London Bound

At the beginning of last week, I made a trip to London to wrap up some unfinished business. The last time I made it there, I had a long list of places I wanted to see and not nearly enough time to fit it all in. So I made a final solo trip - there are just some places an English teacher has to go when she's this close to England!!

I just missed the Chinese new year celebration when I arrived, which was a bummer - Chinatown was festooned with red and gold banners, and everyone was snapping off firecrackers and walking around with inflated pig balloons (in honor of the year of the pig). I did manage to get a picture of myself amidst the waning of the frivoloties, but I'll have to wait to post that. It's on my friend Amy's camera, and she's definitely not in a place to be messing with downloading photos from her camera right now - more on that later . . .

My first day in London was a museum day - I went to the British Museum and the British Library. I'd wanted to see the British Museum ever since our trip to Greece - it has some of the best artifacts from the Parthenon, known as the Elgin Marbles. I was able to see those in additon to a ton of valuable Egyptian and Assyrian artifacts. I left the BM with a fresh perspective on ancient civilizations, and quite a few photos.

The British Library was an English teacher's dream - the earliest surviving published works of Shakespeare, as well as hand-written and edited manuscripts from Jane Austen, Lewis Carroll (illustrated too!), James Joyce, WB Yeats - there were tons more, I just can't remember it all right now. I also saw the Gutenberg Bible and the Magna Carta. Understandably, I couldn't take photographs, so I had to suffice with a photo of the outside building - the statue is of Isaac Newton.

On my second day I made a much-needed day trip to Stratford-upon-Avon to see Shakespeare's birthplace - that's his house below. There aren't many surviving public records pertaining to Shakespeare - nonetheless, I thought the museum there did a good job of presenting all known information. What I found interesting was seeing the difference in the home where he was born, and the place where his daughter lived later on. Shakespeare definitely did well in life! After reading about so many authors who died in poverty, it was refreshing to see that he apparently lived well off of his literary career.

I stayed with my friend Amy throughout the trip and met up with her in the evenings - she was a fabulous host. She's been working in London since early January, but since her husband is still in Dublin, she's had to commute back and forth on the weekends - no fun. Well, my visit happened to coincide with the day she accepted a job back in Dublin and quit her London job. Not a great time for a freewheeling visitor to drop in! We had a good time despite the tumult in poor Amy's life. She even took the time to make it to a West End show with me. We saw Porgy and Bess - not the greatest show I've seen, but there was some good music, and I loved just having the chance to see one of those shows again.

Well, that just about wraps up February. With one month to go in Dublin, we are keeping busier than ever - I'll do my best to keep the updates coming!