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This trip immerses students in London’s vibrant theater scene, exploring its rich history and contemporary productions. Students will visit Shakespeare’s Globe, tour backstage areas, and attend performances in the West End. A day trip to Stratford-upon-Avon includes Shakespeare’s birthplace, Anne Hathaway’s cottage, and a Shakespeare-themed workshop. Walking tours will highlight London’s literary and historical significance. Students will document their experiences through photos and videos, culminating in a multimedia reflection.
Day 1
Day 1
Today, the MS London Winterim arrived in town and was immediately off exploring this amazing city!
From being treated to Cadbury Crème eggs on the bus in the morning, to visiting Kensington Gardens, to having our first experience riding the Tube (London Subway), to eating some amazing food (bangers and mash for dinner!), we are loving learning about the “right” side of the road to drive on (answer: the left) and how every single building around town seems to be from a totally different time period than the one next to it.
We can’t wait to see what else we can learn tomorrow!
Day 2
Day 2
Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
We started off our second day in London with a bus tour all over the city, at the end of which we hopped off at Buckingham Palace in time to witness part of the ceremony of the changing of the guards. Although we didn’t see her, it was pretty cool to learn that Kate Middleton was there as well, honoring the Irish guards for St. Patrick’s Day.
Other activities today included taking a boat ride down the Thames, exploring the shops at Leicester Square, and dining on Korean bibimbap. At the end of the day, we rode a classic red double decker bus back to our hotel—delightful!
Day 3
Day 3
Our third day in London was focused on technical theater. We began with a behind-the-scenes tour of the National Theatre where we got to see (amongst other things) sets being built for a production of Stephen Sondheim’s last musical, “Here We Are” and learn about all the crazy cool features of some of the main stages in this complex (an interesting example of Brutalist architecture).
After a jaunt over the Waterloo Bridge (aka The Ladies’ Bridge) and lunch at Covent Garden (where Eliza Doolittle first meets Henry Higgins in “My Fair Lady”), we went on a scavenger hunt to find some of the most awesome things at the British Museum (like the Rosetta Stone and the Elgin Marbles), where we ran into some of the Dawson Upper Schoolers on their own London Winterim trip!
We concluded the day by seeing “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” a prequel play to the Netflix series of the same name. We were wowed by the insane special effects and were proud of ourselves for understanding how many of them were accomplished after our earlier instruction in technical theater. Watch out if you go see it when it opens in New York in a couple of weeks: That final jump scare is a doozy!
Day 4
Day 4
Today we journeyed to Stratford-upon-Avon to visit Shakespeare’s birthplace, along with the family home of his wife, Anne Hathaway.
In addition to learning all about what homes in the 1500s would have looked like and Shakespeare’s family history, we also practiced insulting each other in Shakespearean English, staged a “brawl,” and both listened to and sang a great deal of British songs (both modern and traditional) on the bus rides to and from Stratford.
Upon arriving back in London, we had a splendid classic fish and chips meal with double-chocolate brownies for dessert—yum!
Day 5
Day 5
On our final day in London, there were a lot of highlights: We toured the Globe theater, participated in a theater workshop where we learned about “tactics” while staging a scene from “Macbeth,” walked across Abbey Road (did you know that a camera streams from it all the time?), and attended a fabulous production of “Wicked.” (Several of us brought rats to watch the show; they reportedly enjoyed it and gave no one the plague—huzzah!)
We are ready to fly home tomorrow but will miss seeing the most amazing sights every single day (not to mention the Nutella packets at breakfast every morning)!
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