National Theatre, more theatre, Stonehenge and Bath

Stonehenge..and the sun!

Thursday: As part of my theatre class, we got to go on a backstage tour of the National Theatre. It's along the "embankment" area of the Thames. The tour was super interesting--we got to see two of the three theatres in the complex. We went backstage in the biggest theatre (the Olivier) and got to see parts of the set for the current show (called "Nation"). We also got to see where they construct most of the sets for the shows, which is pretty unique to that theatre. We also got to see parts of old sets/masks/etc, including part of a horse from the show "War Horse."
In social welfare issues we watched parts of the movie Sicko (which pretty much blasts American healthcare), and I no longer want to live in America. I also went to involvement fair for Imperial and desperately want to join the hiking club, but they seem really hardcore (trainers=not acceptable, and I don't even have hiking boots at home).
Thursday evening I saw a really interesting play, "I am Yusuf and This is my Brother," which is about the partition in Palestine. I don't know how I feel about it. A good portion of the play was in surtitles (subtitles...but above the stage) when the characters were speaking Arabic, and it was so obvious that it had been so simply translated.

Friday wasn't too exciting--just class and grocery shopping.

Saturday I woke up at the even more atrocious hour of 6:20AM to get on the bus at 8AM to go to Stonehenge and Bath. It was COLD. During the bus ride our tour guide told us a huge amount of information about Stonehenge. For example...the Druids DID NOT build it. They used it, but that was about 2,000 years after it had been built. And of course basic history--the stones came from over 20 miles away when they had no use of the wheel, and they have no idea why they built it (maybe for a variety of worship reasons), the summer solstice sunrise lines up exactly with the stones, etc. Or, for the simpler theory, it's where the mothership lands. I wasn't disappointed when I first saw it, probably because so many people had told me not to get my hopes up. It's bigger than I thought it would be. You can't actually go up to the stones, though, because a while back people graffitied it or something, but you can get relatively close.

Bath!

We drove about an hour longer to get to Bath, which is a gorgeous town. I kept forgetting I was in England because it looks SO Italian, which makes sense with the huge Roman influence. We went on a tour of the museum of the Roman baths and got to see remnants of the original baths and see the ones that still exist (but are not used! ew) today. A lot of people believed in the healing powers of the baths--some royalty even went there when they were having trouble conceiving, etc.
After the museum we had free time to explore the rest of the city, so we walked around the shops, enjoyed some of the best hot chocolate in existence, and explored some of Bath Abbey. I didn't get to see the Jane Austen museum, but I'm okay with that, since she apparently hated the place for the five years she lived there.
I'll be adding pictures soon! Saturday was sunny all day (which made me feel like I was in a different country even more).

It's hard to believe that I have midterms in almost all of my classes this week. Ugh.