The Final Weekend...

It's my last weekend here in London, and I couldn't have asked for a better one! All this week it has been sunny, upper 70s, and hardly a cloud in the sky (most of the time). It has also been surprisingly humid! I suppose that's because we're close to the river Thames...

We make sure to go out and sit in the sun at the park at least once a day, and walking around is a must! The weather is so nice you never want to stay indoors. Too bad it started to be this beautiful one week before we leave to go home!

My only big update is that this Thursday I went with some friends to see "Macbeth" at the Globe Theater (a reconstruction of where Shakespeare originally put on his plays. Remember the pictures from January?) We only paid 5 pounds for our standing room in the pit in front of the stage. This is where the "groundlings" would have stood in Shakespeare's time, and the 5 pounds we pay today is the equivalent of the 1 shilling (1/4 of a penny) they would have paid in Shakespeare's day!

It was a very interesting play, with lots of blood, gore, and murder. Very befitting the plot line! Our only complaint is that they didn't cut some of the boring scenes. Even Shakespeare would cut lines of his plays during production - and it seemed like this director didn't cut enough! But maybe that's just because our feet were really getting sore after 3 hours of standing.

The most interesting part of the production was the director's concept of the audience as the "Underworld". Everyone in the pit had to stand under a large black cloth with only our heads sticking out. We were literally "talking heads"! Of course, not being able to see your feet meant that the actors had a good time running under the cloth, poking, tickling, and popping out to scare the crowd. They even reserved holes for dead bodies to rise out of in the middle of the audience! Naturally you didn't know if or when a body would rise out of the hole next to you. It was spooky!

However, my favorite part of the show was at the end. A few of the actors were hiding next to me in the aisle, waiting to go on for the curtain call. They were supposed to be covered in mud and blood from the battle, but my nose smelled otherwise. As the show ended and the audience started to clap, I whispered to the actor next to me "You smell delicious!" and he laughed and whispered back "Thanks - it's all choc!" (Choc is British slang for chocolate) I guess the fake mud was actually chocolate powder mixed with chocolate syrup for effect! No wonder they all smelled so good...

So that's it, my last "Cultural Activity" for the term. The rest of this week is going to be buckle-down and working on the last bits of projects for final presentations. My last class is this Thursday and I fly home on Friday morning. I'll probably update one more time with a reflection over these past 5 months. Oh how they've flown!

I'll leave you with two pictures from MacBeth, showing the audience in the pit standing under the black cloth: