Continuing my quick rewind through the last two weeks as we fly across the Atlantic:

August 7: Our first full day with Myrna and Jack visiting, we went to the Globe to see our third production at the Globe. And it was the best of the three-- a completely over-the-top production of Timon of Athens, complete with feces and cannibalism and acrobatics. Amazing, and a very different production than the first two: using the open stage in a much more modern way. Afterwards, we walked along the river and then up toward the Seven Dials to dine on mussels and frites.

August 8: We visited Southwark Cathedral, which was glorious. We had passed it so many times in our walks around the Southwark area and it was every bit as beautiful inside as out. The kids then went with Myrna and Jack to visit St. Paul's while B and I had some funny tasting soda on the steps. We then made a horrible mistake and went to visit the Natural History Museum. A beautiful Victorian building but packed with mobs of Italians and cretinous other Europeans all on their first week of vacation, and within an hour in the place we were all having panic attacks. Fortunately, the V&A was right next door, so we ducked over and enjoyed the quiet and beauty of our favorite place in London. Eli got to explore the Architecture room, and Gideon devoured the jewelry and a good time was had by all.

August 9: Today was the big day, especially for the boys: Warwick Castle! Unfortunately for Gideon, who was looking forward to it more than all of us combined, he woke up sick as a dog with a screeching fever. To make matters worse, it was going to pour all day. But nothing would dissuade the young warrior, and so we headed off on the train to the Castle, a mashup of English Heritage and Madame Toussault's, with all the pleasures of both. Despite the rain and despite poor Gideon vomiting every hour in a coke cup that he carried everywhere with him, along with his broad sword, we had a great, if exhausting time. We even got to see a real joust in the rain, and a battle with flaming maces and groin kicks!

August 10: All of us needed a quieter day after the muds of Warwick, especially Gid who was still cranking the fever, so we stayed closer to Greenwich, visiting the Maritime Museum, stopping for a pint at the Richard I, and then home for a feast of Goddard's pies with mash and gravy.

August 11: Gideon is feeling better, and just in time because the boys are off with Myrna and Jack to Henry VIII's palace at Hampton Court. They saw the kitchen, chatted with Anne Bolyn, and successfully extricated themselves through the maze. A perfect day! Meanwhile, back at the ranch, B & J went clothes shopping, with the happy excuse of a big fundraising shindig for the University that Beth had to attend the next night at some snooty London club. We all finished the day with fish and chips and beer in front of the Olympics (except Eli, who is sick of fish and chips and had a kebab instead).

August 12: Today we had to say goodbye to Myrna and Jack, who are off to pick up a car and drive around the countryside seeing lots of amazing things. We then met up with the students and their instructor for the week, Malene, to visit the portrait gallery to work on finding inspiration for a dramatic monologue. It was a great project, so we decided to play too and worked on a monologue entitled "Pepys in the Tower" inspired by the portrait of Pepys from 1666 and imagining him looking at it while imprisoned in the Tower 13 years later. Then we went across to visit the National Gallery, which we all agreed was simply divine. We then had to say goodbye to B for the evening while she went off to talk to rich folks and chaperone the students who were eager to try on their dresses and meet rich folks. The boys had a night in, watching movies and waiting for B to return to us, which she did, safe and sound (and a bit drunk, since there turned out to be no food at the rich folks' shindig).

August 13: Even though we all knew better, we decided it was time to do the proper thing and see the Changing of the Guard. Almost immediately we were longing for the relative calm and tranquility of the Natural History Museum. But we got to see enough to satisfy Gideon's love of the pomp and fuzzy hats, and then we made a quick escape into St. James Park and took much-needed recourse in the waterfowl and trees. It felt so good to be in the park we ended up spending a lot of time walking around it and decided to then keep walking all the way town to the Tate Britain, where we had a great lunch and then walked through the galleries from the Tudor and Stuarts through the Nineteenth Century, rediscovering the decadent joys of the Pre-Raphaelites once again (and now old enough, and young enough, to feel no shame). We then walked back to Westminster where we got caught in a storm, catching a train to Lewisham for Tesco to do our mammoth shopping for the Thursday party with the students.

August 14: In the morning we went to join the students at their last class. Everyone read their monologues, and the level of the work (and the nervousness) was quite impressive. It was a fairly moving end to the summer studies for all, and then we raced home to begin prepping for the final bash at our flat--our biggest yet, with 26 people eating and drinking in our living room made for three. It was a nice way to say goodbye to all.

August 15: It was time to make the long-intended pilgrimage to the Bank of England Museum, followed by a lunchtime concert of Messiaen and Bach at St. Martin-in-the-Field. Somehow still having energy at the end of all that, we headed over to the British Library to see their Treasures exhibit, which made Eli mad with ecstasy--something about seeing the original handwriting of Shakespeare, Beethoven and John Lennon, all of it topped off with the Magna Carta itself, almost proved too much for the young lad. But he made it through without exploding, and we skipped all the way home (well, as much as London rushhour would allow).

August 16: All but stranded in Greenwich with the DLR and the Jubilee line down, we hopped on the 188 bus and took it all the way to Russell Square for one last visit to the British Museum: a farewell tour of the mummies, followed by a discovery of the unbelievable Chinese and Indian collections. Then we took the very very long bus ride home, and went out to dinner at the Greenwich Union to begin the weeklong celebration of Gideon's birthday (the food was actually fairly sad, but Gideon at least had a lovely plate of cod and chips and B and I had lots of beer, so no one was complaining).

August 17: Our last day in the U.K., it was time to pack, run some errands, but mostly to play a marathon session of Civilization IV. After six weeks of marveling at the glories of civilizations past, we were ready to build our own and we did pretty well too. And for the first time, we got B totally hooked with us, so there was no one to tell us when to come up for air. I'm sure many proper travelers would disapprove, but for us it seemed the perfect end to a perfect voyage. And to make it all the more perfect, we capped it off with one last round of Goddard's pies.

August 18: The long trip home, which is now coming to its end (I am sitting in the Philadelphia airport as I finish this, waiting for our final leg to Columbus, where we will rediscover proper beds, central airconditioning, dining room tables, late night coffee shops, and many other comforts which we have sorely missed these past six weeks). It has been unbelievably exhausting, expensive, and we loved every single minute of it. Now... on to the next adventure (this one, I suspect, will involve a god named Cratos).

All of which means, of course, we've been having fun-- but also having visitors, illness, minor tragedies among our charges etc. That, and the fact that we recently rediscovered our love of Civilization IV. So, as we prepare for the long flight home, I will try and offer a fast-forward account of the last two weeks of our summer in London.

August 2nd: A rainy Saturday and after our day in Stratford, we decided to have a quiet afternoon around Greenwich to save up energy for our big night out at the Old Vic to see Pygmalion. We had front-row seats, right up against the old floorboard that we stomped across by greats from Kean to Olivier. It was enough of a treat just being there, but the production was also fantastic. Eli was quite shocked by the ending (not at all, of course, what My Fair Lady had promised), and Gideon was starstruck and wanted to stalk outside the stagedoor hoping to catch the actors coming out. It was a lovely evening.

August 3rd: On Sunday, we gave up waiting for the rains to stop and headed out to the Wellington Arch to see what we could see (not much, as it turned out). More interesting was the visit to the old Wellington manse at Aspley House, which displayed quite an obsession with the man Wellington defeated (including a very large nude statue of the very small general). It was a fascinating place, but it was here that Eli was able to finally articulate his growing feelings of anger and depression in rich people's mansions. We decided to make this our last grotesque display of imperial decadence (and for the rest of us who like our decadence imperial, it was a nice way to end our month-long tour).

August 4th: On Monday we headed to Canterbury, and we had a great time reading the General Prologue of the Tales on the train ride out. We decided it was time to do something tourist-trappy for the kids (and their parents), so we began the day in Chaucer's city at the marvelously tacky (and really run-down) "Canterbury Tales," an audio tour with wax works (most of which looks as if they were made out of chewed up crackers). Sad and ugly as it sounds, it was really fun: especially the way the tales were completely out of sync with the "special effects." After some really, really fine fish and chips, we then headed into the distant past at Augustine's Abbey, the ruins of the first Christian abbey in England founded by St. A himself. B and I had been there 15 years ago, and it was lovely to walk through the ruins and rest by the walls (our rest somewhat interrupted by the barbaric children urinating on various monk's tombs: if you ever here a Brit talking about how well behaved English children are, send them my way). We then visited the Cathedral to stand on the spot where Becket died and look up at one of the most beautiful sweeping gothic canopies in the universe. A lovely end to the day, we headed home (but not before stopping at a Shepherd Neame pub for a round of Bishop's Fingers).

August 5th: We went to visit the London Museum, only half of which is opened in the midst of a massive renovation project. Walking around the Barbican area we were stalking in the footsteps of Shakespeare's old haunts on Silver Street and the ruins of Roman London were everywhere underfoot (and the remains of the old Roman walls were right there before us). The Museum itself is a real treat, even in its diminished state, offering an amazing historical tour of the city from prehistoric times through the Fire. Especially striking was the huge leap backwards England went through after Rome took off: for the cultured Londoners it must have been a real shock to go from Roman mosaics and spices to Saxon clubs-on-heads and mud pies. I'm not sure England ever really recovered, truth be told. In the afternoon we came back home to have tea with one of our students who had had a trauma on the Greenwich pier (her laptop was stolen right out of her hands as she was working on a paper) and to clean up the house for Jack and Myrna's arrival the next day.
August 6th: We headed down to the Waterloo Station to meet the students for a tour of the National Theatre. For the first time, the students were running late, starting the feel the wear of the month. As a result we almost missed our tour, but made it just in time. The National Theatre complex was a revelation: three completely different theaters within one compound—a veritable theatrical city under one roof, with all the workshops, rehearsal spaces, shops etc within the citadel. We were sad not to have seen Revenger's Tragedy during its run, but by all accounts the production was a bit much for the young 'uns. Next time, we will make sure we get a chance to attend a production there, however. After the tour, we walked to Charing Cross in hopes we might connect with Jack and Myrna, but then we worried we had missed them in transit and instead headed back to Greenwich to meet them. They arrived safe and sound that afternoon and we celebrated with a walk around Greenwich and a visit to the Painted Hall and the Park and, of course, the pub—the Richard I, which quickly became our favorite in town. Then it was time to rest up for another crazy week.

(to be continued)

We love the trains in Britain and perhaps more than anything else we will miss taking trains (even when they are full of drunken slaterns). So we settled in yesterday morning for what promised to be a lovely 2 hour trainride out to Stratford-upon-Avon to fulfill our mission of being the geekiest and most predictable English major tourists possible (in our younger years, in earlier visits to London, of course, such a thing was unthinkable... now it is simply divine). About 40 minutes in, however, the train stopped in some middle-of-nowhere town (Pimple-upon-Hack I believe it was) and we were told to disembark. Years of such moments traveling by air in the U.S. had prepared us for the inevitable disappointments: day ruined, long queues to try and get money back, and severely disinterested employees. But even as we were steeling ourselves for the hours of trying to get back to London, those stiff-upper-lippers were springing into action. One constitutionally helpful gentleman rounded up all the Stratford folk and began taking headcounts while another went off to work through a plan with the station manager. Before I had even finished spelling out my own time-tested gloom-and-doom scenario for the kids, these Brits had us all on another train headed for Something-or-Whutknot where we would be met by coaches to drive us in to Stratford. No wonder these people survived the Blitz! So much of the general sense of the English from Stateside is absurdly wrong: far from more polite they are often boorish and pushy; they can be loud in a way Americans would never dare; and they binge drink to put our undergrads to shame. But when it comes to stepping up when the going gets tough, that is clearly deep in their fibres (note the spelling!) in a way Americans will never know.

The result was that despite our train being taken out behind the station and shot (no tears, mate!), we made it to Stratford only 10 minutes behind schedule. And grateful we were. We headed off directly to the Shakespeare Centre to see the Birthplace, expecting huge crowds and a garrishly touristy experience and we were pleasantly surprised by relatively tame swarms and a tasteful, educational exhibit and house tour. And the kids (and their parents) were genuinely excited to be walking in the man's footsteps, pissing in his pot and all that. Anything that Shakespeare potentially touched, looked at, or walked on was an especial thrill for Eli. After the birthplace, we walked to Hall's Croft, the home of Shakespeare's daughter and son-in-law, a successful early-17th-century physician. And then on to Trinity Church to see the grave (and to marvel at the magnificent 15th-century misericords in the choir, which must surely have delighted young Will with their strangely secular and fantastical imagery. Finally, we made the long walk out of town to Anne Hathaway's Cottage, the childhood home of Shakespeare's wife, inheritor of his second-best bed. It was a beautiful pastoral end to the day, and we relaxed in the gardens (strangely alone, since the tourists couldn't be bothered to make the 1 mile walk, apparently). After walking back into town, we realized we were starving and grabbed the first pub dinner we could find and settled in for a table full of delicious ale, bangers and mash, and shepherd's pie. We have learned a couple of lessons, and so we grabbed a table in the Quiet Coach and settled in with our books for a sleepy ride home—this time happily without incident.

On Wednesday after a glorious day of lounging around, jamming on the practice chanters and playing Civilization, we headed out to join the students at the Royal Court Theatre in Chelsea to see Gone Too Far,by first-time playwright (and already an Olivier winner!) Bola Agbaje. I must confess I wasn't looking much forward to it, expecting from the accounts in the reviews, a fairly didactic afterschool special about cultural pride and urban violence. But the play turned out to be witty, smart and energetic beyond belief. We were all dazzled by it, and by the young cast who really were splendid. Afterwards we stayed for a Q&A with the cast and author which was incredibly lively (especially when compared to the somewhat turgid affair at the Globe after Merry Wives) and the audience clearly wanted to keep arguing about the issues (knife violence being very much in the news of late) long after the cast had any energy left. The kids were in love with the whole London theatre scene and were absolutely starstruck when they walked outside the theatre and saw much of the cast hanging out and chatting with fans and friends (Gideon even got an autograph from the star).

Officially theatre-junkies now, we headed out in Thursday morning to the Old Vic to see if we could find any tickets for Pygmalion, which had just been extended for another week after a very successful run. We were in luck (double luck, as it turned out, as the kids got cheaper tickets for being under 25), and on Saturday we will be sitting in the front row! We then walked over to the Borough Market to explore the foodie goodness, which was very good indeed. Piles of beautiful fish, Turkish delight and burnt sugar candies, olives of every imaginable variety, and produce so fresh it was still crying for its mother. The kids ate baskets of berries and washed it down with fresh pressed cider and we headed home to prepare piles and piles of tea sandwiches for the students, who were, as always, a delight to have over even in our far from ample entertaining space.

Today we are off to Stratford-upon-Avon to indulge fully in the touristic delights of our summer of Shakespeare (Gideon is in search of a Shakespeare action figure). There is a slight chance of rain. It's a hard life, ain't it?