All the World's a Stage. . .

At least it is according to the great bard himself. You know, that lovely poet and playwright who spoke in that olden day English that most people find hard to understand, well, interesting point; he was born in this country that we are currently stuck in! (I know, surprising isn't it? LOL).
So last weekend Mel and Mike said that they had found a cheap motel not far from said poet's place of birth and would we like to stay the weekend there and visit the town? We, being the Shakespeare nuts that we are, jumped at the chance. So off we drove for a couple of hours, past Oxford, to the little town that became famous simply because a certain person was born there over four hundred years ago. And what a pretty little town it is! It's full of Thatched roofs and little bendy houses and beautiful architecture, and LOADS of Shakespearean references. Nearly every shop has used a Shakespeare quote or title as the shop name. There was a cafe called "The food of love", a jewellers called "Othello Jewellery" and so on and so forth.
There was an absolutely GORGEOUS little book store that was just dedicated to the bard's works. There were postcards were the image and words were taken from The First Folio. There were bound copies of the works as they appeared in the First Folio, complete copies of his poems bound in a beautiful cover, commentaries on the plays, the plays themselves. And then there was this little guy:

He is called "Shakesbear". . .Isn't he so adorable??? Ok, so moving on from the wonderful shop were we just wanted to buy everything! We'll come to some of the houses and buildings you can visit around the town. We didn't go in any of them cause they're a little too touristy and expensive for us; but they're still very pretty from the outside!!

This one is just to show what I was talking about with the town being pretty - this is their LIBRARY!!!

This is the house Shakespeare was born in.
Us in front of said house.

These are the foundation stones which are all that remain of "The New Place" (for those from Waikato Uni, that's what the theatre is named after) which is the house that Shakespeare bought for his daughter and her husband where he lived with them until his death.
The garden of The New Place.

The gardens were open to the public and free to roam around in. So in we went and found these awesome statues dotted around. For those of you who know your Shakespeare you may recognise the above from A Midsummer Night's Dream where Bottom becomes an Ass. Unfortunately the English have funny closing times over Winter so even though it was only 4pm they shut the garden up and kicked us out of it so we couldn't get good photos of the other statues, but they were really beautiful!
Last but not least we have the church, inside which, Shakespeare is buried:

We actually kinda wanted to go in and see his gravesite, but, as mentioned, the English have silly closing times in winter and the church closed at 3.40! So, that plan was dashed. Oh well, I'm sure we will be going back there at some point in the summer. . .

Okay, time for a random segway here (and those who know me know that those happen quite a bit!). The last time we were in London we went to a gorgeous Patisserie - actually we've gone there every time we've gone to London cause it's THAT good - but this time, the food looked so good, Shelley had to take photos of it. The ONLY time Shelley has ever felt moved to photograph her food. . .She's been meaning to put it in a blog for a little while now but keeps forgetting. So I'm going to leave you with this tasty image to drool over. . .
Missing you all, love and hugs.