Day 3 -- London to Oxford

The reconstructed Globe Theatre – let me just say “wow.” Okay, Shakespeare would have done a helluva lot better in iambic pentameter and the whole nine yards, but this is a blog and, besides, it’s past my bedtime. I had this weird cognitive dissonance sitting there within the theatre, thinking both “Whoa, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre – awesome!” and “Hey, that’s where Judy Dench stood in Shakespeare in Love.” It was sort of my retro and modern geekdoms meeting up with each other. The talk was very interesting, from the part where Shakespeare & Company caught the loophole in their expiring lease at their old theatre that the landlord seemed to own the land but not the building itself and so dismantled it to use in the construction of the Globe to the part where the rain and a pigeon both came through the open roof. I would like to have stayed for about a century or so, but we were off to Oxford.

The journey took far longer than anticipated by virtue of slow buses, a very local train and the fact that the woman who’d arranged our accommodations placed us a £10 cab ride out of town. (Planes, trains and automobiles, oh my.) However, once we finally made it to town and convinced our now-cranky child to shape up or else (meaning no souvenirs, which, for Ty, is a fate worse than death), we found the city well worth the trouble. It was too late to actually get in to anything, but simply walking around was rewarding enough. Radcliffe Square alone, with the Bodleian Library, St. Mary the Virgin Church, the Radcliffe Camera et. al. was almost too much beauty in one place. The sense of peace in the square was like a balm to the soul.

We took the ghost tour – of course! – from the least theatrical guide on earth. Still, Ty was impressed because of the conviction that he saw two ghosts (oddly glowing lights) behind some windows at Merton College. So he felt the tour was well worth the money. Hopefully, we’ll get to look around some gardens and see Oxford Castle on the morrow.

Oh, cute Ty note: he decided out of the blue today to call me a mannequin, since we’d passed some odd ones earlier in the day, but then he changed it to womanequin.

[For Rosemary (she knows why ): We actually saw a building before we left London marked “The Texas Embassy.” (Okay, it was a bar and grill.) Anyway, this one’s for you!]