Living La Vida London: Day 12

As of today, I am about half way through with my adventures here in London. It's bittersweet, to be completely honest. I will miss the rhythm of the city and how wonderfully different it is over here, but I miss my family and friends... and American chocolate, Dr. Pepper, and the food from home. But it's not over yet, so there's no need to get all sentimental.

Today. Well, today I gave a very tedious presentation on the Battle of the Pelennor Fields from Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, and it was honestly a very exhausting undertaking. My class is all about fantasy works of literature, yes, but it's also a lot more involved than I really anticipated. There's a lot of work and thought that has to go into each discussion, presentation, and paper you produce and it's all to be done in a very short amount of time! I will say that I enjoy the pace at which we're going, I simply don't like having to go this pace in a country that I would rather just explore as opposed to study in.

I also had to read a short-ish novel after class that was inspired by a place I am seeing with my class tomorrow. That was also quite a lot to do in a short amount of time, but I finished it. My professor is awesome, though. I have honestly never met another person like him; he's the sort of person that I would want following my around the UK simply so that he could tell me all the wonderful minute details of everything I was seeing, and so that he could also show me places and things that I would not otherwise see. Needless to say, we will be facebook friends after this course is through with.

So what did I actually do today? I saw "The Woman in Black" and it was marvelous. I've read the book, seen the movie, and have now seen the play that has been running for 25 years! Just as many years as my parents have been married! This work is one of my many favorite things and I was very excited to see it. Also terrified. Extremely terrified. This is a sort of ghost story that is portrayed by two main actors and one uncredited woman who plays the ghost in the production. I was never more ready to be scared in my entire life, and I was scared... pretty badly.

But before the production even began, I used the restroom just as any responsible theatre-goer would. And the restrooms were the smallest I've ever used. I could barely turn around in the stall let alone pull up my pants. The funniest part of this whole ordeal is that when you looked up, you could see where people were standing on the sidewalk!

 This is the opening set of the production- it was done in a very minimalistic way. This actually added to the terror that filled you basically every moment of the play. You knew something was going to happen, it was just a matter of when or how.

The actors were marvelous as well and again, I had the pleasure of meeting one of them and having this photo taken by the kind door man. As I reviewed my pictures while they were uploading, I noticed that  Tim Delap (the man in this picture) looks very similar to my favorite Olympian Ryan Lochte. I'll just let that observation rest there.






So I'm off to an interesting home called Strawberry Hill tomorrow, not to be confused with Strawberry Fields way up north. I'll make it to Liverpool one of these days but probably not this time around. I'll save it for when my family hops over the pond with me. Maybe next time we'll even go to Scotland (so I can fulfill my dream of becoming a Scottish person) and Ireland so I can see Ireland.