Struttin' Along Avon

Dear Grace,

Let me start you off with a video showing some of the fun from the trip up north!

On St. Patrick's day I woke up to find our dining room walls covered with these adorable four-leaf clover notes addressed to each of the girls in our flat!

I seriously have the best flatmates ever. No other group of girls will ever be able to compare. So that afternoon, a group of us decided to go to the world-famous Speedy's Sandwich, where the 221B Baker Street scenes of Sherlock were filmed!

I was tickled when I noticed that the door knocker was crooked, just like it is in the show, and I couldn't resist running up to touch it! Then I danced all the way home with the knowledge that I touched something Benedict Cumberbatch touched.

Tuesday night I went with Rose, Ryan, and Jarom to see Spamalot. I haven't been to a show that made me literally dance in my seat in such a long time! I'm just glad I was sitting with Rose, because half of the time she initiated the dancing instead of me, which made the experience even more fun.

Wednesday was quite an amazing day. We traveled an hour out to Stratford-Upon-Avon to see where William Shakespeare was born, bred, and buried. We started off at his wife, Anne Hathaway's house...

visited Mary Arden's farm (Shakespeare's mother)...

 (These strange creatures are not sheep, they're pigs! I kid you not!)

...and ended up in the main town of Stratford where we visited Shakespeare's grave...

...as well as the house Shakespeare was born in, which is still standing.

These were places I'd studied and seen in pictures before, and which I'd always thought to myself, "Wouldn't it be awesome if I got to see those?" I never dreamed that one day I would actually get to see these places myself.

(I was so excited to find this archway-tunnel-thingy at Shakespeare's

neighbor's house that I frolicked down it Do-Re-Mi-style)

On Friday I went on the next London Walk where I got to see the Old Baily building (anyone who has seen V For Vendetta will share my appreciation for that) which was awesome, as well as the hospital from which Mr. Holmes jumped off the roof in the last episode of season 3 of Sherlock!

That night we rode south of London to go visit the London Temple.

That was a really cool experience, and most of the names I did baptisms for were from the 1600s. The oldest one was from 1615, which means that girl had been waiting for her work to be done for almost 400 years.

Something funny that happened just before we left to go home was when we walked through the visitor center. Just as I was walking past the front desk, one of the sister missionaries said, "Katie?" I looked back and recognized an old junior high school friend of mine, Hannah Jacobs!

We sat next to each other for a semester in choir class back in the day, so that was fun to see an old friend. What a small world this is!

Today I went with Lindsey and Andrew to Borough Market because Lindsey had never been before, and we stumbled across this exotic meats stand, where I saw some of the strangest burgers I've ever seen.

They serve kangaroo, ostrich, and zebra burgers (and yes, that means actual meat from those animals). Lindsey had a kangaroo burger, which she let me have a bite of. So now I've tasted kangaroo!

After Borough Market Lindsey and Andrew left to see the rugby match they'd gotten tickets for, and I skipped off to go to Camden market again.

(I have yet to get any pictures within the market itself, but this shows one 

small corner of some of the stalls to give you an idea of what it's like)

I went back to the Basement Tea Rooms where Tyler took me before in the hopes that I would get to play the piano and sing while I was there. Unfortunately, all of Camden was ridiculously crowded and busy today for some reason. I thought maybe if I waited past lunch time it would die down, but three hours and two pots of tea later, the crowds had only gotten worse. So, I decided I'd have to go back another day and I went exploring through the market for another hour or two before heading home.

(This is the corner where I like to sit right next to the piano)

Once I got home, I went down to flat 2 to hang out with Rose. We made fish fingers and custard for dinner, and are now happily occupied on the couch watching King Lear for Shakespeare class.