England #1--Touristing

Hello Everyone!

So, I've taken just about forever to find a time to e-mail haven't I...Sorry.

To start at the beginning: I left Ohio with my mum and my grandma at approx. 7:20 on the Evening of Sunday Sept. 3rd, and arrived at about 7:00 a.m. on Monday Sept. 4th. That's about 2:00 a.m. Ohio time. Not surprisingly I was rather tired on my first day of sightseeing.

On Monday we saw Big Ben (the huge clock tower), the parliament buildings, and Westminster Cathedral. Westminster is a huge building, and its totally packed with statues and memorials to probably over a hundred different people, including quite a few royalty. Its amazing how much history is held in that one building.

After visiting Westminster we went to Trafalger's Square and visited an art museum there for about 20 minutes (we just wanted to see the impressionist paintings). We then rode on a double-decker bus to get down to Herrod's. We got to ride right in the front, so we felt like we were about to crash everytime the bus stopped. Herrod's is about the biggest store you can imagine. It has huge departments for perfumes, jewelry, shoes, even handbags. It also has amazing food halls that are spread between at least 4 rooms. We managed not to spend too much money there (the stuff is both good quality and expensive). We just bought a few delicious danish's (they were a plum danish and a pear danish).

We went home after that and I was in bed by about 5:00 in the afternoon. I woke around seven in the morning, so all of you were still asleep (expect possibly Marc).

On Tuesday our big activity was to go to the Globe Theatre. First we went to a market. Annoyingly, I really can't remember what it was called. Later we caught a bus towards the globe theatre, but left the bus too early, so we walked for quite a bit. We took a tour of the globe theatre, which was quite good. The tour guide was one of the best that I, or even my mum, had ever had. The tour told a lot about the history of Shakespeare's theatre, incl. how he started at the Rose theatre and eventually switched to the Globe theatre, and that the Globe theatre has not been rebuilt on the exact spot that the first one was at, because there are other buildings in the way.

We saw Comedy of Errors after the tour, and we had paid for tickets to be groundlings. This meant that we had to stand for the two hours on the floor in front of the stage. We got in line early enough that we were able to find space right along the stage to stand, so we could lean with our elbows on the stage. It was really awesome to be close enough to see the actors expressions and the nuances of their costumes. I found it amusing that the Duke's purple shoes were only painted tennis shoes. the play was quite good, though we were very tired of standing by the end of it.

After seeing the rest of Globe Theatre, we did a little more sightseeing. We walked down the Thimes(?) River to get to the footbridge across. At the footbridge we were able to look at some peregrin falcons who were nesting on the top of a building. Quite a coincidence, that. We saw some of St. Paul's Cathedral, but the front of it was being refinished, so we only saw a great big sheet that looked like St. Paul's. (St. Paul's is where the "Feed the birds" woman sat in the movie 'Mary Poppins,' by the way). We also saw the outside of the Tower of London, and some of the roman wall. We then went home and had dinner.

Wednesday morning we started heading towards Yorkshire. The only thing I want to mention in this e-mail is that we stopped at King's Cross station to see platform 9 and 3/4. I have a picture of me going to visit Harry Potter that i will send in a separate letter.

Lovely. This letter is long enough, so i will send a separate one on Yorkshire and eventually on falconry. (Don't worry, you'll be hearing a lot about falconry by the time I'm done in England).

~Nettie