a little piece of a bigger plan...: February 2006

2006 Olympics

Good luck to Team Canada at the Olympics!

shakespeare's stratford for all it's worth

Last Saturday we went to Stratford-upon-Avon. Having been there eight years ago, we decided to by-pass the town itself, and made a mad-dash to the outskirts of town where lies Anne Hathaway's cottage. Well, that mad-dash turned into a painfully slow trek as it became apparent that the cottage was a good two miles away from the city centre. To boot, the lady giving us directions, choose to share with us the longest possible route, a good half-mile longer than it needed to be. Anyway, we made it. It is a quaint cottage as you can see for yourself in the photos.

But sharing this gem of a cottage in the middle of England, as lovely as it is, is not the purpose of this post. The purpose is to vent about the touristy nature of the town. I appreciate that a literary genius lived here and that Shakespeare aficionados would flock to a location that oozes of Shakespeare-ness. But the laws of supply and demand equate to costs associated with seeing anything that has to remotely do with Shakespeare. And "remote" is an understatement. The house you paid to see is not the original house he lived in. No, you've just paid to stand on the floorboards of a house that was built on the same land as the room in the house in which Shakespeare was born! Hope that was worth the price of admission. I took a photo of the land in question from across the street for free. See that park bench that's been sealed off... well, Shakespeare sat there for just under an hour contemplating and later that same year he wrote Romeo and Juliet so it must be worth something - how much are you willing to pay to see that?! Even inns throughout town have pictures of Shakespeare on their signs in the hopes of attracting customers. The only place that is guaranteed as authentic Shakespeare, the one place that the man is guaranteed of having been is his grave! The same place that he is turning in trying to come to grips with the latest way someone has tried to exploit him. But then who am I kidding...I paid to get into the cottage!