Thursday... Harry Potter Studios!

Excitement builds! 

Potions Classroom!

Entering Hogwarts! For real!!

The Great Hall

The full scale model of Hogwarts.

Matilda the Musical in London (and some other stuff)

Matilda!

Royal Horses leading the Royal Car

See the little red crown on top of the car. Palace Car

A neat building I saw from the bus. 

 

"2nd star to the right and straight on til morning!"

Harry Potter in the UK Class 2014

Roald Dahl (England, Day 4)

A picture/painting of Dahl in his writing hut. He wrote 4 hours a day, 365 days a year.

The museum has all of RD drafts and notes.

"Chocolate" door to one of the exhibits.

Benches inside the RD Museum

RD's writing hut

Gates to the museum

 

 

RD played a prank on the local sweet shop lady. 

 

 

 

England Day 3: Oxford (Part 2)

 

The above street and I are NOT friends. They are all over Oxford, and while they are beautiful, they are are extremely difficult to walk on gracefully. We traveled down one of these cobbled streets for quite a ways to get to the "lodge" of Oriel College of Oxford. "Lodge" is the name for the entrance to college; carried over from centuries ago. This is the arch with crests over the lodge door.

Upon entering the quad, you see

This is as far as most people get to see of the many colleges in Cambridge and Oxford. However, we got the insiders tour with a professor named Bill Woods. We got to see the chapel,

 the dining hall, where 6 nights a week there is a formal dinner, and

 the faculty meeting room. In this room, there are a couple of boxes from the 1600s, which we in the USA would think is really remarkable and need to treasured. However, At Oriel College, these engraved and ornate boxes hold scrap paper and extra pencils.

After the tour ended, several of us went to The Turf Tavern. This tavern is a fairly famous tavern where Oxford students do some silly things, including the Rhodes Scholar, Bill Clinton, who smoked but didn't inhale.

England Day 3: Oxford (Part 1)

Sheep Pasture traveling from Cambridge to Oxford

We started the day on a 2 hour bus ride from Cambridge to Oxford. I kind of wanted to stop and stroll through the pastures. By the time we got to Oxford all the rain had disappeared, and we were able to enjoy a great afternoon out and about.

The Eagle and Child (or Bird and Baby as the Inklings called it) is the local Oxford pub where Tolkien and C.S. Lewis met weekly to write and share drafts of their stories and scholarly writings. After Tolkien shared The Hobbit with Lewis, Lewis decided to try to write a children's story. From that decision, he wrote The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. The room shown below is where Tolkien told Lewis that Narnia stories would never sell because they were undeveloped and too hastily written.

I took lots of photos inside the pub and will gladly share them with you at some point.

Next up was the 127 steep step climb to the top of the St. Mary's Chapel Tower.

King's College Chapel Service: England day 2

Anglican Church Services was a unique experience. This morning's service was theme was a Sung Eucharist.  For a description of the Sung Eucharist, you can click here. An all male choir sang beautiful songs in Latin as we followed along in the service booklet. Apparently, my no rhythm also applies to reading aloud during Anglican church services. I wanted to pause in all the wrong places, and some of the phrases were said quickly, almost slurred.

After the services, we went to lunch at the Anchor Pub where we ended up meeting all the students for our first book discussion. We read The Wind in Willows before traveling to England and had great literature discussions under a riverside willow tree and inside a warm pub.

At 2:20, we hopped a tour bus to travel around Cambridge. The first stop was the American War Cemetery, which is actually American soil way across the pond. We learned about intricacies of the Cambridge University System. I tried to go into the Geology Museum; however, it is closed on Sundays. So I wandered around an outdoor market where I purchased a pair of fleece-lined leggings to wear under my clothes! 48 degrees in the UK certainly is not 48 degrees in TN.

 Dinner was vegetarian Turkish at:

They had beautiful light fixtures.

Cambridge, UK Day 1

After 12 hours of fantastic sleep, I started the day with a brisk walk to the Fitzwilliam Museum. On the way there I passed this church:

The name of the church is awesome: "The Catholic Church of Our Lady and the English Martyrs." Seriously, we need to reconsider some of the church names in America.

The ceilings at the Fitzwilliam were gorgeous.

Additionally, I really liked this posset pot from Staffordshire c1600.

I also really enjoyed the paintings of John Lindley.

 

After the Fitzwilliam, we strolled toward King's College Chapel, but got sidetracked by a street market complete with a Cheese Man Stall. 

After wandering through the vendors, we made it to King's College. We were pretty lucky in that the choir and orchestra were rehearsing while we toured. I love stained glass. I think it is incredible that the glass was removed during WWII and stored in cellars to protect the intricate glass. It was not returned until 1948.

The rest of the afternoon, we explored up and down alleys, across bridges, and through the arcades. All of the students arrived late this afternoon, and we went to dinner as a group.