Theater and a Day Trip #HogsAbroad in England

I’m back with more exciting updates! Life in London never slows down!!

Last Tuesday night (Oct 3rd) a couple of friends and I went to see a show at Shakespeare’s Globe Theater. Tickets are relatively cheap anyway, but they have a special ticket for “groundlings” where you stand in the “yard” (on the ground in front of the stage) for just £5!! The Globe was running King Lear and Much Ado About Nothing, so we opted for the comedy  It was so well done! They set the play in Mexico during the Mexican Revolution which meant that the sets and costumes were bright and colorful, and choruses became dances filled with lots of clapping, skirt-swinging, and “ay ay ay!!” Sometimes, I feel like Shakespeare plays can be entertaining, but you don’t actually really know what’s going on, or miss the jokes, etc. because of the language. This was not that way. It was incredibly funny and they did an excellent job of communicating the story, and putting a fun Mexican fling on it. Only downside was that by the end of the 3rd hour, I kind of couldn’t feel my feet anymore but all in all it was a great deal and an amazing show!

Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday I had classes – it might just be me but the lecturers seem to flyyy through the slides. Lectures are often given by different people based on speciality of the topic and after sitting in a classroom for 2-3 hours straight I start to go a little brain dead haha. But all is well so far!

On Saturday, I took a day trip to Stonehenge and Bath. It was one of the Arcadia sponsored excursions and it was pretty cheap to do, plus I got to see some neat stuff outside of London! Our first stop was Stonhenge which was about 2 hours outside of London. I was really surprised that it was so close to the highway!! We got dropped off at a visitors center where you were them bused to the site. While I definitely didn’t need that long there, it was still very cool to see; it was a very peaceful environment for sure.

Our next stop was Bath, another hour down the road. Our trip took us through the cutest little country towns and when we got to Bath we were met with rolling hills and vistas and more medieval style buildings like what we saw in Oxford. Our trip included a stop in the Roman Baths and then we had free time to explore. We stopped into a cute bakery and I had THE BEST hazelnut chocolate and a pastry. We also stopped into the Jane Austen Center – she actually spent some of her life in Bath and a couple of her books are based there. We toured an exhibition and then got to play dress up with the wax Mr. Darcy  I really enjoyed Bath; it was really charming with lots of great restaurants, shopping, and cafés, and had beautiful views.



Sooooo. On the way to Stonehenge I made one of the most exciting purchases of my life.

No joke.

I snagged Harry Potter and the Cursed Child tickets.

!!!!!!

So this show is basically sold out through next year. And every Friday they do what’s called the “Friday Forty;” basically a ticket lottery where they randomly select you from an online queue to get £20 tickets for great seats. And I had been entering it but to no avail. I actually was doubting that I was going to get to see it during my time in London – you can look on their website to see what tickets are still available for the shows but they are almost exclusively £250 each. Which is about $325 right now. Yeah I don’t have that kind of money to spend on tickets  However that hasn’t stopped me from periodically checking to see if cheaper tickets pop up and on my way to Stonehenge during a routine check of the website I stumbled upon £40 tickets for a show the next night!!!!!! (For reference they were technically £20 tickets because they sell tickets for Part 1 and Part 2 separately.) This was literally as cheap as they could get!!! I was beside myself all day.

So on Sunday I went to see the show, showing at the Palace Theater. Part 1 started at 1pm and was 2 hours and 40 minutes, then Part 2 started at 6:30 and was 2 hours and 20 minutes long. It was a lot of sitting but it didn’t feel that long – I was totally engaged the entire time. Now I’ll be the first to admit that I love Harry Potter and was going to love the show no matter what, but it was honestly one of the best theatrical experiences I’ve ever had. Every aspect of it was so well done, and the “magic” actually seemed like magic – I still can’t figure out how they did some of the special effects (polyjuice potion transforming people on stage, centaurs, people and objects levitating with no obvious fly wires anywhere, being sucked into the telephone booths to go to the Ministry of Magic… The list goes on) If you’ve read the book/script you probably came away a little disappointed; it was very choppy and hard to follow. The play is not like that. Everything makes sense when you see it. But I have to #keepthesecrets so that’s all I’ll say about that  All in all, it was amazing. I truly hope every Harry Potter fan gets the opportunity to see it some day.

How posh am I 

And that’s pretty much my recap!! Tomorrow I’m back to class for a jam packed 3 days before starting another, no doubt, eventful weekend!!

thanks for reading!

-Katie

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Katie, a senior Biology major, is spending the Fall 2017 semester studying Health & Society at King's College in London through Arcadia University.
Read more from Katie at https://katientheuk.wordpress.com/
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