For this blog, I’m combining Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, August 1st through 3rd. On Saturday, I didn’t go out to do anything except walk to the gas station. Other than that short walk, I just worked on homework, which was desperately necessary. Sunday wasn’t much more exciting, but I did do a couple of things. The morning was filled with more homework and relaxing, then in the afternoon I met up with Whitney, Jenna, and Laura. We got on the metro and took a couple of stops to Hyde Park Corner, and started walking around Hyde Park, which is like the Central Park of London. It is so massive. We spent over an hour just walking through it. It was well worth it thought. There are flower gardens of all different kinds all over the park. It was so incredibly pretty. There was also this tree that was sort of inverted, so the main trunk grew upwards, and then all of the branches grew down to the ground, making the tree like a cave. There were opening where you could walk in under the tree. I’ve never seen anything like it before and I wish I had discovered a tree like that as a kid because it would’ve been heaven for pretend-games! From there, we continued through the park on the Princess Diana memorial walkway. There are plaques on the ground along the pathway that have Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Walk engraved in them with a design in the center. We took the path all the way down to the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain. The fountain is arranged in an oval and it just continually flows into itself. There was a little boy playing in the fountain, and I thought it was cute, so I took a picture of him, and he saw me taking the picture, stopped playing, and kicked water at me. I guess he didn’t want his picture taken…but I got it anyway, so there! I got the last word on a 4 year old! After Hyde Park we got back on the metro and went over to Covent Gardens, which is just a shopping and entertainment area. We didn’t get there until about 7, so most of the shops were closed down, but there were still live entertainers out. There was one group where this guy in the group would run through the audience and encourage people to clap their hands and dance, while occasionally doing some comedy, and then he would run back and play his instrument with the group. They all played string instruments and while they were playing, they started dancing around and clicking their heels and stuff like that. It was really entertaining. I left shortly after getting there because I wanted to be back by 8, and that was pretty much the end of my night.
On Monday, Whitney and I had planned to go to the Imperial War Museum. We weren’t meeting until noon, but I woke up around 8:30 due to my chatty roommates (if you girls are reading this, I love you anyway), so I had plenty of time to get ready. We left a little before noon, and it took us about 20 minutes to get there, but at least we found it pretty easily. It was such an amazing museum…it was definitely in my top 3 for this trip. It’s mostly focused on World War II right now because their special exhibit is a Holocaust exhibit, but they had a lot of stuff from World War I also. When you walk in on the ground floor, all you can see is tanks and planes everywhere. The tanks cover the ground and the planes are suspended from the ceiling. Walking around the ground floor you start to see more than the tanks, such as a submarine exhibit, military gars, missiles, and cannons. The submarine exhibit was really interesting. It wasn’t an actual submarine, it was just an enclosed exhibit that we walked through, but there were pieces of submarines inside of the exhibit and they had it arranged sort of like a submarine. They had replicas of the beds set up and of the toilets, as well as the instructions for using the toilets. Apparently, they were really complicated to operate, with a series of 8 instructions, and if they weren’t followed exactly, the toilet could shoot back up at the user. They also had little bits of random information posted throughout the exhibit, like that when people in submarines found dead mice, it caused a lot of worry because it meant that the oxygen in the sub was low. There was also a board with a quote from Winston Churchill mentioning that submarine work is the most dangerous military work. We spent most of our time on the second floor in the Holocaust exhibit. It was so powerful and moving. Parts of it made me physically ill. They had a lot of stuff about Jewish life before Hitler and the war, and then the exhibit went through the Holocaust and to the end of the war. They had pictures, journals, and possessions from Jews that survived in hiding. They had the original hand written pages of Anne Frank’s diary that were recovered from the house that she was hiding in. They also had quotes posted from survivors of the Holocaust, such as Elie Wiesel. There was also a large model of Auschwitz, the main camp, with explanations of what would happen in that part of the camp as you walk by the model. They have pictures posted of every stage of the camp, except from inside the gas chambers obviously. On the back of the model display, they had a glass case stuffed with tattered shoes that the Jews had worn on their way to the camps. There was also a sign saying how the Nazi’s would even use the dead bodies for economic purposes, such as weaving their hair into cloth (that’s the part that made me ill) and using the ashes from the crematory for fertilizers. I felt like a disgusting person because I was so interesting in the exhibit. I can’t even fathom how it’s possible for people to do something like that to other human beings…I can’t understand hate that intense. There were quotes posted from Nazi soldiers describing the screams of dying children, yet after experiencing…and even causing…those screams, they continued to do what they were doing. It was heinous and it’s disgusting for me to think about, even though I had nothing to do with it. The exhibit was so powerful and moving that I walked out of it nearly in tears. It was absolutely incredible. On a lighter note, we continued through the rest of the museum to the collections of uniforms, guns, and items from both World Wars. The way they had it displayed was really cool because they had different rooms set up with things from the wars from all of the different countries that were involved. The Imperial War Museum really was one of the best museums I’ve seen.
After the museum, I went home and napped for about an hour, and then at about 6 Amanda and I left to see As You Like It at Shakespeare’s Globe theater. We had standing tickets so we wanted to be there early to get a good spot. The play was a little over 2 and a half hours long, and with the exception of 10 minutes during the intermission, we had to stand the whole time, but it really wasn’t that bad. And it was so worth it! The play was absolutely hilarious. The story is a comedy about 2 female cousins, one of whom is the daughter of the current Duke, and the other is the daughter of the Duke’s brother, who was previously the Duke until he was banished from the country by the current Duke (I hope that made sense). The current Duke gets mad and banishes his niece as well, and his daughter decides that she has to go with her cousin, so Rosalind (the niece) disguises herself as a man, and Celia (the daughter) disguises herself as a plain woman, and they head into the forest of Arden to find Rosalind’s father. Meanwhile, before running, Rosalind met Orlando and they were instantly in love, and he also ran to the forest because his brother was trying to kill him, so he’s in the forest looking for her, finds her disguised and believes the disguise, and the man version of Rosalind is teaching Orlando how to court Rosalind. Throughout the play, everyone’s falling in love with everyone, some that could never work (such as a woman falling in love with Rosalind while she’s disguised as a man), and it’s just a mess. It all works out though, with four weddings at the end. As You Like It is the play with one of Shakespeare’s most famous quotes, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” It was so much fun to see it in his original theater, standing just as they would have then.
Although I didn’t do very much, it was a really great weekend. The perfect mix of relaxation, studying, and playing!
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