Everything Between Scotland and Wales

After returning from Scotland, it was time to hit the books with two assignments due the following week. Most of the time was filled with sleeping in and doing work, but I did take a break on Tuesday to meet Aubrey for a walking tour of London.

The tour we went on was "Somewhere Else" London, which focused on sites that you might not normally discover on your own. We walked around the South Bank a lot and probably the highlight of the tour was going to the top of the OXO Tower to get a view of the city:

One reason it was the highlight was because we got out of the crappy weather. Everyone wanted to linger inside, but we had to move on. We ended up by the Old Vic (which I will be going to next week) and Waterloo Station.

Aubrey and I then went to try and find the location where they filmed Grimmauld Place in the fifth Harry Potter movie. I had checked imdb.com for filming locations and we went to where it said it was, but couldn't find a house that looked exactly like it, but this one came close:We then decided to get out of the rain, so we headed into the nearest pub for a drink, where I had the best cider I've ever had and Aubrey had a whiskey and tea, which I want to try at some point.

The following weekend was the London weekend for other IFSA students studying outside of London, so I met up with Madison and went to see the Royal Shakespeare Company's final performance of Twelfth Night. We got front row seats for £5.


Yes, you read that right. Front row seats to the final performance of the Royal Shakespeare Company for only £5.

The show was amazing, but I kept making comparisons to the production we did at F&M. Being involved in a production gets you emotionally invested in it, so it is really hard to judge which is better, but there were parts where I preferred one show over the other. An example of this was the way they did the storm at the beginning of the show. The RSC just had a wave prop sitting in the back corner of the stage, on which they projected a video of waves while flashing the lights. At F&M, we had a much more intense storm where we not only flashed lights, but had thunder sound effects, waving pieces of blue and white cloth to simulate the waves, and the actors playing Sebastian and Viola moved around the stage as if they were being tossed on the waves.

That's all for now. Look for another blog post covering my trip to Wales in the next day or two, but for now, I give you this picture from the trip as a preview: