So - first let me say, I'm back from Morocco!! Morocco was SO amazing, wonderful, exciting, different, beautiful, exhilarating, relaxing, strange, and awesome and totally warrants a really long post detailing everything I did, saw, and experienced while there. I intend to write this post soon! But - first, let me catch up on some other posts I've been working on for a while but haven't finished.
A benefit of studying abroad through the USC study abroad office is that since we pay USC tuition which is substantially more expensive than Queen Mary tuition, USC uses all the extra money to organize trips and excursions for us! The first one was supposed to be a trip to see The 39 Steps in the West End (the London Equivalent of Broadway) but the show ended up being cancelled due to a water main leak! Thankfully, we were able to reschedule and see the show another time. It ended up being quite funny and I was very impressed.
Additionally, the USC Alumni Association, London Chapter organized a pub night and invited all the students to join. It turns out, the band is coming to London later this semester and they are organizing a pub crawl for us all! That's definitely one of the best things about going to USC is being part of the Trojan Family, even when you're overseas!
Anywho, USC organized a day trip for us to go to Didcot and Oxford. Didcot is the home of a very old train station and houses a fairly extensive train museum. They have restored some of the world's oldest trains and have them on display. We had a guided tour of the museum which turned out great because our guide was an elderly man who had spent most of his life driving trains and pulled out pictures of himself driving some of the trains that were on display. As one of only three engineers in the group, I think I freaked out some of the humanities majors by geeking out hardcore as we were trekking through their machine shop.
After the train museum in Didcot, we continued our train journey to Oxford. Oxford was very nice, but different from how I expected it to be. I guess in my head I envisioned a cross between an ivy league school and Harry Potter, but honestly it was more like a regular small European town. Certainly, many of the buildings were beautiful, but it wasn't on the scale that I would have expected. We visited a church where they supposedly filmed some of the great hall scenes in Harry Potter, but it was much smaller than the film made it seem.
Here's some pictures:
I thought the architecture was pretty cool.
Just chillin' and feeling like I'm at Hogwarts.
The "great" hall. Honestly, the philosophy library at USC is prettier.
We ended the night by going to see Spamalot! It was a fun show and most definitely ripped off of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. In fact, it was almost exactly the same as the movie. Unfortunately, our seats were pretty terrible, but that didn't stop us from still getting in a few good laughs.
Anywho, I know this happened ages ago, and I'm so sorry for being the world's worst blogger! I'm trying to keep up!
Stephanie
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