I’m currently delighting in the fact that I have an uninterrupted two hours to write and relax. I have not had this much free time in the past two weeks. Seriously. Being at Wroxton has become the busiest time of my life!
Where last I left off, I was about to start classes, with a trip to the theater scheduled for Tuesday of that week. The trip was for one of my English classes. Just the day before we had a first class session and dove into a crash course of the play we were going to see, The Seagull by Anton Chekhov. Talk about being thrown into the deep end. We read through as much of the play as we could in class before seeing it at the Crescent Theatre in Birmingham. My whole class of five people all enjoyed the play, which was very good with enough interesting production choices to give us plenty to debate in the car ride home. We were also informed by our teachers that it’s a favorite British tradition to have ice cream at the interval (intermission) of shows when they go to the theater, and my classmates and I happily partook.
After this, I was able to spend a quiet weekend at the Abbey as the rest of my class went on a three day trip to London. I spent a lot of time making better friends with Pip the Wroxton Cat and exploring the building, hunting down the laundry room in the basement and trying to get my bearings in all the crisscrossing, interwoven hallways. I also got to have bangers and mash for dinner one night, crossing an item of my list of British foods to try.
On the Monday following that weekend, the whole school went out to a football game, which was an experience for the ages. The Wolverhampton Wanderers faced down Newcastle United. Now, being the daughter of a huge NFL fan and a former cheerleader for a high school whose team was horrendous but whose fans were tremendous, I thought I knew sporting events inside and out, but I was absolutely not prepared for this game. British football is on a whole other level.
For starters, we were told that we would be sitting in the section for the home team, Wolverhampton. “What do you mean, sections?” you may ask. So did we. There are very defined, separate sections of seating inside the football stadium for supporters of both the home and away teams, even going so far as to have different entrances for both groups of fans. Why’s that? Because it’s so likely that fights will break out if fans encounter each other that they’re kept entirely separated. So much so, in fact, that we were warned not to wear black and white striped clothing, because that’s what the Newcastle United jerseys looked like, and it was likely to cause problems if we were in the Wolverhampton seats wearing Newcastle colors. We were encouraged to wear yellow for the Wanderers. Since I don’t own a single yellow shirt, I decided to go with a nice safe blue, only to discover once we arrived that the away uniforms for Newcastle are a very similar shade of blue to what I was wearing. I zipped my jacket up pretty quickly, and that’s just the stuff that happens before the game starts.
On the walk from the parking lot through town to the stadium, we were surrounded by fans cheering like crazy for their teams and various favorite players. Not just the kind of cheers Americans are used to either, with everyone just sort of yelling in cacophony together. There were at least a dozen or so of these chants that every single fan seemed to know. They were all shouting them in unison as we marched into the stadium, and all throughout the game as well. Once everyone was settled in their seats, there was then a lightshow once the players finished warming up, complete with about six waving flags and a tarp on the center of the field held up by almost twenty people, all complete with the Wolverhampton mascot. After that, the song Hi Ho Silver Lining was played, which was fairly normal until the chorus, when the music cut out and the whole stadium shouted “Hi Ho, Wolverhampton!” in place of the titular hook. I tried to snag a video of this, finding it was tough to hold back laughing for long enough. I recommend you look it up on YouTube. Never in my life have I seen light shows, practiced chants, and theme songs at a professional sports game besides this one. It was ridiculously fun. Wolverhampton ending up tying the score one to one in the last four minutes, and their fans left the stadium proclaiming it was as good as a victory.
Following that Monday night, there was a full week of classes, then on Friday we took a trip to Bath. What’s in Bath? I’ll give you a minute to guess.
The drive to the city was long but lovely, and even in February the hills of England are just as rolling and green as you’d want them to be. It’s easy to tell that all of the Jersey kids are unused to being out here in the country, and if you want an example, you should see our reaction when we pass a field full of sheep. The novelty has yet to wear off, and you can hear the volume and excitement rise in the bus every time we drive by one. The only kids I’ve seen not be impressed by that sight I know for a fact to be from Pennsylvania.
The first thing we did upon arriving in Bath was to tour the Roman baths that earned the city its title of a World Heritage Site. Visitors are warned not to touch the water in the pools we visit, which are untreated and lined with lead, but you can feel the heat rising off them just by standing near them. One of the pools even visibly bubbles and steams. We got to see relics from the temple to Sulis Minerva that once stood on the site, including curses that people inscribed on lead tablets to beg the goddess to smite people that had wronged them, usually the nameless thief that had stolen the person’s bracelet or bathing tunic. Good to see that people have been petty since the dawn of time. At the end of the tour, there’s a fountain from which you can drink still-warm water from the hot spring itself (not the lead-lined pool). The first sip tastes like licking a rock. The third sip tastes like licking a very old egg. Now that I’ve done it and satisfied my curiosity, I don’t believe I’ll be going back for more.
The famous Roman baths, photo creds to Clare. 
The baths from the upper terrace.
We ate lunch at a little back-alley pizza place called Dough, which I didn’t protest to mainly because I was too hungry to think. Pleasantly, though, the pizza wasn’t bad, and the table split a Dolce pizza (Nutella on a chocolate crust with fruit and whipped cream) for dessert. There were no leftovers from that.
After lunch, we visited the Bath Abbey, one of many exquisite churches in this part of the world. The ceiling is the main star of the show in this building, along with some wonderful stained glass windows. What really caught my attention, though, was the dozens and dozens of graves, dedications, and markers that cover the floor and walls. Some of them are so old or worn down that they’re impossible to make out (although the Abbey is currently running a restoration project that meant we couldn’t enter the front half of the room). The graves range from enormous ones with statues for bishops and wealthy lords’ wives to tiny plaques on the wall, dedicated by children to lost mothers, by parents to three daughters who died before they turned twenty-five, or to children no older than four. You can’t take two steps through the church without walking over someone’s grave, and it seems only right, in a way, to make out what they had to say to the living.
The Abbey’s exterior in the morning. 
Exquisite ceilings in the afternoon.
After leaving the Abbey, we spent the rest of the day wandering through Bath, which is another city that’s so pretty it seems fake. What I noticed more than anything is that there’s an abundance of street musicians here, more than you would see even in a place like New York, and they’re all talented. There’s a certain feeling of having background music wherever you go. My favorite was an older man in a suit and hat singing swing tunes into an old-fashioned microphone. Our last treat was a little gelato (billed as Italian Ice Cream) before we headed back to school.
Saturday was a trip to London, mainly for the purpose of seeing Edward II performed in the Sam Wanamaker Theatre next door to The Globe. I was personally grateful, despite my love of Shakespeare and desire to see the inside of his theater, to be in the Wanamaker, because it was a chilly and fairly gray day, and The Globe is outdoors.
The theater we were in is a reproduction of a Jacobean theater, and it is easily the most beautiful one I’ve ever been in. The entire room is lit only with candles, lit and extinguished by characters at various points of the performance so that by the dark ending of the play, the theaters is similarly dim. It’s small enough that the actors wear no microphones, and they pop through doors all around the room and charge through the audience at times, even going so far as to climb across benches of people to the stage. I’ve never seen a show quite like this one and doubt I ever will again. I really do feel privileged to have been able to sit in that theater and watch that performance.
Other things we did in London included lunch at Nando’s (a Portuguese chicken restaurant chain that was the subject of many memes in recent years) and dinner at a little burger joint with amazing rosemary-salted fries. We killed some time waiting for the bus in a bookstore, where I gave up on self-control and purchased a copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone that is Ravenclaw themed. Speaking of Harry Potter, we had to cross the Thames in order to reach the theater, and our method of doing this was the Millennium Footbridge, which is attacked by Death Eaters in the sixth Potter film. I’m sure there are other important things about it, but that’s the only one I know of.
Sunday was a visit to Stratford-upon-Avon, the birthplace of William Shakespeare. Pursuits of the Bard are a good portion of the reasons I came to England in the first place, so I was very excited for my first Shakesperience.
The first thing we went to in Stratford was Anne Hathaway’s cottage, where she lived prior to becoming Shakespeare’s wife. The farmhouse is very nice and wonderfully preserved, but the real star is the gardens outside, which were in good shape even given the time of year. There’s even an arbor with a bench inside and a speaker that plays some of Shakespeare’s most romantic sonnets on command. Almost the entirety of the Wroxton class was waiting to go into the cottage behind about five people, and one of the tour guides came out to inform us that she’d be making her little speech to us before we went inside, rather than in stops along the way, so that we could all go through at a quicker pace. The way she worded herself made it seem like she was letting us go in ahead of the small group in front of us, and one of the people in said group started to get annoyed and told the tour guide it wasn’t acceptable for them to be made to go after such a large group. The tour guide responded by drawing herself up and saying very loudly “This is Britain, my dear, we form a queue! And the first in the queue goes first!” The guy who spoke up might have been embarrassed, but we were all dying of laughter.
The outside of the cottage. 
A strange structure to be found in the garden. Photo creds to Clare. 
Hints of spring. Photo creds to Clare.
After leaving Anne Hathaway’s house, we made our way into the center of town, where I had a pasty for lunch (another item off my British foods list). We spent some time wandering around into a bunch of cute little shops, including a tea store, a teddy bear store, a crystal store, and one called Alohomora that basically amounted to being the nerd store where you could buy anything related to Harry Potter or Game of Thrones. We also ran into a few of those “living statue” performers, one who was probably King Lear and one who was “Shakespeare’s Ghost” standing right outside his house. He tried to startle us as we went past, but luckily we’d been expecting a jumpscare and he didn’t get us.
A spinach and ricotta pasty for lunch. 
The ghost of Shakespeare waiting to scare visitors.
Finally we got to the house where Shakespeare was born and grew up. There was a museum section before we went in with lots of relics from his life, portraits and ancient copies of his various folios. The house itself was a lot like Anne Hathaway’s, creaky floors and low beams and not a flat surface in the entire building, but it was really incredible to be in a space where someone so iconic spent their time. Outside there was a small stage where actors were coming out to perform bits of Shakespeare for whoever chose to stay a while as they exited the house. We stuck around for a bit of Romeo’s speech before the balcony scene, and after that the actor pulled a skull out of nowhere and we just had to stay for “Alas, poor Yorick” and the bit of Julius Caesar he did afterwards.
Shakespeare’s birthplace. 
A copy of the First Folio. 
A bit of Hamlet performed outside the Bard’s house.
Aside from the gift shops where the only thing I bought was an eraser that said “Out, damned spot,” that was the end of our day in Stratford-upon-Avon. It was a busy week and a busier weekend, but I’m glad I didn’t skip out on anything. Every day I spend here really is a once in a lifetime experience, and this past week or so has absolutely proved that. This coming week I’ll be seeing several more plays and then spending the weekend in Paris. I look forward to it and I hope you all look forward to reading about it! That’s all for now!
Meghan McGowan 
I have been enjoying reading your posts!!
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