Days 6, 7, 8, and 9

So on Day 6 of my expedition, we all woke up early, as we had to be at Marylebone Station by 10:30 to catch the train out to Stratford-upon-Avon. While most of the group elected to walk with Dr. King to the station, a forty-five-minute-or-so walk, I decided to go on the Tube, since I needed to purchase an Oyster card. Oyster cards are debit cards you can use for all London transportation (buses, trains, minicabs) at a cheaper rate than buying a ticket every time. We passed by Baker Street station, where the walls are decorated with mosaics of Sherlock Holmes' distinctive profile (deerstalker cap, pipe, and all), and transferred at Oxford Circus to the Bakerloo line, which led us to Marylebone Station. Again I was struck by how difficult it must be to live in London as a physically disabled person; on the Bakerloo line, only two stops out of twelve or so had access to the street that didn't involve stairs. Anyway, my group made it to Marylebone in plenty of time for me to buy a sausage roll for the train journey, since most English trains don't have lunch carts. The platform number for our train flashed up five minutes before we left, leading us all to make a mad dash for the train in order to sit (Dr. King has told us many stories of the times he was forced to stand for a two-hour journey because of lack of seats).

The train ride was a wonderful experience. Outside, green and amber fields separated by hedgerows (which are just so much friendlier-looking than barbed wire fences) rolled by, inhabited by peaceful sheep or cows or horses; old brick houses sat beside the fields, their shingled roofs covered with ivy; every once in a while you'd see a small town with the requisite church spire nestled between hills, every ridge line decorated with marching tall trees. I had meant to continue reading Mrs. Dalloway, but the scenery put me into a pastoralism-induced coma, where I drowsed, dreaming of being an English sheep farmer, and listened to Pink Floyd on low volume. Anyway, two hours later, we arrived at Stratford-upon-Avon.

Stratford-upon-Avon is a city founded upon Shakespeare. Restaurants are named things like 'the food of love', bed-and-breakfasts are 'Cymbeline,' shops are 'Romeo and Juliet.' All I could think was that people growing up in Stratford-upon-Avon must hate Shakespeare by the time they're eighteen. Upon arrival, we all schlepped our bags to a street lined entirely by bed-and-breakfasts. Claire, Mandi, Erin, Hillary, and I were in the Linhill B&B, which had a large German Shepherd named Amy (currently in disgrace for eating the roast beef on the counter) in residence. We went upstairs, offloaded our stuff, and met downstairs for a tour of Holy Trinity Church where Shakespeare was buried, along with New Place.

Holy Trinity Church was beautiful, although much of the original architecture of the church had been replaced by newer materials. The only original parts, dating from 1210, were the four massive columns that supported the huge tower. The church was built in the standard Anglican and Catholic configuration of a cross shape, although Holy Trinity's two chapels that form the cross-bar of the Chapel were strangely tilted. It's believed that the tilted cross-piece in the church is meant to symbolize the slumped head of Christ on the cross. Anyway, the church had lots of Shakespeare memorabilia, from the heavy stone baptismal font (now scratched and chipped) he was baptized in, a copy of the baptismal register recording his baptism, his body, and the copy of the Bible used by the church at the time Shakespeare attended. I took pictures of it all, including the shrapnel holes left in the outer walls of the church by the English civil war. They also had a sanctuary ring in the inner doors; someone fleeing the law could claim sanctuary in the church for thirty-seven days if they managed to touch the ring.

After that, we went to New Place. New Place was the last house Shakespeare owned before his death. It was passed down through several owners until the 1800s, when a reverend who didn't approve of theater bought it. Unfortunately for him, in the 1800s there was a massive upsurge of interest in Shakespeare, and so onlookers constantly knocked at the door and surrounded his home. Finally, in a fit of pique, he cut down the mulberry tree that Shakespeare himself had planted and demolished the home, leaving it a pile of rubble that he refused to move, making it useless land. Currently there's an archaeological excavation going on at New Place, which is now a garden, searching for remnants of the home. New Place was rather boring; the only real standout interesting thing was the ironically funny and yet horrible story of the vicar who hated theater and bought the house of the greatest playwright the world has ever known despite it.

A few hours of free time later, we assembled for the performance of A Winter's Tale by the Royal Shakespeare Company. It wasn't a bad play (nothing done by the RSC themselves can ever be bad), but it definitely wasn't my favorite Shakespeare (that singular honor belongs to Hamlet). It was a formulaic comedy laden with cliches: royal baby abandoned in woods raised by honorable shepherds; royal baby grows up to be surpassingly wonderful as a sign of their royal blood; dead people coming back to life; everyone getting married in the end, and so on and so forth. Still, the actors were wonderful, and the special effects (such as a massive bear puppet made out of the pages of books) were incredible. We retired to a pub known as the Rose and Crown for a bit, but when it became obvious the place was closing, we went to another pub across the street. This pub was not my scene, and so I decided to leave, but when I realized that the people I'd hoped to leave with had already gone, I determined that I must walk back to the Linhill. Alone. In the dark. With six hundred dollars in pounds and traveler's checks on me.

It was not one of my brighter decisions.

Luckily I happened upon other people of my group at a little hole-in-the-wall pub called the Crossed Keys, and enjoyed the atmosphere for a while before we went back to our respective B&Bs for rest.

Day 7 dawned foggy, but it cleared up as we ate breakfast. English bacon is nothing like American; it consists of something resembling ham jerky. Not bad, but strange. Also scrambled eggs are not their default form of breakfast ovum; fried eggs are. I amused myself with poking at the yolk in my fried eggs before eating them on toast. All in all, not a meal I'd turn down, but I prefer scrambled eggs and American-style bacon regardless. After leaving our bags in the front room of the Linhill, we walked to the next town over to visit Anne Hathaway's childhood home, where William Shakespeare courted her. Walking to the next town was a lovely experience that epitomizes what I love about Britain. We went down narrow alleyways between suburban homes (with no one making a peep at 14 American students tromping about), past community vegetable gardens (Dr. King called them 'allotments', and informed me that they're public land which one rents from the town council) and a pasture where a horse grazed, past publicly-funded playgrounds, all the way into the next town. The entire walk took about twenty minutes on the wonderful path, maintained by the government.

Anne Hathaway's house was quite nice, and even had a chair, believed to be Shakespeare's, inside, along with the Hathaway family dishes. It was also where we met our first Asian tour group, which took pictures of everything, even down to the un-historical things such as the gift shop. After escaping their camera flashes and winding our way through the Hathaway House, John, Kate, Claire, and I went on the woodland walk. We encountered a little grove where someone had nailed a bunch of fairy Barbies to the trees and labeled them with names of the fairies from Shakespeare's plays, such as Titania. Claire found this very cute. I thought it was just like the Blair Witch Project, and remained leery the whole way back to the gift shop.

We then walked back to Stratford-upon-Avon to visit the house where Shakespeare was born. All I can really say is that the Shakespeare Trust has gone absolutely all-out on the multimedia presentation: creepy mannequins of Shakespeare writing, roaring sounds and red lights to represent the Globe burning down, actors doing dialogues from his plays to ease the pain of not being able to take photos inside the Birthplace. So after being subjected to the kitsch of the Birthplace introduction (with the exception of seeing what was likely Shakespeare's gold seal ring, a find that for some reason made me feel closer to him than any other thing I'd seen), we were freed to enter the Birthplace. It was bigger than I'd expected, although it would've only been two rooms at the time Shakespeare was born: the family room and his father John's workshop. John was a glover, which brought in a steady income, and he even worked his way up to being mayor of Stratford. After the Birthplace, we got our stuff, boarded the train, and returned to London and our 'lovely' ACORN flats.

I woke up at 11 on Day 8, and after having breakfast, decided that it was disgraceful that I'd been in London a week and hadn't yet been to the British Museum, which is, after all, just around the corner. I was there for three-and-a-half hours, and only made it through ten of the sixty-eight rooms. This was after, mind you, deciding to not read the captions on items unless they were incredibly interesting. Still, so far I've managed to clear out everything Egyptian, along with almost everything from the Middle East. The Egyptian rooms were the best; for hours I was ten years old again, standing with my nose pressed to the glass, starry-eyed with the idea that mankind could have been that smart, have built such great edifices and had such a complex society thousand of years before the birth of Christ. Everywhere I turned there were things I had seen in books: the papyrus depicting the Weighing of the Heart; the mummy of the old woman; the Rosetta Stone; the massive statue of Ramses II; the Ptolemaic painting of the young man; the painting of the man hunting birds in the swamps of his estate. It was a beautiful museum, and I can only wish that every city was blessed with one like it. After the Museum, we went to a pub called the Marlborough Arms, just off of Gower Street, and while the ambiance was nice and the food good, it was too expensive and small for our crowd. Instead, we retreated to the College Arms, which seems to have been decided unanimously as our home pub, and from there to home.

Day 9 was good, if slow-paced. Got up at about 11:30, had breakfast, and decided to go with Becca and Claire to look for a used bookshop called 'Skoob'. Got lost, came upon St. George's Garden (a small, nearly empty park that had once been used as a graveyard due to lack of space in the church cemeteries), wandered for two hours, returned to the flat, had lunch, and went out with Kate, Chase, Hayes, and John to the river, as they hadn't been down there yet. We meandered through Trafalgar Square, down to Big Ben, did a loop-the-loop around Parliament, and crossed the river heading back towards the Eye before returning to the flats, where I've been ever since. All in all, a good, exploratory day.