Today, we woke up at 7:15 AM to get our breakfast, but the dining spaces were very busy! My roommates and I walked across the hotel building to eat cereal and eggs in our new spot. After we all gathered in the morning, we took the tube to Barons Court, which is close to central London to get to:
LAMDA (London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art)!!!
As the oldest drama school in the UK, LAMDA has various intensive programs for both graduate and undergraduate students. If you are interested in professional acting, directing, classical acting, and/or production & technical arts, you may want to apply here! From "building musicals from the ground up" to filming TV with a state-of-the-art curved LED screen, this school seemed to have it all.
Following our fun trip to LAMDA, we traveled to the V&A Museum. This museum, named after Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, features a large collection of art, fashion, performance pieces, architecture, and ceramics within its walls. The coveted jewelry section just so happened to be closed off today, but we still got to see lots of intriguing pieces, such as these:
a Victorian oil painting by John William Inchbold,
wayang dolls from Indonesia,
and a wonderful rendition of a set design for Pericles, Prince of Tyre.
Next, we moved onto Camden Market, pictured below:
This place had so many stores and stalls that we hardly knew where to start! Once we navigated our way, we discovered many shops where we bought food, tote bags, bracelets, clothes, matcha, and of course, British tea. Some favorite items included a really cute skirt, vintage stamps, a digital camera, and Dubai chocolate strawberries.
I would personally suggest taking the tube back after visiting Camden Market, as our legs were very tired on the walk back to the hotel. The quick pit stop energized us to go see My Neighbor Totoro, a semi-new musical based on Studio Ghibli's 1988 movie. I hadn't seen the musical prior to watching, but a few of my friends told me that it was quite accurate to the movie. It was a very sweet story about a family who had just moved to the countryside after their mother had been in the hospital for a while. The two children were very playful, and when they got lost in the woods at certain points, they met a mythical forest creature, which was presented to us as a huge puppet on stage.
The story, set design, and acting were all fantastic in this musical, so we are all excited to see what awaits us next in Oedipus and Richard II tomorrow!
Stay tuned,
Alexis