I’m sure most frequent travelers have a good story about a kooky tour guide, and I found mine in Trudy, my tour guide on this day trip. Trudy seems like the type of woman who has purple wallpaper and twelve cats named after Tolkien characters. I’ll never be able to convey via this blog how odd this woman was, but I can tell you she said, “Thanks very much indeed” about 5,000 times throughout the day. For this daytrip I was a lot less tired. I had the chance to see the English countryside as we made our way to Oxford. We even rode through the Cotswald region and saw some original thatched roofed houses, which immediately reminded me of high school and Homestar Runner. Also, the houses looked just like Rose’s house in The Holiday, the classic Christmas rom-com that I watched three days in a row when I was sick over Christmas.
It was too cold in Oxford for me to even look around. Most of my time was spent imagining my Uncle Tom here when he studied abroad in college. I love the idea of all the colleges and their separate campuses all stacked on top of each other, but how they interact is still a mystery to me. However, I did get a picture in front of a building that was in Harry Potter.
Stratford-upon-Avon was the real attraction of the day for me. My days performing Shakespeare are long behind me, but I still have a great love for his works. One of the best course I took at Berkeley was Shakespeare (English 117S) with Janet Adelman. She enlightened me to the true meaning behind some of the most famous lines in Anglophone theater. Reading Hamlet in her course was a particularly illuminating experience. We walked through Shakespeare’s birth home, reading the carved signatures of famous visitors in the glass of the china cabinet, and feeling the pelts and leather set up in Shakespeare’s father’s glove workshop. I felt a deep longing for performing again.
The Garden at Shakespeare's Home
Lunch was a Marks & Spencer picnic of English cheeses, wheat buns, and a lovely view of the Avon river. There was the cutest Border collie that looked just like my old dog Molly. I snapped a picture and the dog gave a smile. I loved Stratford-upon-Avon, even if I only got a quick peek. The last stop on the tour was Warwick Castle, which looks majestic from a distance and tacky up close. This place is owned my Madame Tussand, so unfortunately for me, it was full of wax statues. I am extremely phobic of wax statues and fake human beings of any kind, so I mostly stayed in the courtyard watching a horse carriage that looked like a hearse. When we left, I was more than happy to head back to London.
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