Day 8/9/10

So Sunday morning we went to St. Mary's for church, that one that I had gone a toured a few days before. It seems kind of odd at first, but all of these old massive churches are tourist attractions, and yet they are still functioning churches and have services every week. Kind of a weird clash. But yea, we went. It was Anglican, so it was pretty much Catholic as far as I'm concerned, although Sarah went with us and she's a Catholic and said it had a few differences. Most importantly is I think the Anglican service is much shorter than a typical Catholic mass. It was pretty different to me though. They basically handed out scripts to everyone as we walked in the door, telling us when to sit, stand, and kneel, and what to say and when to sat it. Everything the Chaplain said was all printed out too. The only thing not printed was the sermon, which was delivered by a guest Chaplain from what I understand, and that seemed like a sort of side thing, not the center and focus of a service like in Protestant churches. As in, the sermon lasted like 15 minutes. So pretty different. The music was really old fashioned, and pretty hard for me to sing because they would draw out weird words and then all of the sudden spit out a whole bunch of multi-syllable words really fast, so the rhythm was far from intuitive. But other than the differences in tradition and the soporific nature of the worship, it didn't seem too different from us. They love the same Jesus we do. After the service, instead of having coffee and doughnuts like a good ol' Baptist church, they had coffee and sherry. So that was interesting. I now know that drinking sherry is kind of like trying to drink a liquid steak. That kind of sounds good on the surface maybe, but when you actually try to do it, it's not fun at all. I think we're just going to keep going to new random churches every week though.

That was pretty much it for Sunday though. Monday was fairly uneventful as well, other than High Table dinner, which was pretty fun.

What can I say? I'm the man. Literally. I am the male in this picture.

Chelsea and Linsey at dinner.

Brittany and...John Thomas...I don't even know. As usual with him.

Weird Japanese presentation of some pretty Western food. If only I watched the Food Network more, I'd know why they did this. That sauce for the steak was weird though, but addicting.

And we got dinosaur eggs for dessert apparently. Poor Little Foot. Didn't even taste good.

Tuesday we went to Stratford-upon-Avon for our field trip for our Shakespeare class. Stratford is where Shakespeare was born, as well as where he lived for a while, is buried, and where the Royal Shakespeare Company is headquartered pretty much.

The English countryside on the way there:


And then Stratford itself.
And the house Shakespeare was born in.
And the gardens behind the house:






And the inside. We weren't allowed to take pictures, but I was able to get a couple without flash anyway, but they're kinda blurry.



And then these are from the garden outside the John Nash house, which we also got to go through, although I didn't get any pictures of the inside. Apparently Shakespeare lived there for a while too.











And from what I understand, Shakespeare planted this mulberry tree himself. Pretty epic.
We then got to see Shakespeare's tomb at Holy Trinity Church.










Hah, nope, tricked you, that's not it. That's some other guy. We had to go deeper into the church, and pay 50p to go into where Shakespeare himself is buried.


Here's the real deal.
Here's the goofy looking but famous statue of Shakespeare writing, which looks over his grave.

Here it is, famous engraving and all.

Good frend for Iesvs sake forbeare,

To digg the dvst encloased heare.

Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones,

And cvrst be he yt moves my bones.

Change the v's to u's and it will make a little more sense. But yea, to you non-English people, that's what we have to read all the time. And we love it. But the famous epithet basically says don't dig up my grave, which churches commonly did to older graves then, because they ran out of room in the cemeteries. They'd dig up the old ones, throw the bones aside, and fill 'em up anew. Shakespeare wasn't having any of that.
My camera batteries died literally right after I got the picture of his grave. So that was convenient. We then went to eat at this really expensive French restaurant, which thankfully was paid for by our program fees. I couldn't read the menu really, but I ended up getting something I couldn't pronounce that said it was a "classic beef casserole" in the description. Apparently in France, casserole does not mean casserole. It turned out to just be like three tiny little beef tips sitting in a bowl of sauce. I'm not gonna lie, they were good beef tips. But they were not 15-pounds-for-3-bites good. So me and Robert, who got the same thing, were pretty much starving. We were scared too because we knew we'd have to sit through the play and then drive back to Oxford before we'd have another chance to eat. But we ate everyone else's leftovers (since it was mostly girls) and then had cheesecake for dessert and we didn't die.

The play itself was The Merchant of Venice, put on by the Royal Shakespeare Company. In case you don't know, the RSC is pretty much accepted as the premiere Shakespeare troupe, so we got pretty much the best of the best. Thankfully the tickets, at 25 pounds a piece, were covered in the program costs too. But the play itself was really awesome. Thankfully I had already read the play, so I knew what was going on the whole time. The problem with these plays is that so much of it is so poetic, and it takes my brain a lot longer to translate poetry to plain English than it takes the actors to speak it. So if I hadn't read it before, I think I would have been very lost and not enjoyed it as much. But since I had, I was able to remember the plot and pay close attention to pick up on all of the jokes. Merchant of Venice is certainly a comedy, and even just reading it I thought it was very funny. But seeing it performed was really cool because the actors could add in facial expressions and use sarcasm and little pauses and body gestures so that the jokes are easier to get, and you get more of them and it's more entertaining. So I really wish I could do that again, it was a lot of fun. The actors were all really really good too. Bassiano and Shylock, the protagonist and antagonists respectively, were really charismatic and had amazing stage presence. Like the play started with all of the characters in a sort of traditional dance (although it's set in Venice, Italy, it's sort of transposed into England. All of the actors had British accents and the music and dance were definitely traditionally British. But that's how it would have been done in Shakespeare's day, I think.) The dancing was really cool, because although they were all doing the same dance, certain characters would do it a little bit differently. Like Bassiano was definitely a little more all over the place with his dance haha. But back to my point, after the final scene, they were all dancing again, and Shylock, the villain, walks onto the stage and as he walks through the dance sulkily and menacingly, all of the characters just stopped and backed away and looked at him as they saw him and as he sort of interrupted their dance. That was a really cool, perfect picture of Shylock's presence on the stage. The only thing I didn't like was Shylock's rage level. I think the Shylock wrote should have been like screaming his head off in anger, but he was sort of just calm and collected all the way through. But now I'm gonna end up writing out my first paper on here, reviewing the play, so I'll stop there. That was pretty much it for Sunday through Tuesday this week though.