Stratford-Upon-Avon! Hello Shakespeare!

2/28/08
The trip started out extremely early in the morning, at 6:30am to be exact. I had to wake up that early in order to get a shower before we left at 7am. Its a really good thing that our water heater is broken or else it would have been a really miserable shower. Wait a minute...it was a miserable shower! The people that were suppose to fix it still haven't done anything and BYU has a contract with them so they are just being really lazy about getting it fixed. We are now going on a week of taking ICE cold showers here in London and it about freezes my brain every time. I have the biggest head ache after, and I don't even think that we are even getting that clean here because the soap will just freeze to us and crumble when we try to use it. It is NO FUN! The bus ride over there was about three hours and I was so tired that I slept most of the ride, which I hate doing because the scenery is amazing with the green hills and sheep and everything. It is just so pretty. The morning didn't just start off bad because of my shower though. A few weeks ago I had bought Phantom of the Opera tickets and we had planned to go on the same day as our trip, not knowing that we were going to Stratford Upon Avon. So we had to try and sell our tickets or else the four of us girls were going to be out of $50. One of the girls went to this University called Arcadia by us and put an add up for the students to let them know that we had tickets available for them to buy from us. We got a few responses and this made us so happy because then we wouldnt lose any money. Well, one of the girls here told the people that were going to buy them that she would meet them to exchange tickets and money. Well my friend forgot. I was pretty mad because we had been trying so hard to sell them and then our one chance to get money out of them she forgot. So she called them that night and apologized for forgetting and asked if they still wanted them. The obviously still did, and this is where I got a little confused. The girls told them that she would leave the tickets at the front desk at Arcadia for them to pick up and they could leave the money in the envelope that she left there for them. I didn't really understand that logic because we are in a foreign country and not everyone is honest, so I was extremely worried that we were going to get ripped off.

The whole time at Stratford I couldn't stop thinking about the tickets, it just made me sick. But when we arrived home we got an email from the people that got the tickets from us and they said that Arcadia wouldn't let them leave the money there because the University didn't want to be responsible for all of that money but the woman said that she would meet us anytime to have her pay us and she thanked us for the tickets. So in the end it did work out and I am so glad that the people that took our tickets were honest because it would have been so easy for them to have just taken them and avoided paying us.

So now that I have gotten that story out of the way want to tell you about my visit to Stratford!

Our first stop was at Anne Hathaway's cottage! My professor told us that this is the place where she lived before she married John Groburg...Well if you know your history well enough, there was another Anne Hathaway who was the wife of Shakespeare. This is the cottage that she grew up in and it was so cute. As we pulled up you could see this small little garden in the trees with this cottage that seriously looked like snow white cottage. It had a straw roof and the flowers were so pretty everywhere. The tour didn't start until 10am so we were able to wander for a while. I found a gift shop for the cottage and they sold these really pretty prints of the house and the flowers so I bought two of them. One of my professors wives gets the biggest kick out of me because I am always looking for really pretty prints to buy of places that I go to. But I look at it as a really good investment for when I have my own house and I can have the pictures hanging in there. The picture with Mike and I holding the little things that say "Out, damned spot!" Are erasers, we thought that they were pretty funny.

So after the cottage we went to Shakespeare's birth place. My professor thought that he was funny and asked me where the epidural room was in the building. It fooled a few of the girls, they actually thought that Shakespeare's mom would have had an epidural when giving birth to Shakespeare. It was pretty funny. The whole town is so old! Just eh houses an everything you can see from the pictures have stayed the same and alot of the floors haven't even been replaced from his time. CRAZY!

We also went to this old church where Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway are buried. It was a really great experience to see that and get pictures with it.

We had a play to go to at 1pm called Henry the 4th by Shakespeare. Well it was fun....at least the beginning and the end, I don't remember much of the middle, seeing as that I fell asleep because I didn't understand most of what they were saying and there is obviously no music involved so I crashed pretty fast. I should have read a summery of it before but I didn't so the play was really confusing. It was a really great thing to end the day with because we went on an entire Shakespeare tour and then we got to end the day with one of his plays. It was a beautiful town and so fun to just walk around in. We left for home around 5pm and made it home in time for dinner and it gave us time to relax from our long drive.