Baklava

This week would best be classified as Theatre Week! Only in London can you see four plays in six days. The first was Les Miz, and it was incredible. I’ve listened to the music my whole life, but I’ve never seen it on a professional stage like that before so I was blown away (Bountiful High just isn’t the same :) ).

We’d been planning on going to Lion King on Tuesday night for a week, but were most disappointed when we got to the theater and they told us they weren’t doing student discounts (again) because they were too busy. We didn’t want to go home empty handed, so we decided to try and make it over to Billy Elliott and see if we could get tickets. We only had a half an hour, though, to make it all the way across town during rush hour! We were running through the stations and were crammed onto the crowded trains, but we made it just in time! Our student tickets didn’t get us very good seats, but the theater was only half full so we got to move over to decent ones. I’m glad it worked out – it was a fun musical! The 12-year-old main character was amazingly talented – I don’t think very many adults could sing/dance/act the way he could!

The next play was Shakespeare’s As You Like It, which we got to see in the replica Globe Theatre. I wish I could say that I was fully alert and knew what was going on 100% of the time, but I cannot. Even though I was confused some of the time, though, I still enjoyed my experience! The language is beautiful, and the actors were really good. The next afternoon our group did a tour of the theatre, which was fun to do after seeing the play! As part of the tour, we also got to see a rehearsal of Much Ado About Nothing. (The actor who plays Geoffrey in Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was one of the actors in it!)

Globe Theater

For the last play, Alison and I finally made it to The Lion King. We bought the restricted view tickets on the fourth row, so we got great seats for a good deal! It was so worth it to sit up close, because the looking at the costumes is the best part!

We had a few group day trips this week. The first was visiting Hampton Court, a huge palace just outside of Central London. Its first and most famous resident was King Henry VIII, who happily took over the palace when his advisor, Cardinal Wolsey, fell out of favor. This palace is unique in that half of it is Tudor, and the other half Baroque - the two sides were built more than 100 years apart from each other, from two very different architectural time periods, so it’s pretty much a two-for-one experience!  (If anyone has seen Pirates 4 yet, Hampton Court is the palace they take Jack Sparrow to see the king at the beginning of the movie! The outside they show is the Tudor side, and the inside of the palace is Baroque. It was weird to see that in the movie two days after we were at the palace!)

Tudor Side

Baroque Side

With King Henry VIII (Hampton Court Disneyland style)

After Hampton Court, the bus continued onward to Down House, the house of Charles Darwin. Normally, this house wouldn’t be especially exciting for me, but our literature class had just finished reading a non-fiction book about Darwin and his wife. It was amazing to see all the places I had just been reading about in the book!

Wednesday our group took the train out to Cambridge to tour the university. We were very lucky to be able to do this, because Cambridge is in the middle of their final exams, and they are usually very strict about letting in visitors. Cambridge is much different from universities in the States in that instead of taking finals at the end of every semester, they only take their tests at the end of three years. No pressure or anything. BYU has a program at Cambridge, though, so the BYU professor there was able to get us in! And then the BYU graduate students there took small groups of us on tours throughout the university. Since they are students they were able to get us into places we wouldn’t usually be able to go. The Cambridge culture is so completely different from what I’m used to, so it was so interesting! It’s been there for almost 500 years, so there is so much history and tradition. For example, some of the colleges have formal night every night for dinner, where the students are required to wear their formal robes (exactly like Harry Potter!). Also, only the professors, called fellows, are allowed to walk on the grass. Sometimes they may invite special students to walk on the grass with them, which is considered a great honor. There is one exception though: there’s a part of the grass at St. John’s College that students are allowed to walk on during the Easter term only. So I actually got to walk on the grass! I felt so special!

Cambridge is right on the banks of a small river, where many tourists go on boat rides, or “punting.” Punting is where the driver of the boat stands on the back and uses a huge pole to steer and to push the boat along the river. They let us do the punting! I don’t know why they trusted us to do it – it took fifteen minutes to get away from the dock, and it was bumper boats the whole time. We only had one casualty – Professor Miller’s wife fell fully clothed, purse and all, into the river! I felt so bad – the water was dirty and cold. But she got right back up and did it again in her soaking wet clothes!

For dinner, a few of us went to eat at a pub called The Eagle. Not only did they serve amazing fish and chips, this was the place where Tolkein and C.S. Lewis sat around and discussed their book ideas, and where Watson and Crick first announced that they had discovered DNA.

There are these Barclay's bike stations all over London, where you can rent a bike for 24 hours for just one pound. A group of us rented some bikes to do one of our required walks, and it was so much fun! It was slightly terrifying trying to maneuver on the streets, but most of it was through the parks so we survived! 

Bike group at Buckingham Palace

I finally made it over to Harrod's - it's overwhelmingly huge and completely over the top, but so fun to see! (My Crandall relatives would be horrified to know that I had never heard of this place before this trip : ) ) The store is six levels of luxury items, and is full of designer clothes/shoes/purses/etc. It also has a candy shop, pizzeria, gourmet food section, a toy store, pet shop, jewelry (Tiffany's of course!), a hat section, and this is just what we saw on three of the floors. Any time we would pick up one of the shoes (some of them were well over 500 pounds) or look at a hat, a sales person would rush over to see if they could help us. Help, meaning they wanted us to stop touching the very expensive products. Of course the highlight was the food section - there are so many beautiful things to look at! I loved the cupcakes and chocolates.

Harrod's

$2000 Teddy Bear : )

Yesterday we went to the Borough Market – it was my favorite so far, probably because it was full of delicious food! We tried so many different things (cheese, jam, nuts, to name a few) and I had an amazing lemon-garlic chicken baguette sandwich for lunch. My very favorite thing that I ate was some cinnamon baklava. I never really thought twice about baklava before yesterday, but now I have to say that I really, really love it! I love it even though the man who sold it to me very sneakily put me out 10 pounds two minutes later. The stand with the baklava also had this incredible array of candied nuts, and after Hillary and I tried the hazelnut cinnamon nuts we decided we had to buy some. As he was putting them into a container for us, he gave us another sample of the honey macadamia nuts, and they were great too, so we added a few of them in. Then he had us try yogurt raspberries, and we decided since we were splitting the cost, it couldn’t hurt to throw them in too. I’m sure our faces were priceless after they weighed everything and told us the total. Here’s what the Turkish salesman taught me about sales techniques: first, don’t list your prices clearly, and second, give your customers many delicious free samples so they can’t say no. Oh well, the nuts were delicious! 

Best sandwich ever.

Other highlights: 

• Seeing Pirates at the theater where they filmed part of Notting Hill
• Teaching Primary. Today, my fellow BYU student brought her fake Kate Middleton ring as a visual aid, and cute 7-year-old Poppy put it on and exclaimed, "I'm getting married to Prince William!"
• Finding out that me and the girl sleeping in the bunk next to me sleep talk to each other! Our mumbled conversations with each other have kept the other four girls in our room very entertained. So funny - I'm sure Lizzy could've warned my roommates about this.
• Meeting Dean and Kathy Hughes. Brother Hughes is the author of nearly 100 books, and has written a lot of popular LDS historical fiction. His books include the Children of the Promise series, which were some of my favorite books in junior high! Sister Hughes served in the last General Relief Society Presidency and gave an incredible talk at the fireside at the center tonight. Brother Hughes, along with speaking at the fireside, also spoke to our literature class about writing historical fiction. 
• Meeting up with my dear friend and roommate Anna McKean! On her way to her study abroad in Spain...
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