Shakespeare Land

Quick shout out to the lovely and amazing Lauren who sent me an email!  It was a marvelous thing to come home to, and the first email/letter/contact other than Facebook and comments on the blog I've had.  THANK YOU!

I just went on a marvelous two day adventure across the English countryside.  And here is the blog post to follow!  I'm only going to do what happened yesterday in order to study for my London Walks final tomorrow morning.  So here we go.

I LOVED the drive.  London is beautiful, amazing, and vibrant but the English countryside is stunning, even in February.  I would be perfectly happy to live there forever.  To give us a taste of small towns in England complete with thatched roofs they took us to a tiny little town called Chipping Camden in the Cotswalds.

Really old market building

We wandered through the town enjoying the beautiful fields, houses, and a cute little graveyard.  The graves were all recent which wasn't what we expected but we enjoyed the personal messages on them.

I want my tombstone to say that about me

Thatched roof held together by chain-link fence looking stuff

Do you like my new coat?  Me too!  It was so cheap!

After an hour or so in that gorgeous place we headed up to Stratford-upon-Avon.  This is where Shakespeare was born!  We headed to Trinity Church where our good friend Will was buried.

Wait, no.  I can't remember.  At some point during the day, I think it was before the church, we went to Anne Hathaway's cottage (why are my picture not in order?  I don't understand!).  Anne Hathaway, as all of you know, is the actress in Princess Diaries!  Just kidding.  She was Shakespeare's wife.  It was a cool little house.  There we learned that if you had a bed, it would be in the main room to show it off to everyone, especially if people could peek through the windows and know how rich you were to be able to have such a fine piece of furniture.

Next (at least I'm fairly confident that it was next) we went to the Shakespeare's Birthplace museum.  I don't remember anything particularly exciting about the museum itself except that it felt like Disneyland because all the doors opened and shut automatically.  Think Snow White or Pinocchio.  After you go through the introduction designed to convince you that Shakespeare was real and one of the most glorious people ever to walk the planet, you get to go into his father's house.  The best part about that was the glove making workshop and touching the skins of all sorts of animals.  The doorways were very short in here but being short myself I didn't have to bend down at all.  Dr. M pointed this out to his daughters by cheerily saying, "Hey, look!  These doors are Aylea sized!"  Ha.  Haha.  For the record, I really do love my professors.  They're great.

At this point everyone was tired of museums so instead of going to the last one we had planned to do we went and checked into our Bed and Breakfasts.  I was in a charming one with a smaller group and the M. Mason family.  It was the cutest little place I've ever been in.  Most rooms had more than one bed but the one I shared with the marvelous Christi only had one bed.  I didn't mind, though, since it's exactly what I imagined what a princess bed to look like.  Get this, there was also a bathroom I didn't have to share with twelve people.  Glorious.  

We were pretty hungry by now so we went to go find food.  I ate Lasagna at a lovely little restaurant called The Food of Love.

Clock thing in Stratford

Inside of the church Shakespeare was buried. See, I told you my pictures weren't in order.

After we were too tired and cold to continue exploring (and because everything was closed) we went back to the B&B for a twenty minutes or so before we went to the theatre where we would be watching Taming of the Shrew.  We read the play in class so we were pretty excited about seeing it.  I'd never seen any Shakespeare plays before even though I've read almost all of his plays.

Um... most miserable experience in my life.  For one thing, I started feeling very sick halfway through.  I have got to get myself drinking more water.  For another thing, it is a marvelous example of what the 13th article of faith says to avoid.