history

i've seen a lot of old things this week. a lot. england's pretty big on this "history" stuff.
but if there's anything i've learned on this trip so far, it's that i am very much my father's daughter, and he's all about history. so i'm a pretty big fan too.

it rained on monday, so we decided to stick with indoor activities for the day. we started out with lunch at shakespeare's, a little place a couple blocks away from wadham. and by "lunch," i mean "milkshakes." yeah. shakespeare's specializes in shakes of every flavor imaginable, with literally over 100 different items available to mix and match for the perfect milkshake. they also have preset flavors that are named after shakespeare plays. i ordered the "macbeth:" oreos, dark chocolate, and more oreos on top. heaven in my mouth.
after finishing our shakes in approximately .2 seconds, because they were just that good, we headed over to the natural history museum. the front room of the museum was very cool; there were fossils and minerals and model dinosaurs everywhere. but the back room... yowza. i think it was actually a separate museum - the pitt-rivers - but it was housed in the same building. anyway, the pitt-rivers is the museum that displays all the things that the british stole from the countries they colonized way back in the day. oh. my. gosh. there was SO. MUCH. STUFF. i honestly don't even know how to begin to describe to you just how much stuff was in this room. rows and rows and rows of glass cases, all packed with hundreds of artifacts. and there were three floors of this. it was overwhelming to say the very least. there wasn't very much organization either, so for the most part we were left to our own devices to try to figure out just what exactly we were looking at. and this will probably sound strange, but just being in that room, looking at all of that - it physically exhausted me. by the time we finished looking around, i was literally dragging my feet across the floor, struggling to stay upright. so i went straight back to my room and took a two and a half hour nap. yes.

tuesday was an adventure day. after classes, we once again boarded a bus with sack lunches in hand and set off for london. our first stop was highgate cemetery, one of the first formal cemeteries established in london, to prevent the entire city from being wiped out by corpse-bred diseases. yeah, sometimes history isn't so fun. we made this particular stop because according to my gothic novel professor, it has something to do with dracula? but i haven't read dracula yet so the significance was lost on me. but highgate also happens to be where karl marx, george eliot, and herbert spencer are buried. so we went to visit them. and in case you were wondering, people still leave flowers on marx's grave. i thought that was interesting.

if you know me at all, you know i was just thrilled to spend my afternoon wandering through an old graveyard. (if you don't know me at all, that was sarcasm.) i just felt really strange walking around, looking at all these graves of people that i didn't know, and not having anyone in particular to visit myself. it seemed somehow disrespectful to me.
one thing i did enjoy about walking around the cemetery, however, was reading the epitaphs. those words are just so purposeful, and to me they seem so full of life, despite being there to commemorate the dead. one of my favorites simply read, "beloved." i think that's beautiful. so simple but obviously from the heart. and i took a picture of this one because i wanted to remember it:

thank you Jesus for reminding me that death is not nearly as grim as old, dreary cemeteries make it seem.

after leaving highgate, we had a few free hours in london, so a small group of us tagged allong with dr. moore and made our way to the tate modern art museum. the tate is housed in a huge old warehoue right on the thames river, and it makes for a very different atmosphere than any other museum i've been to. there were some really cool pieces on display, including one by chinese artist ai weiwei that appeared to be a massive pile of sunflower seeds, but each seed was actually hand-crafted from porcelain and hand-painted to look like a sunflower seed. there were thousands of them. i don't know much about art, but that was pretty incredible. unfortunately, the museum closed about an hour after we got there, so we didn't have nearly enough time to see all that we wanted to. but we were all starving by the time they herded us out, so we walked down the street to a greek restaurant for dinner. it was fantastic. definitely the best meal out i've had since getting here. and we got so much! pita, hummus, tzatziki, tahini, chicken kebabs, lamb, chickpea salad - we devoured it all in minutes and shoot, was it delicious.
after dinner it was time for the main event of the day - seeing all's well that ends well at the globe theater. the globe. so freaking cool. i mean, i know it's not the original, but it was rebuilt to look exactly like it, and it's in the same place, so that's gotta count for something right? the theater is really cool: there's no roof, so it's very open, but it's not very big, so it still feels intimate.

the play was really good and really funny; i enjoyed it much more than last week's macbeth experience.

after the play, it was time to board the bus again and head back to oxford. i'm always sad to leave london, but this time wasn't so bad because i know for sure i'll be going back.