More from the land of Tea

More adventures from everyone's favorite American!!

Well a lot has happened since I last wrote so I better get right into it.  Last Fri Oct 28th the class took a trip to Cambridge, the place where learning was invented. 

This is a picture of the chapel at Kings College.  Caimbridge is  made up of several smaller colleges.  We walked around a few of them during the day, and learned a bit about the history of the place.  Around 5pm we all went to an Anglican service at this Church.  During the service I observed that the Catholics aren't  the only ones who love making people sit and stand randomly for an hour.  Nor do they have the market on boring sermons cornered.   I guess because the 2 churches are so similar, it just goes to follow that the services would be as well.

After that trip I laid low for the weekend.  Good thing too because this week was a busy one.  Mon and Tues were pretty normal days filled with scholastic activities and the occasional ale.  Not at the same time of course.  Teachers tend to get upset if you try to bring a pint to their lecture.  Wed was a pretty big day.  I started off at the Tate Britain Museum and spent a couple of hours looking at Turner paintings with my class.  I really enjoyed his darker moodier pieces.  I have never gone to too many museums back home, but I am really enjoying all  the trips we are making.  I will soon be so refined and cultured no one will recognize me.  Just call me Sir Chris.  After the museum we took a trip to the Harrow School.  This place was founded in 1605 and is one of the highest regarded boarding schools in London.  Churchill was educated here along with a few Prime Ministers

THese are the 2 crests of the school and the building above is the chapel.  All in all the school seemed like a pretty impressive place.  All you needed to get in was, the grades.  Oh and 50K a year.  For five years (13-18).  What a bargain.

The real excitment on Wed came in the evening.  The entire program went to see "Moon for the Misbegotten".  It's a Eugene O'Neill play and this production was starring Kevin (Kaiser Soze) Spacey himself.  It was playing at the Old Vic a nice little theatre. Anyways as soon as I sat down, we had great seats by the way 5th row center, someone told me to turn around.  I looked back about four rows and sitting there was Natalie (Princess Amadala) Portman.  I had better seats that a celebrity!  A few minutes later I noticed Sir Ian (Magneto, Gandalf) Mckellen was sitting a few seats to Portmans right.  I now had better seats that 2 celeb!  The play itself was incredibly.  More of O'neill's light and fluffy subject matter: depression, despair, alcoholism, hopelessness, despair, more alcohol.  THe last hour was pretty emotional.  I waited outside for a few minutes afterwards and got Kevins autograph along with Colm Meany.  You might not recognize the name but his face would be familiar.  He's an Irish actor who's been in Star Trek and Layer Cake.

Friday we took a trip up north to St Albans, home of the only English Pope in history, Nicholas Breakspere.  We visited another Cathedral and saw some Roman ruins.  I had a drink in a pub that was REBUILT in 1500.  Turns out the original was constructed in 1423 but burnt down.  The bar was called Ye Olde Fighting Cocks and was a Tudor roundhouse style building complete with a real log fire roaring in the fireplace.  Quite authentic although I don't think they served Nachos around the time of Henry the VIII.

I have to jet now.  I am off to Battersea Power station, the building pictured at the begining of this post.  The Pink Floyd fans out there will recognize it as the building on the cover of the album Animals.  It has been seen in Monty Python movies as well.  It sat abandoned for 20 years but recently it was sold and is going to be developed into a shopping center (sigh).  Oh well at least I am going to get to see the inside.  It has been closed to the public for 20 years and they only opened it up recently for a couple of weeks.  Talk about timing.