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I had a jolly good time in London this weekend. On Friday, we went as a field trip. Our first stop was the National Gallery. Sally (one of our 2 Art History professors and the Dean of European Studies) talked to us for about an hour in the medieval gallery, where we looked at some altarpieces. Then we explored the Renaissance galleries on our own. They have a lot of great stuff there- some particularly beautiful Jan van Eyck's, Andrea Mantegna's, and Giovanni Bellini's. My favorite was Botticelli's Venus and Mars, which I am writing about for my Art History paper this week. We did not have time to go into the wing of the gallery that has the works of Raphael, da Vinci, and Michelangelo, but we are going to see them when we return to London at the end of the tour. When we left there, we all piled into taxis to go over to the Globe Theatre. We had about an hour to eat lunch before the play. The girls and I walked over to one of the many London street markets. It smelled absolutely amazing there. We got sandwiches and went to eat by the river before heading back to the Globe. The play that we saw was The Merry Wives of Windsor. I was not familiar with this one, so I didn't really know what to expect. It turned out to be amazing. So hilarious. The story is about the knight from Shakespeare's history play Henry IV, John Falstaff. He is this ridiculous, fat, old man who tries to seduce a couple of men's wives. They decide to play tricks on him- he ends up having to hide from their husbands in a dirty laundry basket and is thrown into the river. One time he has to wear a dress and pretend to be a woman. I loved it. After the play, it took us forever to get back to Oxford because of traffic. For dinner, Stevens ordered us pizzas, and we all ate together in the Common Room.
Saturday morning, I woke up in time to eat breakfast before going to the train station. When I got to London, I bought a ticket for the sightseeing bus tour. It went all through the Westminster side of town and then the London city side of town, taking total about 2 and a half hours. I sat on the top level of the bus so I could take pictures. It was a lot of fun- I got to see all the major sites, but more importantly, I know where I want to go when I come back in October and how to find them. After the tour was over, I grabbed a sandwich and a DC and had lunch in Trafalgar Sqaure. I went to this comic book store I had heard about, Forbidden Planet, because I knew that none of my friends would want to go in those last 4 days. It was 2 stories of the geek's paradise. I looked around for a while and saw some cool stuff. Then I got back on the sightseeing bus (tickets last for the entire day). This time, it was a different line that goes towards Kensington and Harrod's, and then over to the British Museum. I only did half the ride, though, because I had made plans by email to meet my friend Kate, who was in London this weekend with another study abroad program. Her group left today for 3 months in Salzburg. Her hotel was in the Hyde Park area, so I walked across the park. I found her hotel, and her, so we went to a nearby pub, got a pint of Strongbow, and visited for an hour. Then we walked through the park a little bit before I had to go take the Underground back to Paddington Station for my return train.
And now, we are starting the craziness of the final week- lots of papers and tests, me wanting to die. By Thursday, though, it will all be over- we will have our final High Table dinner, a free day in Oxford on Friday, and then Saturday it's off to Paris. We were supposed to be taking the Eurostar (the train that goes through English Channel by underwater tunnel), but that caught on fire a few days ago and is not working at the moment...
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