Toffee is in England

Eamon!  It’s ME!  Toffee!!!  Have you been waiting for my updates?  I had so much fun and was SO busy in England that I fell asleep every night before bedtime and didn’t get a chance to write you! But now I have all my pictures and I can tell you all about it.

Here we go!

DAY 1:  I landed in London!  We flew all night long, so I had to sleep on the plane.  I am small enough that I could snuggle up on Cousin Amy’s lap, so I slept just fine, but Erin didn’t so much.  So she had to take a little nap when we got to the apartment (or as they say in England, the “flat”) we rented.  She needed to sleep since we had a long night ahead of us!  

After nap time was over, we went to go see a Shakespeare play!  Do you know who William Shakespeare is?  If you don’t now, you certainly will as you continue on in school!  He is usually considered the greatest writers in the English language.  He wrote 37 plays, and we got to see one of them that night!  We saw “Pericles” which is a comedy.  Because Shakespeare wrote in such a different way than we speak now, it was a bit hard for me to understand what was happening.  But, the more I just watched and listened the more I understood, and soon I was laughing along with everyone else.  During the intermission, I had a chance to read the playbill about the show.  

I also got to meet some new friends in the gift shop!  They are the “Plague Rats”.  Do you know what a “plague” is?  It is a very contagious disease that causes a lot of people to get very sick and die.  Back in Shakespeare’s time, the people in the city of London lived very close together and they didn’t have plumbing like we do now.  So, all sorts of garbage & food were thrown into the streets.  Well, rats LOVE garbage and food so they were happy living in the city.  BUT, those dang rats were covered in FLEAS!  Fleas would bite the rats, and then jump on people and bite them too, which caused everyone to get very sick.  No one knew that it was the fleas causing the problem, so they didn’t know how to help the people get better, so many of them died.  So many people were afraid to get sick, that they moved out to the countryside,and when that happened, the Globe Theater closed….no one was around to see the plays!

Anyway, these Plague Rats were there as a funny gift, and since they didn’t have fleas, I was able to get close to talk with them (they are the ones who actually told me all that plague information!)

What was neat about this theater is that there were no electric lights in there.  The whole theater was lit by 6 candelabras like the picure below.  I was surprised that we could see everything by just candlelight!  

Well, I have much more to write, so I will end this note and start on my next one!

 

Love,

Toffee