Drake Chamber Choir England Tour 2010
Saturday-Sunday, January 9-10, 2010 Journal by Melissa Judge
It’s Saturday and hard to believe it is our last full day in England. After having a free night to explore London, we now have a free day today to do more sight seeing. Yesterday our tour of the Tower of London was cancelled due to snow and slippy conditions, so a rather large group of us met at 9:30 in the lobby of the hotel to visit the Tower with Dr. Saylor. After yet another full, delicious English breakfast we were off to begin our jam-packed day of seeing London. When we arrived at the Tower, our group separated and most of the students walked around to view the crown jewels and Henry the VIII’s many sets of armor. A small group decided to take the Yeoman tour, which was a theatrical and historical presentation about the Tower. We heard many gruesome stories of the beheadings of criminals and murder mysteries. It was an amusing and interesting tour. After exploring the rest of the tower and seeing the jaw-dropping crown jewels, we decided to visit Camden Market.
As I walked out of the tube station, I was in awe of the sights of the market. It was like nothing I had ever seen before. I had expected a nice, quaint market like the ones we had visited in Cambridge, but this was maybe the exact opposite. It was big city version of a market, where literally everything you may have wanted was crammed into a couple city blocks. There were tons of stands where you could eat what I heard to be “very exotic foods” from some members in the choir who dared to try them. The main section of the market consisted of small aisles surrounded by open shops where you could buy anything from photos of London to tights with comic strips printed on them. It was very eclectic to say the least.
After spending some time exploring the market it was back on the tube to navigate the way to the British Library. It is the national library of the UK and one of the greatest libraries in the world. We visited the Sir John Ritblat Gallery, which is home to many treasures of the world. Some of the highlights included a copy of the Magna Carta; Lewis Carroll’s original manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground; the Duke’s Plan, an early map of New York; and Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebook, which you could actually turn the pages in, using their touch screen interactive programs. The “music nerd” in me came out especially when we had the opportunity to see the original score of Handel’s Messiah, the original score of Schubert’s song An die Musik, and many other originals from Beethoven and Vaughan Williams to name a few. They also had a display showing hand-written lyrics to songs by The Beatles. It’s difficult to describe the feeling after seeing these historic documents. To be honest it made me speechless.
Our visit to the British Library had to be rather brief because we had to return to the hotel to prepare for our final concert at St. James Piccadilly. When we entered the space, I was again in awe at the beauty of Christopher Wren’s work. This church was smaller than the cathedrals we had visited in London, but the acoustic was beautifully warm and pure. I think this moment was very bittersweet for the whole choir and especially for the seniors. It would be the last Chamber Choir concert that Mason, Alex, Tamra and I would ever perform, and the last concert on our what seemed to be flawless tour. The concert was again stunning. There were moments when I looked across the choir to people and I could see the simple joy coming from their hearts. It was yet another moment where as ABC says, “all hearts and minds were in the same place”.
The concert was not the close to our wonderful day, however. We had our farewell dinner following. We loaded the coach and arrived at Denise’s Restaurant, a lovely little place a couple blocks from our hotel. We were able to talk and reminisce over another delicious meal of salmon salad, steak, and a chocolate mouse desert. The manager of the restaurant requested we sing a piece, so from our seats at the tables we sang the closer of our concert “Sing a Song of Six Pence”, and I can’t think of a more carefree moment on the tour than that. It was so much fun to share one piece with the people in the restaurant and just to be silly with our group. Our farewell dinner was full of belly-shaking laughs lots of clapping and many fun conversations. It was the perfect ending to what really was a perfect tour.
As I walked out of the tube station, I was in awe of the sights of the market. It was like nothing I had ever seen before. I had expected a nice, quaint market like the ones we had visited in Cambridge, but this was maybe the exact opposite. It was big city version of a market, where literally everything you may have wanted was crammed into a couple city blocks. There were tons of stands where you could eat what I heard to be “very exotic foods” from some members in the choir who dared to try them. The main section of the market consisted of small aisles surrounded by open shops where you could buy anything from photos of London to tights with comic strips printed on them. It was very eclectic to say the least.
After spending some time exploring the market it was back on the tube to navigate the way to the British Library. It is the national library of the UK and one of the greatest libraries in the world. We visited the Sir John Ritblat Gallery, which is home to many treasures of the world. Some of the highlights included a copy of the Magna Carta; Lewis Carroll’s original manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground; the Duke’s Plan, an early map of New York; and Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebook, which you could actually turn the pages in, using their touch screen interactive programs. The “music nerd” in me came out especially when we had the opportunity to see the original score of Handel’s Messiah, the original score of Schubert’s song An die Musik, and many other originals from Beethoven and Vaughan Williams to name a few. They also had a display showing hand-written lyrics to songs by The Beatles. It’s difficult to describe the feeling after seeing these historic documents. To be honest it made me speechless.
Our visit to the British Library had to be rather brief because we had to return to the hotel to prepare for our final concert at St. James Piccadilly. When we entered the space, I was again in awe at the beauty of Christopher Wren’s work. This church was smaller than the cathedrals we had visited in London, but the acoustic was beautifully warm and pure. I think this moment was very bittersweet for the whole choir and especially for the seniors. It would be the last Chamber Choir concert that Mason, Alex, Tamra and I would ever perform, and the last concert on our what seemed to be flawless tour. The concert was again stunning. There were moments when I looked across the choir to people and I could see the simple joy coming from their hearts. It was yet another moment where as ABC says, “all hearts and minds were in the same place”.
The concert was not the close to our wonderful day, however. We had our farewell dinner following. We loaded the coach and arrived at Denise’s Restaurant, a lovely little place a couple blocks from our hotel. We were able to talk and reminisce over another delicious meal of salmon salad, steak, and a chocolate mouse desert. The manager of the restaurant requested we sing a piece, so from our seats at the tables we sang the closer of our concert “Sing a Song of Six Pence”, and I can’t think of a more carefree moment on the tour than that. It was so much fun to share one piece with the people in the restaurant and just to be silly with our group. Our farewell dinner was full of belly-shaking laughs lots of clapping and many fun conversations. It was the perfect ending to what really was a perfect tour.
