Stratford-Upon-Avon

Today we went to Stratford, which ended up being rather anti-climatic. The most looked-forward to trip of the term, and it was probably the most disappointing. We got there around 3:30pm and went to the Shakespeare Musuem and toured Shakespeare's Birthplace. Afterwards everyone compared dumb facts acquired from the museum, such as "Shakespeare left his sword to his neighbor in his will" or "Shakespeare may have passed through Buckingham on his way to London" or "milk maid- a maid who milks cows" or "this lock may have been in Shakespeare's house, although it post-dates his time there." (These are all "true" facts that were mentioned at some point during our touring.) It didn't take us more than an hour to get through everything, but by then it was dark. And according to our itinerary the next 3 hours were for us to explore the town. We tried to see Shakespeare's grave, but the church closes at 4. In fact, like every other English town all of Stratford shuts down by 5, so we pretty much walked around in the dark and ate dinner until it was time to see the play. We had tickets for Julius Caesar, which turned out to be a modern version. In other words, same play, same script, but the guys wore suits and leather. The acting was good, but I didn't like the play. I wanted to see Shakespeare the real way. Plus there's something weird about seeing scrawny, pale British men play these great Roman characters. The worst part of all was this random singing/dancing number with these two girls. Definitely was not in the original script. They also did a lot with video and sound effects that sounded like a skillet being dropped or even better this techno-cricket noise they kept interjecting. I was starting to get annoyed. But I really liked how the theater was set up, there's only two rows of chairs, and it goes up 3 floors, so everyone can sit pretty close. Stratford looked like a really neat town, lots of tudor style buildings, so hopefully I can come back sometime when it's not dark.