Stratford-Upon-Avon

After hearing all about J.K. Rowling in Edinburgh and all about Jane Austen in Bath, England, we next went to Stratford-Upon-Avon where we heard all about another famous writer William Shakespeare. Stratford is another quaint town in England and is also the birthplace to William Shakespeare. We got there Tuesday afternoon and checked into our hostel which was unfortunately 1.5 miles from the city's center. It was a different hostel from the others I have stayed at so far. It was an old house in a neighborhood on the outskirts of town. It wasn't as busy either, and most of the guests were families which was a first for my hostel experiences.

We didn't do much the first day but the second day we took a bus into town and started our day by visiting the graves of William Shakespeare and his wife Anne Hathaway. I had expected it to be a typical gravestone in the cemetery, but his grave is actually inside the church, right in front of the alter. Molly and I then walked along the river and saw little baby ducks and Stratford's swans. We stopped in the RSC Theater (Royal Shakespeare Company), looked through the gift store, and took pictures of the Swan Theater where Shakespeare use to put on his plays. Molly and I then walked over to the house where Shakespeare was born. We could havegone in but decided to check out Anne Hathaway's cottage instead. It was just a little outside of the city's center but didn't take too long to get to. It was a cute thatched house with a flower garden and a path through the woods. We spent a couple hours there and learned the random interesting fact that carrots weren't orange until after the 1700s. We then went back into town; and not knowing what else to do, we decided to check how much a ticket for a play would cost. It turned out that if we had asked when we had visited that morning we could have gotten a student rush ticket or something that would have gave us prime seats for only 5 pounds. Instead, we had to now pay a little bit more for limited view seats. But we didn't know what else to do, so we decided to go for it. We ended up buying tickets for Macbeth in the RSC Theater.

We went back to the hostel, dressed up nice and came back into town for supper and the play. The play started off slow and I had a horrible time understanding the dialogue. Then in the middle of the first half, the fire alarm went off. At first, everybody thought it was part of the play because they had been using lots of loud noises and earlier even set off some "explosions." We eventually did figure it out though and had to wait outside for a few minutes while they confirmed that nothing was engulfed in flames. After that the play started to pick up momentum and make more sense. Also, during intermission, Molly discovered that the actor playing the vicar was the bad guy's announcer in A Knight's Tale. It wasn't a really big role or anything but still fun to see someone you can recognize from a movie. The play was kind of morbid (definitely a tragedy) but had poetic justice at the end which I liked. In the end, I was glad we went to it and thought it was a perfect way to end our trip in Shakespeare. The next day we made our way back to Bangor and recuperated before we set out again, this time to Ireland with the whole program.