day 8

Today was pretty much filled up with one event: going to Hampton Court palace, home of King Henry VIII. I actually got to sleep in this morning, which was fabulous. This was just an API trip, so I met my group downstairs and we were off to the train station. We met Rachel, our director, her son, her mother this time as a helper for the baby, and Alex, our assistant director.

The train ride was very nice, and I listened to Mugglecast, my favorite Harry Potter podcast from mugglenet.com the whole way over. For those of you who don’t know, a podcast is something Apple does where people record shows about particular topics and put them on iTunes for people to download for free. I highly recommend them as they come is just about any subject you could be interested in, and they’re free. This week’s Mugglecast was all about the new Harry Potter theme park in Orlando and it made me very excited to go next fall with Potter Watch.



We got to the little village where the palace was and made the short walk to the palace itself. Though Hampton Court is not terribly tall, it does cover a lot of area, and it really quite huge. It’s all made out of red brick on the outside and it filled with all kinds of apartments and living spaces that have been restored to the way they looked by in Henry VIII’s time.

The first thing we wanted to do was get lunch, so we walked through the beautiful gardens to the café. I wanted to get something that looked very British for lunch, so I got what I though was a kind of meat pie with potatoes and a pistachio cake. But the meat pie was not a meat pie, though it looked like it. I can’t even begin to guess what it might have been. It tasted familiar, but I could not place what it was. Shannon got the same thing and she said she couldn’t tell what it was either. It was uniform all the way through and it sort of had the texture of a not-all-the-way-baked potato. It tasted all right, but I may never know what it was I was eating.

After the mystery lunch we were all feeling better so we started our tour of the palace. We saw all the huge kitchens where all the huge meals were prepared. They ate a lot of meat pies back then, but the pie part wasn’t eaten. It was sort of like a disposable cooking pot. They would put the boiled meat in the crust and cook it all together, then they would eat the meet and through away the crust. Henry’s court went through crazy amounts of meat. The audio guide said that his court moved around the country, eating and eating until there was nothing left in that area, then moved on to a new palace where they bankrupted the people. I’m really glad I wasn’t a peasant in that time.

We walked all through the great halls and great bedrooms and great hallways and listen to the audio tour tell us things. The audio tour was informative but it talked about each room for too long. I was done looking at a room and it was still going on about some painting that the Duke of Something or Other gave to Prince Whosit when he went someplace. But it was still fun.

After we were done at the palace we got back on the train and came to London. I spent the rest of the day relaxing and chatting on skype. It was a lovely day.



British word of the day: kip = a nap