so yesterday was a wednesday which means.... coach trips! yesterday we went to shakespeare's homeplace, stratford-upon-avon. some people wonder why the long name... haha i will explain :) the town itself is called stratford. it is located on the river avon (which means 'river' in celtic)... throw it all together... stratford-upon-avon! stratford on the avon river. yay. i'm sure you're so glad you know that now. haha. so yeah we started the day with packing our lunches which i always think is so funny. it's tradition that we turn on mtv in the kitchen while we do it and it's typically eighties music and it's just o funny. i feel like we are in a scene out of sitcom or something hahahah a bunch of college kids packing these little sandwiches in the middle of london while watching these wacko eighties music videos. that probably isn't funny to anyone else but oh well. hahaha.
okay so it took like two hours to get there so we decided to break up the trip a little bit. our first stop was warwick castle! this place has the most interesting history. so the site has had a fort of some sort on it for like 900 years which is pretty crazy. that's like anglo-saxon time. eventually it became the property of the earl of warwick, who during the war of the roses was the eighth richest man in britain. it is believed he was worth about 60 billion pounds or something. which is a ton right?! sooo fast forward to the 1920s. the earl has a lot of money he doesn't know what to do with, so he goes to hollywood to make it big as a movie star! the guy was an absolutely horrible actor, so no one would hire him. despite the fact he wasn't making any money he kept throwing all these extravagant parties and getting in with all the stars... and by about 1960 all of his money was gone! he had to declare bankruptcy! he ended up having to sell this huge castle.. and he only sold it for 2 million pounds!!! that still sounds like a ton of money but you seriously need to see this place. it is more than a hundred acres, it has this ancient castle on it... it came fully furbished with old armor and 4 skeletons of prehistoric irish elk... this place is worth wayyyy more. but i guess he was desperate? so yeah it was sold to madame tussauds for 2 million pounds!
i know it's weird that madame tussauds bought it, but they did a pretty good job turning into a total tourist destination. it's so funny it really reminded me of disneyland. they have hidden speakers everywhere so there is always sound effects and background music.. hahah it's hilarious. they also of course have wax figures everywhere. by the way... i've decided wax figures are totally creepy. not a fan. but they have cool exhibits on like witches and torture and princesses and all sorts of stuff that tourists love ya know? so they did an awesome job.
right when we got there we started with this little tour on the defense and attack strategies that would have been used at warwick. i say 'would have' because no one was ever dumb enough to attack the castle. this place was brutal. they had it all set up so basically any way you can think of dying is a possibility. they would dump hot liquid and sand on you.. dump dead animals with deadly disease on you.. trap you in a narrow hallway with flying sharp things that would dismember you.. they had archers that could shoot like 15 arrows a minute which was a big deal.. they had acid.. it was just miserable. but cool to hear about. haha.
after that tour they launched a real trebuchet! the only one that still operates! a trebuchet is the giant sling shot thing you see in the movies that launches big rocks and fireballs. our guides told us that yes, they really did launch fireballs, as well as animals both alive and dead, and dead enemies! how terrible is that? yucky. i guess the items get going at like 150 mph so it makes quite an impact and yeah.. pretty traumatizing. it was pretty cool to see one in action!
after that they had a birds of prey show which i thought was really random and funny. but it was cool! they had two bald eagles that all the europeans went absolutely BONKERS over. it was hilarious.. but they were huge and beautiful birds so i can see why. but also america is just the shiz so of course they love our eagle. duh.
then we had some free time! so we walked around the towers and stuff. it was the usual castle stuff. i know that sounds so terrible and i hate saying that.. but seriously most of the castles are about the same after you have seen like 4. they're stone. they have really narrow staircases. they're not very pretty unless you're looking at them from the outside. the end. oh my gosh that's terrible that i just said that. but it's true!
so we were off to stratford after that! we munched our cute little lunches on the bus on our way. our first stop was anne hathaway's cottage. this place kind of cracked me up. it's a total joke! anne only lived there like the first four years of her life and shakespeare was probably never there. and only two rooms in the house were actually part of the house when he was alive. so yeah. but it is super pretty! it's a cute little old cottage with the thatched roof and waddle and daub.. i'm sure everyone has seen pictures. the prettiest part is probably the garden... which was planted in the late 1800s. haha. definitely not shakespeare's time. but it is cool that those still rooms are still there.
it was super super rainy so we cut our time in the gardens a little short and headed to the main part of stratford, where shakespeare's actual birthplace is!! now this was legit. it's the house that he lived in until he was married. it has the room he was born in, the shop his dad worked in (he was a glovemaker), and all that! it was actually really cool! and to top if off the house is freakin cute :) haha so that's always a plus! after you exit the house they have these actors that literally have every piece shakespeare ever wrote memorized. you can ask them to recite anything and they know it. how crazy is that? i think i'd rather die than memorize all of shakespeare's works. sorry shakespeare lovers. also there was this guy in the house that would recite poems.. he was so funny. he was kind of a loony old man and he liked that we were young and friendly so he started just reciting all these poems for us. his favorites were from this book that was a bunch of famous soliloquies and poems from the perspective of a cat. so he recited this poem that was hamlet's famous "to be or not to be" soliloquy as if it were a cat... it was so funny we were dying. just imagine a wacky old british man telling us a cat poem in shakespearean style. hahahha i still laugh thinking about it
after that it was reading and time for bed! another wednesday in the books!
then it was today! woke up and had class. woo hoooo! so exciting. then i had a peanut butter and honey and mailed some postcards, then we were off to kew gardens! kew is a suburb of london and it's really cute. the gardens are the national gardens and they are super cool. they are like 300 acres so it's a huge setup. it has the largest seed bank in the world. it also has these really cool glass houses (green houses) that are the oldest victorian glass houses in the world. they have a palm house, a water lilly house, a temperate house.. they have so much stuff it's insane. we didn't have time to do everything because i started dish crew tonight! so we did the canopy walk which was cool. they have these metal bridges you can hike to the top of and walk through the treetops. then we went through some of the glass houses... it was very cool. sorry this is so boring and not detailed compared to all the things i just wrote about from yesterday!
tomorrow we are going to the imperial war museum and richard III at the globe. standing again :/ yikes. so i will post again then! see ya later!
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