thank goodness I knew who he was. It was rather funny seeing him meow and snort. Bahaha. The play was a modern form of the play. It was okay but not my favorite. After the play we headed back to Worcester and we passed out. I was exhausted.
