Tuesday 22nd: The Shining at Wollaton Hall

I'm writing this blog on 3rd March, almost two weeks late. So I may have forgotten a few details.

I woke up this day feeling very tired. I had a big sleep-in. During the day I think I probably did some relaxing, wrote a few blog entries, and may have done some studying.

Before Finland, a few of us got strange emails saying that if we were to click 'like' on a certain facebook page trying to promote breakfast cereal and enter our email, then we could be given two free tickets to see a movie at Wollaton Hall. It sounded really obscure, but it turned out that myself and all the other exchange students I met were given a ticket. So we had a free movie at Wollaton Hall. Awesome. I had visited Wollaton Hall a few weeks earlier. It is the very impressive looking one with deer in the land surrounding it.

We caught a double decker bus to the hall. This was only the second time I've been in one of the busses even though they're everywhere in England, not just in London. The first time I had my big suitcase so I had to stay on the bottom floor, but this time we went up to the top. It was great fun although I couldn't see much. It was a little cold and raining outside so the windows were foggy. This made a great atsmophere. When we started up the driveway to the big mansion/hall/thing we went over some huge bumps which sent us flying out of our seats. Some trees scraped past the windows and we got great glimpses of the building lit up.

I forgot to take my camera, but here are two that Frederic took:

Inside they gave us some free food: a popcorn style box filled with a kind of cinnamon breakfast cereal, water, and orange juice. After sitting down, one of the people who look after the building told a brief history of the building and then stories of two of the ghosts who supposedly live there. Some parts of the story, such as a girl running from a strange dark figure and falling and breaking her legs happened in the very room we were sitting in on the same floor stones. It was quite cool. He said that the ghosts are quite friendly and that we may feel their presence. I didn't.

The movie was really good. The Shining. I had seen it just once before when I was less capable of watching slightly creepy scary movies. The room echoed a little bit which made some of the dialogue a little hard to hear. But it was okay, and seeing it in a big old house made it very unique.

Afterwards we caught the bus back to the campus and then went to the Mooch bar for a while to have some beer. After finland, I had just enough British currency to buy one.