WWII and Stonehenge

Monday, February 15, 2010

I’ve been meaning to blog the last couple of days, but time had somehow slipped away from me. To make up for that, I’m going to have to cram a lot into this one for now. Well, it REALLY isn’t that much.
So, the best place to start this is the Thursday of last week. On that day, my Beatles class had a trip to the Imperial War Museum here in London. We went to this museum to do a little research on an essay we have to do about Britain during WWII. The research went fine, and it was a very cool museum. I started my research in the Holocaust exhibit of the place. For the size of the exhibit, it was really good. It had some really good information for both my paper and my general knowledge. Overall, I enjoyed the exhibit. After I was done with that exhibit, I spent the rest of the time exploring the WWII exhibit.
Of all my time at the museum, I spent the most in the WWII exhibit. Majority of the reason I did this was the fact that it had all the information I needed for my paper. The objective of the paper was to get a good grasp of the effect WWII had on British society during and after the war. Because of this, I made sure that I spent as much time as I could in the exhibit, and I got a lot of information doing this. Most of the exhibits were really good. We were also supplied an audio guide, which made taking notes somewhat easier. Yet, the best part of the museum was the Blitz Experience. Basically, this exhibit was a short story about what life during the Blitz was like. It was good, but the only complaint I have is that there really is no participation. All you do is walk around and listen to the story that is going on overhead. You get to see the places that are being talked about, but that’s about it. For a museum, the exhibit is good, but I would like to see be even better.
The museum took up most of my Thursday, and the only other thing I was able to do was stop by the Adelphi Theatre, the home of Love Never Dies, and ask about ticket prices. That stop was really cool because the musical was still in the middle of rehearsals, and I was able to see some of the crew outside. The bad thing about is I found out that there are no group discounts for the show. It’s new so I wasn’t that disappointed. Even with that, it was still cool just being there.
The next biggest day for me was Saturday. That day, I was able to go see Stonehenge and visit Salisbury with my study abroad group. At the start of the day, the bus was supposed to be outside our flats at 8:45 am. It wasn’t there, and we waited for a bit. At around 9, we were told to go back to our flats and wait for a call from the leaders when the bus came. The bus didn’t get to the flats until ten, which cut down our touring time. Once we were all on the bus, we left on our over one hour journey to Stonehenge.



Stonehenge itself was really cool. The good thing was that I hadn’t studied a lot about it so my expectations were not let down. Apparently, that was somewhat unusual because a lot of people go to Stonehenge and are disappointed by the size. I would think that no matter the size that Stonehenge would still be awesome. Anyway, we spent some time there and got some really good pictures.
After we were done with Stonehenge, we went to Salisbury. There, we toured a cathedral, which was extremely beautiful, and saw an original copy of the Magna Carta. After that, we toured the city itself. It was pretty cool, and I enjoyed myself a lot. This was a really good day and ended with a really good dinner out with my fellow Teaching Fellows.