Oxford, Stratford, Warwick

                Today started with a trip to Oxford. Oxford University is made up of 38 colleges, all throughout the town. Our tour focused on Christ’s Church, which is one of the most famous of the colleges because of people who went there, and movies that have been filmed there. One of the most interesting things about the college is that it served as the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. While he was teaching at Christ’s Church, he observed the Dean’s three daughters, one of whom was Alice. All throughout our tour, our guide would point out things that were inspirations in the book, such as the Dean being the White Rabbit and always being late because he had to go a long way from his office to the chapel for mass. There is also a window in the great hall referred to as the Alice Window because it has a picture of the real Alice, as well as creatures from the book along the bottom. The other cool thing about this college is that it was used for the Harry Potter series. The great hall here was the inspiration for the great hall in the movies. The only reason it was not actually used was because the school still needed the hall to be functional for its students. The staircase leading up to the great hall, however, was actually used in the first movie, as well as one other hallway. I stood in the exact same spot as Dame Maggie Smith.

Yeah, I’m kind of a big deal!! The tour continued throughout the town and we learned about some other famous people who attended school here such as the current prime minister, and author of the Narnia series, C.S. Lewis. We also were able to see his inspiration for some of the characters in his books and the lamp post used in the first movie. We then saw many other buildings and different parts of the colleges, ending at the University library that houses thousands upon thousands of books. We did not go inside, but it was still pretty neat.

                Next we head to Stratford-Upon-Avon, or the city of Shakespeare. We were taken to the area where he was born, rather than where he lived, but this was also our lunch time and we only had about 40 minutes total so we weren’t really able to do much here. I saw the house where Shakespeare was born, but I did not go inside on the tour because I wanted lunch instead. I did try Shepherd’s Pie for lunch and it was actually pretty good. Yay for new things!!

                Our final stop for the day was Warwick Castle. This is a crazy old castle dating back to a long time ago (I don’t remember the century, probably why I’m not a history person). It was however, really cool. It has a really tall tower that has like 5,000,000 stairs…okay, so maybe I’m exaggerating a little bit but there were a lot. It didn’t help that we were in a rush to climb it because we didn’t have much time here either and did this last. But I’m glad we did because the views were amazing. Overall today was pretty awesome. It was a lot to do in one day and I wish we would have had a little bit more time because everything was very rushed, but it was still cool.

 View from the bottom!!

View from the top!!