London

Sunny, 75 degrees F

8:00am - Met WISC group in front of Ashmolean Museum to catch motor-coach for London. Heavy traffic.

10:30am - Finally arrived in London. Began driving tour.

11:30am - We disembarked the coach and took a walking tour of the Westminster Abbey grounds. However, we did not go inside.  Admission is around £15, so we were rather glad of that fact.  We'll need to make the visit at some point though. Next we wandered past the WWII-era Cabinet War Rooms, where some of the ground would be returning to in the afternoon for a tour, and made our way over to Kensington Park. Lots of families and young couples out for a stroll on a warm summer day.  From there we proceeded to Buckingham Palace where we caught the tail end of the Changing of the Guards ceremony. Many decorations were being set up for Queen's Diamond Jubilee next weekend which will mark her 60th year on the throne.

Bailey calls the Queen collect.

Maroon Friday at Westminster Abbey, London

Member of the Foot Guards outside St. James Palace

Changing of the Guard, Buckingham Palace

 
12:00pm -  Walked to Trafalgar Square where we were dismissed for afternoon activities. Bailey, Hannah, Spencer, and I ate lunch at the Sherlock Holmes pub, a decent London establishment with a rather kitschy upstairs mock-up of the fictional detective's study. I had a beef and onion chutney sandwich with a side of Yorkshire pudding. Also, a decent but pricy ale.  The meal was quite good, but prices in the City take some getting used to.

Sherlock Holmes pub, London

Crossing the River Thames

River traffic on the Thames, London

2:30pm - After strolling over the River Thames and down the south bank, we arrived at Shakespeare's Globe, the modern reconstruction of the Globe Theatre, to attend a performance of Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew." However, we had been forewarned to expect a surprise. As part of the theater's World Culture Festival featuring 37 plays in 37 languages, this performance was to be in Urdu, the national language of Pakistan. The acting troupe made minor changes to the decorations and character names to reflect the cultural differences. Also, the company added Bollywood flourishes including an onstage house band with traditional Pakistani instrumentation and several choreographed dance numbers. Quite an experience!

Hannah nerds out at the Globe!

(l to r): Spencer Hall, Hannah Rogers, Bailey Hansen, and me at the Globe

And the band played on... Shakespeare's Globe, London

The "Taming of the Shrew" is about a strong-willed elder daughter and her family's plot to teach her her place and marry her off. Americans may be familiar with the 1999 film adaptation "10 Things I Hate About You" starring Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles.  The play's ending is funny but rather misogynistic. Some critics view the play as satirical, but we couldn't help but note that the mostly-Pakistani crowd seemed to respond well "whenever a woman was put in her place."  I certainly don't want to make generalizations about an entire culture, and I must emphasis that none of my friends nor I understood the Urdu version of the script. (At the time I may have claimed total fluency in Urdu to my friends as a joke, so don't tell anyone. Our secret.) I imagine a typical theater crowd would skew more liberal and/or more cultured than others, but the fact remains that this audience did go cheer wildly during several tense scenes.  I suppose all I can do is chalk it up to cultural differences.

"Taming of the Shrew" at Shakespeare's Globe

Even though we could not understand a word, the performance was incredibly engrossing. I suppose it's cliché, but in this case Shakespeare definitely transcends linguistic boundaries.