London Theatre

This summer I traveled with the theatre department to the city of London for a month. As a group we saw over 20 productions, went to several museums, and spent a long weekend at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon. After the program concluded I ventured out on my own to Copenhagen, Denmark before returning home.

Going into this trip I had the naïve thought that London would feel familiar to me in someway. I think because America and England are so closely connected in history, and we share many pop culture icons, that I felt like I knew England already. In some ways this turned out to be true. The traditional culture shock never came; instead, I was surprised by things I had never even thought to consider. I expected to travel to London and learn about the craft of theatre, and maybe pick up some interesting cultural tidbits along the way. Turns out, I learned a lot more about myself and the way I view the world than I could have imagined. This was only augmented further by my solo trip to Copenhagen, a country that is not familiar in the same way as England, but one with an unshared history and a foreign language.

One of the clearest moments that made me realize suddenly that I was not in the States anymore was going grocery shopping in my first week. Grocery stores are very different in England; instead of supermarkets they have small shops more similar to a convenience store here, but with better food. I spent a good while in the refrigerated section looking for eggs, until someone seeing my confusion asked if I needed help. They showed me to the eggs, which were on the bottom shelf of the baking aisle, not refrigerated! It was a small thing I know, but this was the moment that I realized how it is not the big things that define a culture, but rather the little things that are so ingrained we don’t notice them.

This continued to be a theme throughout my trip. Another way that I noticed the more subtle differences was the closeness of history in England. We study kings and queens, wars, and cultural movements in textbooks, but we don’t have very much physical evidence of history in the United States. I loved that in London you could be walking down the street and pass a newly constructed building next door to a 12^th century church. The history is so present in the everyday life; it helps to shape the culture of the city in a way that we don’t experience in our young country.

Travelling to Copenhagen this became even more evident. The small differences there were a bit more pronounced than those in London, but it was still things that I had never thought to consider that I found the most surprising cultural differences. The language barrier, which was what I had expected to find a challenge, was almost non-existent since nearly every Danish citizen speaks clearer English than many Americans. What was different was the sense of time. The day stays light late into the evening there and so there are people out on the streets until well into the evening, yet all the stores closed around five o’clock.

These experiences and cultural observations are significant because they allowed me to see the ingrained ways that I view the world. I have a more objective understanding of my identity and my viewpoints after being exposed to other ways of living. I think that this will help me as I move forward in life just in being able to better understand that other people approach situations from very different perspectives, even when those differences are not outwardly visible.

Hanging out with Shakespeare in Southwark Cathedral

A segment of the old Roman wall of London in the heart of the modern day financial district

Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford

Rosenborg Castle, Copenhagen