Group Trips 1 & 2
This year, the Fall 2009 Readingites are lucky enough to be going on four group trips around England this term. Our first one was three weeks ago when we traveled to Portsmouth, a city on England’s south coast. Our main destination in Portsmouth was the Historic Dockyard, which houses (among other things) the HMS Victory, Lord Nelson’s ship at the Battle of Trafalgar, and the Mary Rose, a Tudor warship that sank in 1545 and that has only recently been raised to the surface. The Mary Rose went off display for further preservation the day after we visited, so we were very lucky indeed to have seen her when we did! After a tour of the Historic Dockyard, we had some free time to explore Portsmouth on our own. Fellow Readingite Annie and I managed, after a few wrong turns, to find Portsmouth’s Anglican Cathedral. A moderate-sized building, the most impressive part of it (besides the amazing white stonework inside), was the fact that half of it was less than 20 years old while the other half was hundreds of years old, yet the two sides had been fitted together almost seamlessly!
The group’s second trip was last Friday, when we headed into London to visit Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre for a production of the Bard’s As You Like It. The week preceding the visit, we had studied the text of As You Like It in our World in Britain seminar so the group was well versed in what to expect on stage, or so we thought. The show, at least for me, exceeded every expectation I had after reading the play and broke many stereotypes that I had about Shakespeare’s work. The show was truly comedic and, in many ways, unexpectedly modern. The Readingites experienced the show the “true” Elizabethan way, standing in front of the stage as groundlings, with many of us directly in front of the stage!
Classes at the University started for most of the group today and, with still two more trips in front us, plus undoubtedly more papers to write, the rest of the term is no doubt bound to get busier and more exciting very soon!
