Greetings from Oxford!

So as you can read I am now in Oxford. It's Sunday morning and we are getting ready to go to church at Christ Church.

Oh but first. I caught the last half hour of Doctor Who last night.... OH MY GOSH OH MY GOSH OH MY GOSH!!!! AHHHHHHHHHH! I want to know how the beginning went, but AHHHHHHHH!!!!!!! I cannot believe the storyline! SO AMAZING!

And then I watched a bit of 'I'll Do Anything' (which is a TV competition to cast OLIVER! on West End... They've done, Grease, Sound of Music and Joseph already) which was AWESOME! John Barrowman is one of the judges so it was nice to look at him. :-)

Okay, okay, okay....

Um... Two days ago we toured around Bath and saw a lot of literary touristy things. I bought a 'Teach yourself to play ukulele' book. :-) Bath wasn't the most interesting. Plus when we were walking around it was hot and humid.

Then we drove to Stratford and moved in to our B&B. We left shortly after to go to the first of Midsummer Night's Dream put on by the Royal Shakespeare Company. What a brilliant show! They kept all the dialog the same, but used a more modern setting. It was amazing! The *character* of Lysander was my favorite, but the actor who played Demetrius was the best! He had an awesome rich bass voice.... Mmmmm.... :-)

I have a good story about standing in line for Midsummer Night's Dream involving accents, so if you see we when I get back to the States, remind me and I'll tell you.

After the play we all went back to the hotel and went to sleep. We were all exhausted!

The next morning, after breakfast (yum!) We went to Mary Arden's house. Mary Arden was Shakespeare's mother. They had a couple people there living at if it was Shakespeare's time, like Living History Farms in Des Moines and that was really neat. They talked to us about the different things everyone did and how they cooked and did chores. The house had a farmyard and everything. I liked the chickens and sheep. The sheep were just going to TOWN on the grass. I didn't see them look up once.

At the Arden house they also had a falconry display and that day they had their 8 week old barn owl, named Beau. The falconer had him fly to her a couple times and then let people try to have him come to them. I was chosen as the first volunteer and I got the owl to fly to my gloved had with the help of a piece of raw chicken. It was so cool! At 8 weeks the owl was full grown, and it only weighed about 10 oz. The glove was heavier than the owl, but still. It was SO cool! Don't worry, I have pictures. :-)

Okay, that's all I have time for now. I'll try and catch you up later today! Cheers!