Week 1: The Day of Tours

I spent six weeks in London this summer. I stood in Big Ben's shadow, experienced a Shakespeare play at the Globe Theatre, celebrated sixty years of reigning with the Queen at Buckingham Palace, and ran across the magnificent Tower Bridge. But those are just some superficial details. With such an inexhaustible wealth of experiences to pick from, how could I pick the most worthy events to represent my stay, and become the content of this blog? I decided to pick just one thing per week that I would extol as my favorite of that week. Of course, that was before I realized how difficult picking just one thing would be. With that said, my favorite thing very quickly expanded into "my favorite day." Without further ado, I present the first of my six favorite adventures in the United Kingdom.

Week 1: The Day of Tours

Before I even knew what my professors had planned for us to do as a group, I knew that I couldn't go to London without going to the Warner Brothers Studio Tour of the Making of Harry Potter. Harry Potter had been such a huge part of my life that I couldn't imagine being in London and not making an effort to go to the studios, or at the very least go to King's Cross to see Platform 9 and 3/4 ( as it happened, I found out that my living arrangements [ almost all MSU study abroad groups lived in Byron Court, a New York University London branch building ] were down the street from King's Cross Station, and I would visit the iconic location at least four times a week!). So when a group of girls mentioned on our study abroad facebook page that they were interested in setting up a group tour, I basically threw my money at them. We set the date for July 5th, a scant week after we would have arrived in the country.

Meanwhile, I had also been in contact since May with a company called City Jogging Tours. These particular tours were the most unique I had researched in London, as they boasted the most efficient way to see the city: on foot, on a daily run! As a runner, I was extremely excited to see London through the eyes of a local. The only problem was that the only date available online was June 30th, which had been fine in theory, before Delta airlines ruined my scheduled arrival in England. I was able to email the company from the Boston airport, and since I was able to give them such advance notice, they were able to give me other dates to choose from. Of course, Murphy's Law wasn't quite finished with me yet, and my options were either July 5th (the day of the Harry Potter tour), or July 6th (our first day trip as a group, which were mandatory). I still really wanted to go on this running tour, and since the Harry Potter tour wasn't until later in the evening, I decided to just do both on that day. 

This is me after I had just completed an awesome ( supposedly ) 7km City Running Tour of London! I say supposedly because it definitely did not feel like over four miles. The distance flew by! Anyway, it was called the Riverside Tour, and an adorable little Englishwoman, who was also named Andrea, guided me as we ran around Tower Hill and the Tower of London. The first bridge we crossed was the Tower Bridge, which everyone always confuses for the London Bridge, as well as: the actual London Bridge ( which was nowhere near as impressive ), the Millennium Bridge, and Blackfriars Bridge; through a couple small parks alongside the road next to the Thames river; past the London Eye ( which is also called the Millennium Wheel, though it actually wasn't completed by the millennium, and opened in March of 2000, coincidentally on my birthday:] ), across our last bridge of the day, Westminster Bridge, and then ended under the Elizabeth Tower. Fun fact: "Big Ben" doesn't refer to the clock tower: it's actually the big bell inside of the tower. It was a fantastic experience, and I loved getting to know a local runner, especially one who had such an incredible repertoire of marathons: she had done seven, and it was her goal to do one in all of the major cities. She had done London twice, and Chicago and Boston, both of which stood out to me particularly. London is beautiful, and it was an absolutely beautiful day, as well. I really enjoyed running alongside the Thames, especially after discovering that London built little parks along major roads specifically as a way to get back in touch with nature. I would come back to this particular park much later in my trip, called the Victoria Embankment Gardens, and spend an enjoyably relaxing day reading there. If I could pinpoint the most surprising thing that I learned on my tour, it is that London is just composed of bridges. Obviously, that's nowhere near true, but after going back and forth along so many bridges ( and running by even more ), it certainly seems true. And it obviously makes sense to have a lot of bridges, but it's just not something that I generally think about, nor am used to. I know when I'm at State, I'm often frustrated that the bridges across the Red Cedar are so few and far inbetween. 

The Harry Potter studio tour started off by guiding us past the actual cupboard under the stairs that was Harry's room for most of his childhood, paralleling Harry's beginning with the beginning of the tour. They ushered us into a room where an overly enthusiastic guide was cracking bad puns and generally being too cheerful for my liking, and I began to despair that the whole tour would be like this. Luckily, that feeling disappeared after they closed the door on the small amphitheater we were in, and started playing a movie.

It was a mini documentary about the first time that Harry Potter was read by Warner Bros Studio, before it had caught the world by storm. It was supposedly handed to a lowly assistant, on the bottom shelf of a bookcase filled with books to be considered for adaptation. After that video was done, we were herded into an actual theater type room, and settled down to watch yet another video. This was possibly my favorite part of the tour: the main actors and actress came on screen, and spoke about how filming Harry Potter influenced their own lives. It was incredibly moving to hear how these children grew with the films, and how completely it dominated their lives. They ended with a heartfelt thanks to the behind the scenes workers, and with how they broke the fourth wall, inviting us into Hogwarts, I admittedly teared up a bit. It was such a surreal experience to watch that short film, and then go behind the screen to find exactly the same doors that the actors had just disappeared through in the film. 

 I tasted butterbeer, drove Arthur Weasley's flying car, stood outside number 4, Privet Drive, and boarded the Knight Bus. My inner seven year old cried tears of joy to be in such close proximity to the actual props used in the movie adaptations of the books that inspired me to read, and cultivated my thirst for more and more reading material. I'll forever owe this book series more than I can say, so I'm inexpressibly grateful to have had the opportunity to be a part of that magical world, if only for a day.