Warning the following is rated L as this is a long post...I wrote it before going to the internet cafe so mom doesn't have to pay for me to think....she is going to type it for me. Mom also decided that renting a car in England was probably not the smartest thing to do. They drive on the wrong side of the car and on the wrong side of the road and she would still have to shift gears. So we are going everywhere by train or bus or walking.
Yesterday we took the train to Oxford to see where Harry Potter was filmed. Oxford is really old with alot of different colleges there. We saw the Bodelean Library which is the library in the Harry Potter films. The Divinity room which is the Sanatorium in the movie is there but I was not old enough to go in so I had to look at it through the windows. They had a show about music there and how important it is in important events. I listened to the music and singing from the coronation in 1937. It was OK, but I still like rock better.
We also saw Christ Church and it's hall. THe hall is what the dining room in Harry Potter is based on. Harry Potter was not filmed in it (they needed it to feed the students). They built a model of it and filmed there. The room is really big and really old. All of the pictures are of important people who went to school there. For lunch they were having pork loin with baked apples, shepherd's pie and coq au vin. This is very different from my school because we never have that kind of food, the tables are bigger and fancy, the teachers eat in the same room and people serve you here. (picture above)
There is really no Harry Potter stuff in Oxford...they all talk about Alice in Wonderland and that stuff is everywhere. The story goes that Alice is based on a real girl that lived at Oxford because her father was a college dean. A dean is really important, kind of like a principal. The rabbit in the book is based on her father. He ate dinner at the head table in the Hall and when he was done he could leave. For the important people so they didn't have to walk through the students, there was a secret door with a spiral staircase they used to leave the Hall. This is the rabbit's hole. In the fireplace, the thing that holds the logs has heads on it with long necks, just like Alice gets in the book and some of the other characters are based on stuff in the stained glass windows. A cat named Dinah, liked to climb the chestnut tree outside the library where the author worked. this is the Cheshire cat in the book. At Christ Church there is a bell named Tom. Every night at 9:05 it rings 101 times. This is for the 101 original students of the college who had a 9:00 curfew. It rings late because for some reason Oxford time is five minutes behind Greenwich Mean Time (so yesterday I was only 4 hours and 55 minutes ahead of you)
We also went to the Museum of Natural History. Thie dinosaur footprints were very big. Inside we saw lots of stuffed animals like a nile crocodile and a dodo. There were lots of bugs too. Some of these were alive. (Picture above)
One more short post and then we are off to Stonehenge.
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