Blenheim Palace and Evensong in Christchurch

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Good news! They found my notebooks on the bus! Ha, I told the bus driver they had to be on there. Luckily, we were using the same bus company today, so they just brought my notebooks along with them. I have never been so happy to finish an essay in my life.

We left the accursed Stow-on-Wold, which I didn’t see much of and will be happy never to return to, thank you very much, and coached out to Blenheim Palace. The Palace was given to one of Winston Churchill’s ancestors as a reward for a battle he won in . . . the war slips my mind, but it had something to do with the French anyway. The palace is amazing! I can’t believe that anyone would try to live in a place like this—it’s just too big. Although, compared to some grandiose places, it does at least seem very tasteful. You don’t get this sense of being completely overloaded; awed, but not overloaded.

I suppose it helped that we had a tour guide to explain the stories behind lots of the paintings and tapestries, so it felt like they had meaning rather than just gaudiness. They had an interesting Winston Churchill exhibit with lots of his letters and paintings. The main level of the house was amazing, particularly the library, which looks like the one in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. It’s totally amazing; I was definitely drooling over their collection of books. There was a rather lame anamatronic exhibit upstairs, which we watched for about 15 minutes before ditching out and heading out to the grounds.

Churchill did two important things at Blenheim Palace: be born (six weeks premature while his mother was attending a party there) and decide to get married. As I walked the grounds, I saw the Temple of Diana where he proposed to his wife—so adorable! The grounds here are wonderful, if not exactly natural. The whole landscape was designed by Capability Brown, the English landscape architect, who put in the lake here and designed some amazing vistas. I begin to think his type of work is the most amazing form of art—to be able to design something that can be walked through in 3D and also plan for how it will grow and change over the years.

Our time at Blenheim was too short—I only got to see a little of the Secret Garden (full of artificial ruins courtesy of Capability Brown) and none of the elaborate garden maze before boarding the coach for Oxford. The Oxford Youth Hostel was on the surface level impressive, but the rooms smelled terrible, and they refused to let a large group like us use the kitchen, which they neglected to tell us beforehand and totally wrecked our dinner plans.

We arrived barely in time for a tour of Christchurch College, which is where they film the scenes of the Great Hall in the Harry Potter movies! I went into super fan girl mode when we walked up the stairs McGonagal leads the first years up in Sorcerer’s Stone. I am so jealous of the students, who get to eat here every day. On the other hand, perhaps that would be intimidating. The other main feature at Christchurch is the smallest cathedral in England, which was really beautiful. We caught a quick cup of hot chocolate across the street and returned to the cathedral for Evensong services. It was kind of a weird experience for me, seeing so much that was familiar used in a way just different enough to be really disconcerting. And then there was the contrast between the singing, which made me feel like I in the 18th century (or earlier—I can’t place the time of music well) and the prayers written by the American minister about the problem of global warming—an odd combination of old and new. I’ve written a lot more about this in my journal, which will probably show up on the main blog when I get home. Suffice to say, it was very enlightening, but I think I still prefer Mormon worship services actually. They feel much more personal and real.

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