The towels that were meant to have arrived the night before were still missing. Apparently there were some communication problems between head office and the youth hostel. In the end, Jenny (one of the chaperones) had to go out and buy over 100 hand towels using the emergency money.
That day, we set out for the Globe Theatre. We went around in groups. The lady who showed us around said that the original Globe Theatre burned down 14 years after its construction in the Great Fire of London. The Globe Theatre that stands today is an fairly accurate replica built by following blueprints and drawings of the original Globe. The main differences between the current Globe and the original Globe are the exits: there are fire doors and more of them. (In fact, quite a lot of doors that I saw in London were fire doors.) We went inside the actual theatre itself and the lady explained that you only had to pay a penny to stand on the lowest level of the theatre, and it was often crowded. People on the upper tiers would yell insults at the people on the bottom such as “Penny-stinkers!” or something like that.
After having a look inside the theatre, we were taken to another building a short way down the road. We went through some acting exercises and we were shown an example of a script during Shakespeare’s time. Actors wouldn’t get the full script- they’d just get a cue script, consisting of the actor’s lines and the last words spoken before each of the actor’s lines. We all had a go at using cue scripts. It was pretty difficult because I felt that I was concentrating too hard on listening for the cue words and not really taking in everything that was being said. Another difficulty was that a character might tell a character not to grab on to them, and since cue scripts don’t have actions written on them, people only realised that they were meant to grab on to another person after the line was said.
We had lunch in a small park next to the Globe Theatre overlooking the Thames. We got a good view of the Millennium Bridge- in fact, it was almost directly in front of us.
Our itinerary said that we were going to walk to Australia House for our next concert, but we ended up driving instead- probably because of all of the instruments and concert uniforms that had to be transported. Apparently the parts of Harry Potter involving Gringotts were filmed in Australia House.
We had to get dressed in partitioned-off corners of the basement floor, which not everyone was too keen on doing since if you stood at the right angle you could probably see inside the other gender’s dressing corner (no, I didn’t try this). After getting changed, some people began warming up their instruments. One of the Low Foul Winds decided to play an ostinato on their instrument- F, C, F, C, F, C, F C D E. Cookie then joined in with “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” in the altissimo register (the high squeaky one). Senior Wind Orchestra played Pastime with Good Company, Fantasy on an Australian Folk Song and probably one or two others as well which I’ve forgotten. After the concert, some people were able to meet up with relatives.
We boarded the buses yet again, this time our destination being the London Eye, a.k.a. giant Ferris wheel. While waiting for the bus to leave, I saw the London School of Economics through the window. I took a picture of it for Mrs Reilly, the enthusiastic economics teacher who went on Canberra Tour with me (I felt sorry for her, but then again I feel sorry for anyone who has to go on the same plane as me). Then it was off to the London Eye.
The queue was hideous, even though our tickets were pre-bought. The queue was actually in two parts, and there were people in the first section who would highlight the tickets so that when you went to the second part the people there would be able to see that you weren’t a queue jumper. We boarded in groups of about 10. Due to the size of the wheel, and the fact that it had to go slow enough for people to get off and on, it took a while to get to the top. Julia O had a fear of heights but she was brave about it and got on anyway. Finally, it was back to the hostel for dinner and sleep. By this time, the hostel didn’t seem so bad after all. It must have just been the shock of the first night.
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