travel day 11: stratford and oxford by way of London

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yet another day trip out of London. my tour guide was a total dushbag. i at first thought he was gay (not that there is anything wrong with that!) but i realized he is probably just a super sleazy middle age guy. my mom and i just got a really creepy vibe from him. we first went to Anne Hathaway's, Shakespeare's wife's house in stratford. it was really cute! it looked like something you would see in a fairy tale. beautiful house with some really nice garden and a maze. the gift shop had some stuff i considered buying but didn't because i feel guilty spending my money, and my parents who probably would have bought stuff for me. they had these books that basically were an EASIER CLIFF'S NOTES version of most of Shakespeare's popular works. now, the only English class i have left to take is another linguistics class unfortunately. i don't need books like this for that class but i think if ever i teacher junior high or high school English, books like that would be very useful to myself and my future students. i know i could just buy those books elsewhere though. i also liked these large postcards that they wanted almost two dollars each for that featured mice recreating stuff having to do with Shakespeare. i would have bought a poster if it had been from a midsummer night's dream if it featured donkey but they didn't have that so i left empty handed. so far, i haven't bought anything on my trip that wasn't food or tickets. we then went to see Shakespeare's birthplace which is worth a visit too. i liked Anne Hathaway's cottage more though to be honest. i didn't go see his theatre which i am disappointed with. at the time, my parents didn't want to see it and were hungry so we skipped it. we spent two hours walking around stratford which looks like solvang but English and not Swedish. we ate lunch outside from this french cafe little place. one of the waiters looked very much like a guy i guess you could say i "dated" only he was (not to be mean), an uglier version of him and i think the guy was french. he kept staring at me because maybe he thought i was staring at him. i kind of like staring at people and seeing their reactions. we then bordered the buss heading to oxford. oxford isn't worth a visit imo. yes its a very old and very difficult college but so what? not worth getting out of your buss or car for. we went to Christchurch college, went to a church (yep another one for this gafiltafish), and saw the dining hall where many Christchurch college students eat and it is also where they filmed some harry potter scenes. we then had free time so we just went to one of the stores because my mom wanted a couple of shirts. i waited outside. once she bought them, we walked away from the store and saw a TINY sign reading "student discount". my mom and i decided that i should go in and use my student card to see if we could get some money back by returning it and then buying the shirts again using my card. now we aren't that cheap, but England is really expensive and the dollar is worth shit here. the workers wouldn't do it. how hard is it just to hand me back a couple of pounds using a calculator dividing up the discount with the merchandise total? they just said sorry you should have read the sign (WHICH THEY DONT LEAVE AT EITHER OF THE WINDOWS!). i walked away giving a sourpuss look and i didn't say a word. my day got worse. the creepy tour guide met us outside there and said that all the women should use the bathroom now because it was going to be a long ride back to London. he said he would meet us right by the bathroom. i had to go and so did my mom so went went there. once we got out (we weren't there for more than a few minutes), we saw no one from our group was still in the bathroom or outside. the guide wasn't there either. it started to rain. we were like wtf? we heard him say he would wait for us there. we thought maybe he and the group were still at the original meeting spot so we walked over not having an umbrella. no one was there either. at that point, my mom and i were pissed off. YOU DONT TELL SOMEONE ONE THING AND THEN DO THE OTHER ESPECIALLY WHEN YOU ARE A FUCKIN TOUR GUIDE! we walked back to the bathrooms and walked past them a little bit. we saw our bus from an odd corner with our guide standing next to the bus but he couldn't get his fuckin ass to outside of the bathroom? we gave him a dirty look and he looked like nothing was wrong. our trip back to London was long due to a lot of traffic. my mom and i didn't tip him. i think my dad did though. i will see this guy in hell.

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