there is so much more to see

So, there are three types of theatre I go to, here in Londontown.

First, there are shows I see for my Theatre in London class. Those are about once a week (give-or-take) and tend to be things I never have never seen otherwise.

So far, I’ve seen Clybourne Park, The Children’s Hour, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and In a Forest, Dark and Deep. Tomorrow I am going to see War Horse, which everyone I’ve spoken to has recommended.

The Children’s Hour had Elisabeth Moss and Kiera Knightly. In a Forest Dark and Deep had Matthew Fox. You know, from Lost. The TV show. He was excellent.

So, a play a week. Cool plays, enjoyable plays, mostly, although I was a little disappointed in Umbrellas. I don’t always talk about them, because again, they happen EVERY WEEK. I do think about them, and I should probably post more about them.

The second category is plays that I go out and pursue by myself. There are a few plays I want to see – Blood Bothers, for one, as I really enjoyed it the first time – and I’ve already been to one. The aforementioned Season’s Greetings, for Catherine Tate. I have already bought tickets for Much Ado About Nothing, because they were selling FAST. Again, Catherine Tate. And David Tennant. I fully intend to keep my eyes peeled for more plays to see, but I’m already seeing plenty for the class, obviously, so the call isn’t necessarily there.

Oh, right. Dasi and I are considering going to The Holy Rosenbergs, which is about the Jewish community in North London. I’ve heard mixed things, but I can get £12 tickets, which is pretty cheap for a night out.

Then there is the last category, which I completely forgot about until yesterday!

See, when I paid for this study abroad program, I was told that part of the tuition would cover events and things, but they were never very clear about what exactly, probably because they didn’t know yet. Which is reasonable. Theatre is fickle.

Well, first of all, I’m going to see The Lion King, for free (for all intents and purposes at this point.) I’ve seen it before, but you know what? SO EXCITED.

More importantly, I’ve just gotten back from seeing a play I had never heard of, until I got the email that we could pick up tickets for it at the International Students Office. It’s called The Woman in Black and it has a reputation as a pretty scary play.

A well-deserved reputation.

It’s based on a book, and I’m pretty sure the play was adapted with a framing device, which was incredibly clever. An elderly man hires an actor/acting coach to teach him public speaking, so he (the old man’s name is Arthur Kipps) can tell a personal ghost story of his past to his friends and family. As the young actor tries to teach Kipps how to act, they end up transforming the dry read-through into a two-man play with minimal props, and an unseen lighting and sound mixer.

The actor plays the role of Young Kipps in their play, and the real Kipps plays everyone else.

It is amazing. I think the framing device really sold it. It is also so scary I screamed multiple times, and I was nowhere near alone. Dasi couldn’t come in the end, so I was sitting by myself clutching the programme for the whole second act, whispering “no, no, no” every time the actor as Young Kipps did something stupid like go through the previously locked door or something like that.

So scary. But it was wonderful, and it was the first thing that I got to do through the London Met. Study Abroad Office, so I’m hoping we get more events. There is a chance that we might be able to arrange our own events if we get enough people together. Peter and I are thinking about asking for a tour of the BBC studios. Why not?

Sorry I haven’t been posting as often as I would like. I got back from Cardiff and had my first midterm the next day, and then Purim, and now I’m really in the swing of midterms.

Plus, I’m unhappy with the video formatting on the last post. It doesn’t play for everybody, and it stutters badly on my own laptop. I’m looking into alternative options, but I’m not so fond of youtube. Vimeo looks good right now. If any of you know anything, drop me a line?

Lastly, I don’t know how many of you have looked at my first post, or talked to me about all of my travel plans for this semester, but my first choice was Japan, not England. Odds are I wouldn’t have even been there yet, as I don’t beleive the Japanese spring semester has not yet begun. But with the nuclear fallout issues and the high language barrier, I’m not sure what would have happened in the end. I’m not quite sure what to say, and I just wanted to mention that I’m aware about the issue. But I am thinking about it.

I’m experimenting with my video player!

Dasi Makes Challah and Our Kitchen

Bread developments: Dasi had discovered a fantastic bread recipe, honey whole-wheat or something like that, and I might have insisted she make it since, because just this once I would like to stick with something that works instead of experimenting.

We recorded the video a while ago, but I’ve just now decided that it would be a good idea to start uploading videos to this site. If this one words out, you’ll all get to see why!

Note: recorded on my Macaulay-gift flip video. I think a digital audio recorder would have been cooler, but I’m having fun playing around with this.

I mentioned that I had been trying to get together with my friend Rachel in England, but we kept having conflicts. So I called her up and asked about shabbos!

She lives in Stanmore, at the end of the Jubilee line, which doesn’t run by King’s Cross. So I had to take the Metropolitan line and switch, and I was running late and the line got delayed and I juuuuuust made it for shabbos.

I had a wonderful time, met a lot of her family and her husband and her absolutely adorable baby boy. We went to shul, despite the ran, and we walked around the neighborhood later, and she gave me a tour. Saturday night we went out to see No Strings Attached and I tried some more British chocolate.

And last shabbos Dasi and I stayed in the dorm. We went to Chabad for Friday night, and met mostly French and Israelis staying in London. Shabbos day we ate at Bracha’s flat, which is literally just down the road. She’s a graduated Macaulay student, studying in London for grad school. After lunch we walked to the British Museum for a bit before coming back.

This week, I’m going to Cardiff! We’ll see how it goes!

Or rather, as this is England, I went to shabbos at Uni. University of Cambridge in fact.

Yes, that Cambridge.

Becky (the friend I stayed with two posts ago) sympathized with my desire to GO EVERYWHERE AND SEE EVERYTHING and mentioned that she had a really good friend named Donna at Cambridge, St. John’s College. (They pronounce “Saint” slightly differently here. More like “Sent” vs “Say-nt.”)

Anyway, her friend, Donna, was willing to host Dasi and me along with Becky, so come Friday afternoon we were off!

It was my first trip on a train in the UK this trip, and I had a great time. I love trains, and this one left right from King’s Cross, which was super-convenient.

So, shabbos in Cambridge!

Friday night we walked from St. Johns (the college Donna was attending) to the J-Soc (Jewish Society. In case it wasn’t obvious yet, British people abbreviate everything), which was about a five-minute walk. JSoc was lovely, we did kabbalat shabbat and then rearranged the whole space for dinner. Not so much singing, but an American studying law.

The atmosphere was really nice. It’s a smaller group of students, but more diverse. The divre torah were also really nice over shabbos.

So, after dinner we went to this lounge-room-place where a lot of Jewish students hang out and play pool. Donna was great at it, I declined. (On the incredible off chance anyone who has ever seen me play pool is reading this, you know why.) A few boys on the dart team were throwing darts pretty impressively, but Dasi and I were drifting off, so we left a little before midnight.

We stayed up late to chat, and the next morning Dasi ran off early and managed to find the JSoc by herself. We met her for lunch, and then went on a walking tour of some of the nearby colleges.

Remember, Cambridge is a university broken up into a bunch of smaller colleges, most of them founded by kings and such. Basically every college is OLDER THAN MY COUNTRY. Which is a little, you know, daunting. The boy from Friday night came with us, Austin, and between him and Donna we learned a ton of random, and occasionally hilarious facts and myths. Turns out St. Johns is the “Slytherin” of Cambridge. Who knew, right?

I am happy I didn’t go there, but I have to admit that it would have been pretty awesome.

Also, everyone biked everywhere. Bikes, as far as the eye could see. Crossing steets wasn’t just a game of “look in the other direction!” It became a game of “BIKES ARE UNPREDICTABLE. RUN AWAY.”

We hung out in the afternoon after our walk – it was freezing, by the way – and then went back for seudah shlishit and havdalah, and then ran back to the dorm to grab our bags to try and catch the next train out.

Round trip, our tickets cost £20. Good deal! Becky and I got to chat a lot on the train back, and make informal plans to visit Highgate Cemetery at some point.

One nice thing – I gave Donna a fairly large bag of M&M’s and she tagged me on facebook a few days later to let me know that they came in handy for her paper-writing all nighter! 😀

Nothing especially big happened last week, but Wednesday was fun, so let’s talk about that.

For my Theatre class, we went to get a tour of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. COOLEST. THING. EVER.

No really.

It’s as accurate a reconstruction of the original Globe Theatre as possible. The whole thing was spearheaded by an American actor who was shocked and dismayed that there wasn’t already such a theater in existence when he visited London. So he raised money, and his daughter raised money when he died, and the theater is built basically on the same spot. There are a few differences – like sprinklers, should the wooden thing catch on fire. But it has a thatch roof! THATCH! Like I said, coolest thing ever.

(And for all you Doctor Who fans, yes, I do beleive it was the set for the Shakespeare episode. Which meant that I spent a good bit of our tour picturing the filming, which was probably REALLY COOL. But the Queen never went to Theatre. Theatre came to the Queen.)

We’re not seeing a play there in class, but I’m going to try to get cheap standing tickets when I have a chance. They are staging Macbeth soon. If anyone from my high school is reading this, do you remember Macbeth? I played Lady Macbeth in Talia’s film, I recall. I would absolutely love to see it staged.

Anyway, afterward Dasi and I wandered back to the tube line. She was going to North London to visit a friend, so I called up Shoshy, totally forgetting that she doesn’t live with the Golders Green/Hendon crowd. She invited me over (it was reading week for UCL and a few other universities) and fed me dinner, because she is amazing. We chatted for a while, and then she discovered that I had never see the Keira Knightly version of Pride and Prejudice (sorry, Michal!) so she pulled it out of her enormously impressive DVD collection and we watched it right then.

Then I went to see Miriam and meet her fiance! Which was great, as Miriam was the first friend I saw the last two times I was in London, so the trip wasn’t really complete until I saw her. 😀

Then, for the second time, I caught the last train back to my stop. Shoshy drove me to the station with about eight minutes to spare, and I dithered on the platform for a bit. Better early than late, because I have no clue how the night buses work here yet. Silly train system, shutting down at night.