London, Day Ten

Today was an exciting finale for our English "holiday" as the British would say. We left the apartment early to head over to the Warner Brothers Harry Potter studio tour. This is seriously one of the coolest things I've ever done, although it did tear down the illusion of the magic the movies give off. It was strange seeing how a bunch of different things can add up to one big thing. Hogwarts, for example, was filmed bit by bit at tons of different cathedrals all over England. This is somewhat disheartening for me because I always liked to live in the fantasy of a real Hogwarts. I knew there wasn't one, obviously. Seeing all of the different places filming was done was just kind of sad for me, tearing the castle I had pictured in my mind apart, bit by bit.

Outside the entrance of the tour

Here is mom in front of the only "put together" view of Hogwarts that they used for filming. This was used for landscape shots of the castle. This is the largest scale model of Hogwarts. Definitely a sight to see.

On a lighter note, however, there were a bunch of cool sets still kept in tact from when they were last filming. I actually got to go into the great hall, which was a "hot set" meaning it was ready and set for filming; props in the correct location, lighting good to go, etc. Although, the entire ceiling for the great hall was done with CGI so there was no roof, but rather a bunch of piping instead. Like I said, the illusion of Hogwarts has been dismantled pretty solidly.

They had corners of the Great Hall set up with different house robes. Naturally, I had to have my picture with the Ravenclaw corner.

Casually taking a selfie in the Mirror of Erised

The Black family tapestry was a real tapestry. Not just some fake wall paper. Pretty cool.

The films hardly used any CGI animals. There were tons of owls and each of the more important animals had multiple animal actors portraying them. It is tricky to see in the photo but you can see pictures of the animals that played Fang, Crookshanks, Hedwig, and Mrs. Norris. Fang had nine dogs portraying him! All of the animals in these films were rescues as well and they found them good homes afterwards.

Me on the Hogwarts bridge

Diagon Alley was also very close to being a "hot set." You can see Weasley's Wizard Wheezes behind me in the distance.

We got to have some fun with green screen magic while we toured the studio. We learned that all of the quidditch/broomstick scenes were done in front of green screens, which was really fascinating to me. They had a green screen experience, which my mom and I happily participated in, putting us in the Ford Anglia and myself on a broomstick in Ravenclaw robes, no doubt. It was a lot of fun. I only wish my acting skills were better to make the video they took of me more realistic.
While I truly could have spent the entire day exploring this studio, we only had three hours of time there since we took a tour bus to the site. Unfortunately, I had to detach myself from the place before I would I have liked, but not without some delicious butterbeer.

Is there something on my face? That frosting was super yummy by the way.

Once we arrived back at the flat, we quickly changed into fancier clothes and made our way to a French restaurant called Balthazar for a reservation. The highlights of our meal were delicious escargot, one of my French restaurant staples and profiteroles for dessert. I was amazed that we managed to get a full course meal in before our show for the evening, but we pulled it off with full bellies.

The delicious escargot! Escargot is best in a garlic butter sauce

Profiteroles! Ice cream inside a puff pastry type thing with hot fudge drizzled over the top. Wow!

We made it to the theater just in time for our show, Stomp London. Let me tell you, this is one of the coolest things I have ever witnessed. If you find yourself in London and wanting to see a show, you cannot pass this up! Despite the cramped theater, there was rhythmical magic in the air that evening. No words were spoken ever. Only the occasional grunt. If you have any appreciation for percussion, then you would love this. The props the actors "stomped" with ranged from plastic bags to giant rubber inner tubes. Anything and everything on stage was used to make rhythm at one point. One of my particular favorites was a number they did with the opening, closing, and lighting of zippo lighters. I'm telling you, don't miss this show if you have the opportunity. I see myself in attendance again the next time I am in London for sure.

What a great day to top off our adventures in England. While it is sad to leave this amazing country tomorrow, I have a sneaking suspicion that this will not be my last visit to the UK. I am in love with everything about this place. Well, perhaps not the smoking habits of the people, but certainly everything else. I had the best time here and truly cannot wait until I can visit again. Until next time England, cheers!

London, Day Nine

Today has been one of my favorite days so far. I started the day by bringing out the geek in myself with a Harry Potter "Muggle" tour around London. This was a walking tour all around the city to some of the filming locations for the movies and other places that inspired J.K. Rowling while she was writing the books.

For example... Recognize this?

It's from the third movie after Harry has taken the night bus to the leaky cauldron. If you look at the third picture closely enough, you can tell it is the same wall, down to the white markings on the side. Obviously there was some CGI going on to turn it into the back entrance to the Leaky Cauldron

Here I am, hanging on every word of Harry Potter facts that our tour guide is giving us.

I even participated in a magic trick at the end of our tour.

A wand appeared out of thin air! If you want to know the secret, you will have to ask me to do the magic trick for you.

There was lots of Harry Potter trivia and we were even sorted into Hogwarts houses. I already knew I was a Ravenclaw, so there was no surprise when this was my result. Mom was sorted into Gryfindor. She knew this already as well. I found myself craving more Harry Potter at the end of our tour, which luckily I will be getting tomorrow, which you will read about when I post tomorrow's blog. In the meantime though, I didn't have much time to linger on my "magical" desires.

After our tour, we headed to Borough Market for lunch. There were lots of neat booths with international foods being prepared for lunch, but after a two hour walking tour, all we wanted to do was sit, so we picked a restaurant right on the edge of the market. I had an Irish beef brisket with "horseradish puffs" (still not exactly sure what else went into those besides horseradish) and golden beets. It was an entirely new meal to me, but everything was delicious.

We quickly peeked through the booths at Borough Market and sampled some delicious fudge, which we couldn't determine the exact flavor of. We didn't linger long though because we had other shopping destinations on our list for the afternoon. We snapped a quick picture and headed out to the next stop.

Our next stop was at Kings Cross Station. We wouldn't have stopped here but our Harry Potter tour guide was telling us that they had revamped the platform 9 3/4 picture stop since the last time we were in London and that they even had a gift shop. Naturally, we had to go back. I mean, gift shop, come on! Unfortunately, they now have a roped off line area next to the photo spot that looked to be at least 30 minutes long, so we headed straight to the shop, where I got some really neat stuff. First, I picked up a Ravenclaw scarf. I know we are just getting out of the cold, but it was so authentic looking and I had to show some house pride. Plus, it'll blend in well at school since the UK color and the Ravenclaw color is blue. The coolest purchase of the day was a poster in this shop though. It is a normal sized poster, yet the entire narrative of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's (aka, Philosopher's in the UK) Stone is printed on the poster. Literally the entire story. And you don't need a magnifying glass to read it in real life.

This is an image of my poster that I found online, so you have an idea what it looks like. I didn't want to unroll mine just yet.

After the Harry Potter store, we took the tube over to Oxford Street. There is a lot of really great shopping here. We even stumbled upon a little street off to the side called Carnaby Street that was cutely designed with cobblestone streets and pretty lights. We found a really eccentric shoe store on this street, where there were lots of heels with bright patterns and colors. We even saw some heels where the heel was a kitten. I wanted to take a picture, but the shop lady was looking at me and I didn't want to get yelled at if we weren't allowed to take pictures. I was tempted to buy them just because of my fondness for kitties, but my common sense persuaded me not to.

We poked around some of the other stores on Oxford Street for a while, but the real reason I was so determined to go there was because during my first experience in London on Oxford Street, we found a street vendor that had nutella waffles. This is the first and best nutella waffle I have ever had! Everybody doubted me in my search for this store this trip, despite the fact that I remembered exactly where the stand was located (directly across the street from Topshop on Oxford Street, right next to the Oxford Circus tube station). I was told that street vendors are constantly on the move and that it would almost certainly not still be there. Well it was. Lo and behold, the best nutella waffle in the world:

Once we were stuffed to the brim with delicious waffle (we each had to have our own), we quickly went through Harrods and picked up some chocolates to sample once our waffles digested (I know what you are thinking, but we can't help but be gluttonous sometimes) and headed back to the flat for the rest of the evening.

It felt like we were running all over the place all day, so we decided we wanted to have a relaxing night in, which began around 6 p.m. We ordered pizza from Zonzo for dinner (the same Italian restaurant that we ate at a few nights ago). I have enjoyed a nice night of catching up on my blog writing and looking up Harry Potter merchandise on multiple websites. Yes, the craze has begun again. It never really stopped, but it is especially revamped now. Luckily, I can continue to wallow in my obsession tomorrow because we are going to tour the Warner Brothers Harry Potter Studio, where we will see all sorts of set pieces and props from the movies. But more on that later.

London, Day Eight

Today was the day that hardly went according to plan at all. Mom and I went round and round last night about what our plan for today was going to be and we ended up switching just about everything around as we went along today. All that work for nothing.

So we originally planned on starting the day with the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. We knew we needed to get there early because, in the words of Rick Steve, "every tourist in London was there." There has never been a more accurate statement. It. Was. Packed. Mom had been to the changing of the guard during one of her previous trips to London, but she said she couldn't see anything so she didn't stay the whole time. She said from the spot we were at, we would only be able to see the guards enter Buckingham Palace, none of the cool stuff that happens inside the gates. We decided it wasn't worth our while to stay. Even if we did decide we wanted to see the guards enter, we would have had to wait for forty-five minutes just to see that. So we took a picture in front of the palace on our way out and headed to the next thing on our list.

Again, originally we planned a shopping day to follow watching the changing of the guard; we had a few specific places we wanted to go, not just shopping for the sake of shopping. Yet, it was a gorgeously sunny day. Mom and I had been looking into taking a double-decker bus tour tomorrow, but we decided to do it today instead since it had turned out to be such a beautiful day. We road the bus around, starting at Buckingham Palace, through the Westminster/Parliament area, all through the financial district of London and past the Tower of London, finally hopping off at Hyde Park to grab some lunch. Truth be told, I was kind of glad to get off that bus. While it was extremely interesting to learn about the different areas of London, it was certainly not a relaxing tour. The traffic in London, or any big city for that matter, is extremely chaotic. I could have sworn we were going to get into a wreck at least ten times and my body tensed up every single time we stopped. It was good to be walking on solid ground again after that ride.

Here is a picture I took of a cool dragon statue with the English coat of arms while on the bus tour

We grabbed lunch from a food place called Pret - A - Manger, which has premade sandwiches and other side items like chips. We decided to semi-picnic our lunch in the park, which was a gorgeous scene. They had chairs set up across the lawn (not free of course) that we sat in and just took in the greenery. The park was huge and surrounded by trees in a way that made you almost forget you were in the middle of a giant city. We enjoyed the generous sunlight of the day while we were in our chairs and just relaxed.

Lunch in Hyde Park with Mom

Once lunch was over, we hopped on the tube and went to the Baker Street area, to check out Daunt Books, a neat, old bookstore that has been kept up over the years. I didn't end up buying anything, but the store was very beautiful and had quite the selection of books.

We didn't linger long at the bookstore. We had a busy evening planned so we ran back to the flat and freshened ourselves up for what was sure to be a long and interesting evening.

We headed out of our flat around 4:30 to catch a train from the Waterloo station to Twickenham, England, where the beautiful Gothic mansion of Strawberry Hill awaited us. We arrived in the quaint town of Twickenham just in time for a quick dinner before our tour. We didn't realize just how quaint it was when we made plans to grab something to eat before we went to Strawberry Hill.
When we got off the train, we looked left and looked right and there was pretty much nothing. Just lots of houses. We popped into a local store that told us that the closest place to eat was a Thai restaurant called Sopa (which I could have swore was a Spanish word, not Thai...). The next closest options were about a 15 minute walk in the opposite direction of the house we wanted to tour, so Thai food it was.

The Thai restaurant had a weird schedule where they closed at 3:30 and then reopened at 6:00. We arrived at 5:45, where we could see the owners of the restaurant sitting at a table, presumably having dinner before they had to reopen. They kept looking at us, bewildered that anybody would actually be lined up outside of their restaurant, like we wanted to be the very first in line to eat their food this evening. If only they knew we were on a tight schedule.

Once we got in, the food was actually quite delicious. We were a little nervous to eat there. I had never had Thai food and my mom had only had it once, which was an experience she didn't enjoy. However, she had some pad thai noodles and I had some stir-fried prawns and steamed rice, which turned out to be delicious. We also ventured out to try their Thai banana pancake, which I have pictured below.

Apparently what made the pancake "Thai" was the greenness of it but it just tasted normal. We suspect food coloring.

We finished dinner just in time to head over to the Strawberry Hill mansion for our tour. I was particularly excited for this tour, for one because it was a twilight tour, which makes this Gothic building even more creepy and exciting, as it was originally intended to be, but also because this particular mansion was built and resided in by writer Horace Walpole in the 18th century. Horace Walpole is particularly famous as two things: being the son of Britain's first prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole and writing the first ever Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto. I had the pleasure to read this novel this past semester in my literature class and knew that the next time I visited London, I had to go see the place that inspired the novel. The story goes that Horace Walpole awoke one night from a terrible dream that a giant armored fist was bombarding his grand staircase. This put him into a writing frenzy and he spent the rest of the night writing details and ideas that would eventually turn into this book. There are many similarities between Strawberry Hill mansion and the castle (Otranto) that is featured in his book, obviously not by coincidence. Walpole's real masterpiece in life was his gorgeous home. He even wrote a guide book about it, which I received a free copy of during my tour, so that whenever people would visit him, they would notice every little detail and all the effort he put into to making his home a spectacular sight. It resided over 9 acres of beautiful gardens (most of which belong to a local university now) along the River Thames. It truly was a sight to see. I took lots of pictures.

This is the front of Strawberry Hill when we got there and there was still daylight outside

This is the front of it when we were leaving. See how the demeanor changes? Kinda spooky.

This is Horace Walpole himself. He did not display any portraits of himself in his house. Only family members. So this is one of the only likenesses I saw of him during my visit.

This was our favorite room in the whole house. Horace entertained his guests in this room. The design was based off of the queen's dressing chamber in Buckingham Palace. He had a knack for rich and royal design.

There was a lot of beautiful stained glass artwork throughout the house. Horace purchased each little stained glass oval individually and organized them into a larger window collection, like the one you see here, and put them all over the house. He spent an entire year's salary purchasing these tiny ovals. The people restoring the house are attempting to find all of the original stained glass pieces to put back into the house, which is why you see some blank spaces. There was a big sale about 100 years after Horace died where everything in the house, (paintings, furniture, everything) was sold in a grand 28 day sale. Everything was gone and the restoration company is working very hard to find everything and return the mansion to its original state. Only a few rooms have been successfully restored. I hope to return someday in the far future to see what kind of  progress they have made.

This was a great way to put a visual to the things I had been learning about this book throughout my literature class and could not have asked for a better way to top off my learning for the course. When the tour ended, it was 10 p.m., aka bed time. By the time we arrived back at our flat, it was 11. We quickly skyped my dad to check in with things at home, where I had him gather up the animals and put them in front of the camera because I miss my babies, and then we turned into bed, since we had another busy day quickly approaching us in the morning.

Our family Skype session, featuring sweet little Abe

London, Day Seven: Stonehenge and Bath

Today was quite the busy day. We got up at the early time of 7 am! I'm pretty sure I haven't gotten up that early since high school. We said a quick goodbye to my dad, who was heading back to the U.S. this morning and then scurried out the door to get to our tour bus for the day. We had an all day trip to Stonehenge and Bath planned for today.



With only a little confusion on where to pick up our coach at Victoria Coach Station, we made it with ten minutes to spare at 8:50 a.m. I got some pretty hard z's on our way to Stonehenge, our first stop. I usually don't sleep well on planes or buses, any form of transportation really. I was pretty exhausted from a late night of blogging though, so the nap time was more than welcomed.

Me, in front of our bus for the day

Stonehenge, which is in the town of Salisbury, is about two hours from London. Once we arrived, we were informed that we would have two hours to tour the place and meet back at the bus at 1 p.m. With this in mind, we decided we didn't have time to see the little museum by the main visitors center, but we did get to see the historical phenomenon itself, and I must say, it is breathtaking.

Stonehenge was thought to be built in about 2500 BC, which is the late Neolithic period, possibly by Celtic Druids (ancient priests that we're living in Britain the time the Romans arrived in AD 43).
The main theory is that this was a domain of the dead for the Celtic ancestors and a place to worship them. The giant stones weigh up to seven tons each and were thought to be brought from over 19 miles. Another theory states that they might have drug the stones over rolling timbers and down rivers to transport them. They also said something about bringing in blue stones from Wales that were thought to be special because they transported them especially far. They all looked grey to me though.

After we circled around the site, we hit the gift shop, grabbed some lunch from the cafe, and headed back to our bus, where we proceeded for another hour to Bath.

A view of the Avon river and the iconic Pulteney Bridge from our bus on the way into Bath

Immediately upon arrival, we realized that the allotted time of two hours was not going to be enough time to tour the city. We looked into to taking the train back to London instead and decided that that was the better option. So with that in mind, we told our guide that we would be skipping the bus back to London and headed off to do our own thing.

Our first stop was the Roman baths. This was quite a sight! I can't believe that these pools are linked to continually flowing hot water from a water spring way below the ground. That is just amazing to me!

A plaque explaining how the pools worked

The architecture was gorgeous and the pools were actually warm! I stuck a finger in to test it out but there was a lot of algae growing in them now. It is not a place you would want to bathe any longer. There was the main pool in the center of the complex and then there were two smaller pools off to the sides. They also had "warm" rooms, which served as saunas. The steam from the springs heated these rooms. It was like an ancient spa resort. Crazy.

Mom in front of the main pool on the upper level

You can't see me very well but I am sitting to the right of the pillar that is furthest to the right

 After we left the baths, we headed straight to The Pump Room, which was connected to the bath building. The Pump Room is neat because it was a popular tea lounge over two hundred years ago. I had just finished reading Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen for my literature class this past semester, which is set in Bath, so this room was especially exciting for me because the characters in the novel spent a lot of time socializing during tea in the very same setting. I loved being able to put Northanger Abbey into a visualization. It brings on an entirely new perspective of the novel, which was very exciting.

The famous Pump Room

Mom and I sampled the tea and scones while we were there. They were quite tasty if I do say so myself. We can't get enough of that clotted cream. I will miss it when we head home.

Speaking of Jane Austen, we decided to set off to the Jane Austen Center next, which was a little museum in a local house, dedicated to her life and works. Northanger Abbey is not the first Austen novel I have read and it certainly won't be the last. I decided this museum was a must-see for the budding fanatic in me.

Me next to a statue of Jane Austen

While I learned lots of things about the life of Jane (such as the fact that she was only engaged once and it was only for one day), really the most exciting part of the museum was talking to the girls that worked there. The two I spoke with were both college students at the local university, so naturally we had lots of things in common. In fact, one of the girls was the same age as me and also an English major with a focus on creative writing and wanted to go into publishing once she graduates, just the same as me. We had a wonderful conversation about books and classes and where we want to be after college. It was just glorious. I could tell we would be friends if we lived near each other.

After the Jane Austen Center, we decided we ought to look into an earlyish dinner and then head back to London. We came across a restaurant called Sotto Sotto, which I am guessing means 'basement' in Italian because the restaurant was two staircases below the ground in a neat cavern-like setting (and also the Spanish word for basement is 'sottono' which is strikingly similar).

If you visit Bath and like Italian food, be sure to eat at Sotto Sotto

I had the salmon in a delicious mustard-cream sauce and mom had the penne alla vodka, her favorite. It was a wonderful meal, down to the last bite. We rubbed our bellies the whole train ride back to town and went to bed as soon as we got home, exhausted from our long, yet extremely productive day.

London, Day Six: Windsor

Today, we started the day with delicious chocolate croissants. I am curious how many of them I have had now on this trip. I have lost count. After breakfast, we headed to Paddington Train Station to catch a train out to Windsor Castle. Windsor Castle is the Queen's residence whenever she is not at Buckingham palace. It was about a 30 minute train ride out of the city to get there. 

We arrived just in time to watch the changing of the guard processional leave the castle gates. There was a nasty policeman who was screaming at people to stay out of the roads before the little parade started. He seemed very bitter about life and took his job a little too seriously. I didn't dare step into the street until the processional had passed and was way down the road.

We poked around in some shops for a little while until it was lunchtime. Mom had been raving about Wagamama since the plane ride over, so we decided to give it a go. I had some delicious fried rice with chicken and prawns (shrimp).

My meal. It's sideways, sorry.

Me and my (waga)mama.

I have noticed that there are a lot of really great food chains over here that really need to expand to America. Here is a list of my top three, along with a short description:

1) Patisserie Valerie - A bakery/place for other delicious treats. I have a hard time believing this is a chain because the pastries taste so homemade and fresh. We have made many trips here.
2) Nando's - A Portuguese restaurant that is famous for their "Peri Peri" sauce. It is delicious over chicken. See my post from yesterday to learn more about it.
3) Wagamama - A Japanese restaurant that serves everything from rice dishes to yakisoba. Everything is huge though so don't go crazy with the appetizers or anything.

I have also noticed a lack in the better food chains of America. No wonder the Brits are rumored to hate us. The majority of American restaurants they have are McDonalds, KFC, and Subway! I will say, I did see a Five Guys, which is a step in the right direction. However, for any British readers I may have, here are suggestions for some better American chains.

1) Olive Garden - A delicious Italian restaurant. The salad and breadsticks are the best part and they come with every meal!
2) Jimmy John's - WAY better than subway. The bread has a way better flavor and they have freaky fast delivery.
3) Raising Cane's Chicken - No words can do this justice. As long as you don't mind the feeling of your arteries clogging as you eat, this place is like chicken heaven. Some of my Indiana readers may not know what this is, since we sadly don't have them there. Next time you are in Kentucky, venture down and try it. And get extra Cane's sauce! You will need it.

Back to England and what I was doing today, after lunch at Wagamama, we wandered down to the River Thames, where we found a pack of swans. Apparently they just chill by the docks all the time because the gift shop next to it sold swan food. Naturally, we bought some and had a good time feeding them. They were quite friendly. One of them seemed to be following me a little too closely. I ran away like the scaredy cat that I am.

"Feed the birds...

... tuppence a bag...

... tuppence... tuppence...

... tuppence a bag."

I couldn't help but throw in a little Mary Poppins tune into those captions. It was stuck in my head the whole time. Although the bags were actually two for a pound, so we should maybe change the lyrics to "feed the birds, fiftypence a bag"After we fed the birds, we purchased yet another snack. We had heard that there is a delicious ice cream treat from Rick Steve's called 99p, which is a vanilla cone with a flake bar in it. We came across this delicacy today at an ice cream shop at Windsor Castle by the docks, and let me tell you, it is not all its cracked up to be. I am a serious lover of flake bars and I have got to say that I was not impressed. We each had our own cone anyways and ate the whole thing, despite our lack of impression.

We finished up our ice cream just in time for a two hour long river boat tour up the Thames and back. I've got to tell you though, I wasn't impressed with this either. It was rather cold and most of the scenery consisted of trees that lined the river. The highlight of this excursion was purchasing hot chocolate from the bar inside and drinking it slowly in a completely closed in room, away from the wind. We did get a few photos though.

 After our boat ride, we hopped on the train back to London (with a delicious snack thanks to Cafe Nero and Patisserie Valerie)...

This is the best eclair I've ever had!

 ... and headed to dinner at an Italian restaurant called Zonzo. Strangely enough, this was not our first time eating at this restaurant. We were in our flat and collectively decided that Italian food sounded good for dinner. So we started searching Italian restaurants in the area on our phone maps. A restaurant named Zonzo comes up and it sounds pretty good and has positive reviews, so we walk there since it is only about a five minute walk from our flat. As soon as we get there, we immediately realize that we had picked this place out to eat the first time we came to London two years ago. Imagine that. There are over 16,000 restaurants in London and we randomly pick one that we had already been to before. Same location and everything. In fact, it was even the same table. How weird is that?

We scarfed down some salad and lasagna and called it an early night. We headed back to the flat for another episode of Game of Thrones (we are officially caught up now, so there are no more episodes to watch) and are now heading to bed. Dad is leaving early tomorrow morning (sadly, although I think he is ready to be home) and we have to be at a pickup station at 8 in the morning for our day trip, so an early bed time it is.