The Good, the Bad, and the Really, Really Ugly

The Good
So here is a catch up of what I did this past weekend divided into how much I liked each thing. On Thursday, our history class went to St. Paul's Cathedral. Amazing. It is so beautiful inside that I was just blown away. I also climbed to the top and got a good view of the city. Then, on Friday, my friend Alex, her friend Helen, and I got up early and went to stand in line for a Van Gogh exhibition. You heard correctly. We got up at 8 am so we could get to the Royal Academy of Arts and get in line for a ticket office that opened at 10 am. Now who says young people aren't cultured? We got there at 8:45 and were the fourth group in line. By 10 o'clock, there were at least 100 people standing in line. So we got in right away and went through the exhibition which featured many of Van Gogh's paintings, but also his letters that he wrote to his brother and his artist friends. It was a really good exhibition and I'm really glad we stood in line for it. After that, we went to Fortnum and Mason and I got a chocolate cupcake that was pretty good. We then went for lunch at a pub called Ye Grapes. Now, here's a fun fact about pubs in London: the newest and most posh thing for them to do is to have a Thai restaurant within their pub. I've been to a pub near my flat called The Churchill Arms a few times for Thai food, but we'd heard this place was better, so w decided to check it out. It was good, but not as good as the Churchill. Finally, Alex and I went to the Wallace Collection. It is a private collection of art in a fancy house. Rococo art plus a beautiful, well-furnished old house equals perfection in my eyes. It was a really cool collection.

The Bad
The weather here has been cold and rainy and we are about ready to kill anybody who tells us that it is 70 and sunny in the Midwest.

The Really, Really Ugly
On Saturday, Lauren, Alex, and I went to Stratford-upon-Avon, the birthplace of Shakespeare. The town itself wasn't bad at all; we got some really good food and cake at the market, but we timed it wrong. We wanted to see a play of course, but to see an evening show means staying the night as there is no train that late at night. However, since it was Easter weekend, no one was booking for just one night. So we saw the matinee of Romeo and Juliet (which I will get to). This meant that the play was from 1-4:15 so by the time it was over, most of the attractions and stores and such were closed. We did see Shakespeare's grave and the outside of his house where he was born, but that was kind of it.

Now, the play. I don't even know where to start except to say it was just awful. I was so disappointed because I'd really been hoping that the Royal Shakespeare Company's version of Romeo and Juliet was going to be awesome. Unfortunately because they are so famous, I think they are expected to try new things and new concepts which is fair because if the RSC performed Romeo and Juliet the same way as it has always been played, they would probably get a lot of crap for it. Instead, they tried something new and I'm going to give it a crap review. It wasn't one of those plays where you could say, "Well, if only Romeo had been a bit better it would have been okay," EVERYTHING was wrong and bad. The directing, the costumes, the staging, and the acting. I don't think any of the lines were cut, not even speeches that are traditionally cut, so the play was really long. The director decided to put Romeo and Juliet in modern day dress (jeans, sweatshirts, and Converse) while everyone else was in Elizabethan attire. Lauren, Alex, and I put our heads together about this and decided that the director was going for a "they were ahead of their time" thing because at the end, everyone comes out in modern clothes. So everyone around R&J was so stuck in their ways that they seemed Elizabethan while R&J's love was modern. Right, because a 14 year old girl marrying some twenty-something year old would be totally accepted now a days. Please. Anyway, the acting was not good either. R&J barely looked at each other when they were talking to one another, let alone touch. Benvolio, Romeo's best friend, was one of the worst actors I've seen. And Mercutio. Oh my God, I don't even know what to say about him. To be fair, it was mostly the director's fault, because they decided to take him in a really perverse direction. Mercutio is the comedy in the play and is known for making some not very discreet speeches about love and sex. There was NOTHING discreet about his speeches in this version. I won't describe to you what he did because I do not wish to scar any of you and to be honest, I was cringing and not watching half of it and really really hoping that the young children in the audience were not getting it at all. Mercutio is one of the best parts of R&J for me, but in this version, I was literally thinking "Thank God he dies soon." The only redeeming factor was that the Friar and the Prince were both pretty good, but they have relatively small parts. So, really disappointing. :(