Oxford/Stratford/Paris

There's a lot to cover here, so I'll make subheads so you can effectively skim for which city you're interested in. Note to Brian (who hasn't posted any comments since I've been gone -- what gives?): This is mostly for you, because you'll want to read the part about Oxford.

PARIS
Well I've been wandering around Paris all day, and so far I've seen the Louvre and the Notre Dame Cathedral... from here I'm going to the Centre Pompidou and the Picasso Museum. This place is confusing as all hell, and I *really* wish I'd spent more than half an hour with that learn-French-book-and-CD set I got. All I know is how to count to 10 (but I still can't understand when they're telling me a price, and how to say "Do you speak English?" for which the answer, almost every time, is "Noon."

Anyway the Louvre is amazing -- I hate that I don't understand the little descriptions next to the paintings, because that's usually one of my favorite parts of an art museum. So after looking around for about an hour I went back downstairs and shelled out the 5 euro for an English audio tour. Of course the tour doesn't cover every painting, and didn't have descriptions for most of what I was interested in.

The Mona Lisa is in this small-ish room, behind glass, a rope and a parade of security. In the midst of all that, it seems very, very small. The largest painting in the museum, "Les Noces de Cana," is on the wall opposite the Mona Lisa, and it takes up almost the whole wall it's on. It's huge and detailed and intriguing, and everyone in the room crowds in front of the barrier on the opposite wall, as the security guards scurry around the crowd reminding them in every language to please put their cameras away. It's all pretty strange.

The Notre Dame Cathedral is gorgeous, but it's about the fifth or sixth cathedral I've seen so far and I don't know what else to say about it. Except that they charge 5 euro to light a candle. It's on the honor system -- just drop the money in the box and take a candle, so I wonder how many people cheat the church. I like to think about that.

STRATFORD-UPON-AVON
This place really knows how to capitalize on Shakespeare. They charge money to get everywhere (Shakespeare lived near here, so he most certainly would have walked on this square of sidewalk: Pay 2 pounds to pass.) That aside, it was pretty cool being there. I saw Shakespeare's birthplace and his grave, different houses he and his family members lived in, and the church he was baptised and probably married in. That's where his grave is, and they charge 1.50 to get past a point in the middle of the church before the grave. So I told them I was 14 and got to go in for 50 pence. That's right. I lied to a little old lady in a church. And I'd do it again.

During the day I went on a little self-guided walking tour of Stratford, and toward the end I still had plenty of time to kill before The Crucible so I wandered into the Butterfly Farm, which says its the biggest butterfly farm in the world. The brochure made it look all exciting, and the sign had drawings of pretty butterflies all around. I walked into the lobby/gift shop, and saw that it was 3.99 (for a child, 'cause I'm 14, you know), more than I wanted to pay for anything but I was already in there and I had all this time so I shelled it out.

I stepped through the passageway into the butterfly farm and a massive insect came flapping violently directly toward me. Which is when I realized I'm *terrified* of all insects, even the pretty ones. But I'd already paid. So I huddled my head in my arms and made my way through the little path, making very screechy girly noises when exceptionally large butterflies came dashing toward me all the while trying to evade the others just sitting on the path. It was horrifying. Although I had enough good sense to avoid the Arachnoroom, which boasted it housed the world's largest spider (seriously).

At night I saw "The Crucible" at the Royal Shakespeare Theater (they weren't showing any Shakespeare plays). It was about the Salem witch trials, and was really well-done. As the girls were rolling around the stage acting like they'd been possessed by spirits it all seemed utterly ridiculous that this happened at one time and that so many people were executed. But there's a line in there that's "You're either with us against us," nearly word for word, and the judge in charge of putting these people to death reminded me a little too much of, well, you know. The play would have been even better if it weren't for the obnoxious class of high-school kids in the entire area in front of me. One had a cell phone go off toward the end, right before death. The ringer was that song "You had a bad day."

At the bus stop to go back to the hostel from the theater, and drunken English truck driver decided my idle waiting was an invitation to talk. After about a minute of talking (and him figuring I was from the U.S. from my accent), he said, "I'm just gonna be blunt: I got the best blow job of my life in New York." He proceeded to suggest maybe he could get a California blow job too. I like that there are icky people everywhere. Makes me feel more at home.

OXFORD
Well, most importantly, I stood on the track where Roger Bannister ran the first sub-four-minute mile. It's so ordinary (actually pretty crappy... it's this old, worn rubber track that looks like it needed replacing about 50 years ago). Of course when Bannister ran on it, it was little pieces of cinder, which makes the accomplishment that much more amazing. There's this tiny little sign that says "Site of the first sub-four-minute mile" or something like that -- I have no doubt that people walk by it every day without noticing it at all. A mini-shrine with a photo of Bannister crossing the finish line, some cinder from the track and the stopwatch used to time it sits behind some glass inside the athletic building, but you technically can't get through the gate into it unless you're a student (they let me look, anyway), so I'm guessing it doesn't get many visitors. So there was that.

Other than that, I walked around to a bunch of different colleges, went inside, saw the quads, etc. A lot of them charge non-students to walk onto the campus, but I had a student showing me around, which was cool because he also was able to tell a lot of stories about the different colleges. One of them allegedly has the oldest college quad in the world, but rumor has it some guy saw an older one in Morrocco which makes this one just the oldest in Europe. Another college has deer just chillin' in their little area in the middle of campus. Eventually the deer are served to the faculty in the dining hall.

I also ate in a dining hall (looks like the one in the Harry Potter movies) and had a beer in a the pub where Lewis Carroll and C.S. Lewis used to meet and read their stories to each other. The drinking age there is 16 and I was carded. (but I have been getting child's tickets to everything in England, so I guess I can't exactly complain.

CONCLUSION
So that's it (or a fragment of it, at least). In conclusion, in the last few days I've stood on the track where the four-minute barrier was broken, drank in the pub where Lewis Carroll and C.S. Lewis used to hang out, saw a play on the stage where Shakespeare's plays were performed right after he wrote them (and where he acted), been asked for a California blow job by a creepy English truck driver, and been scared shitless by butterflies.