Day 16

Today we went to class as usual in the morning. I am getting a little bit bored of class, mainly because since most of the people in the program are not Elang or Linguistics majors we spend a lot of time discussing and explaining things that I have already learned. But it is fun to me to hear other people who knew nothing about this stuff get excited about people they heard and their accents- as I said earlier, it makes me feel like less of a dork. J After class we had tickets to go see The Merry Wives of Windsor at the Globe Theatre. To get there we walked across the Millennium Bridge, which is a cool and fairly recent bridge just for pedestrians. We chilled by the Thames for a few minutes and took some pictures. Thankfully at the theater we got seats (well, benches) and we were not groundlings, who are the psychopaths that stand on the ground next to the stage the whole time. One girl standing down there even fainted during the show. Robyn and I rented some seat cushions to make the experience more comfortable, and we joked that they had fleas in them like they used to back in the day of Shakespeare. The show was ok; it is just that I am not the biggest fan of Shakespeare because it is so hard for me to understand what the heck is going on. The only time I have enjoyed Shakespeare was in an English class where we discussed the culture and I read the modern-day version of the play on Sparknotes. Since I understood it, I enjoyed it. But since I have never read The Merry Wives of Windsor a lot of it was lost on me. Our seats were all the way to the left of the stage (the theater is a circle), so we couldn’t see much but it wasn’t that bad. There were some funny parts, one especially was when the two main women characters did a little clapping/secret handshake thing that was amazing.

After the show we went home and by then it was about 6. Days go by so fast here! I definitely think the travel time has a lot to do with it. Especially now in the peak of tourist season the tube is always crowded in the middle of the day so it always take a while to get places. For dinner we made spaghetti (it took us a while since we had to make two batches) and chatted with some other girls in our group who also live in our building, although we don’t see them very often. We ended the night by watching part of Cranford, which is a BBC series based on books by Elizabeth Gaskell (think Jane Austen). It was enjoyable, but I was disappointed because like five people died right as their lives were becoming really good and it made me really sad! But there are two more episodes to go, so hopefully something good will happen next.