All Work and No Play

Today marked the day of the second Jane Austen field trip. We were not going very far from campus. We took a bus to Golders Green (about a mile away), and then another bus to Kenwood (another mile or so) to see Kenwood House. Kenwood House is an historic mansion dating back to the 1600s. It originally belonged to a Murray, who adopted the name Lord Mansfield. In 1922, it was bought by a descendant of Guinness, the guy who invented the Irish beer. The house has been historically preserved, and is the home of a Rembrandt and Vermeer painting, as well as several Gainsborough and Reynolds paintings. The architecture and interior designing is magnificent- very over the top, which is exactly what they were trying to achieve. The grounds are fantastic, needless to say, and it was very easy to picture any Austen mansion as being like Kenwood House. Most famously, Kenwood House was used for the filming of scenes from the 1999 movie version of Mansfield Park as well as Notting Hill, the movie starring Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant. We got an excellent tour with a very knowledgable guide, and learned a lot about the running of a mansion in the 18th century, as well as customs and scandals. It was definitely eye-opening. We were done by around 1pm, so I left to finish all the work that I had waiting for me. I stopped by the Golders Green Post Office to buy stamps (62p for one- so expensive!) and saw where the Hindu temple for the area is, so I'll definitely be planning a visit there soon.
I got back, took a shower, sat down to read Mansfield Park, and promptly fell asleep 30 minutes later. Upon waking up, I did laundry and read extensively to make up for lost time. A not-so-nice dinner of spaghetti and runny sauce later, I did some more reading, cleaned my room (it looks great now) and went over to a friend's room in the attempt of doing homework. Obviously no homework was done, but we talked extensively about American television, which only made me realize how much I missed watching TV. There is a television here, but it only delivers 3 channels, all 3 BBC, none of them with good programming.
I have yet to finish my homework, but sleep is beckoning, so I plan to wake relatively early and finish it (I have to go through a few chapters in Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park and look for any or all of 12 different narrative techniques that Jane Austen employs). Here are some pictures from today's field trip. I'm proud of the flowers, if I may say so myself. They didn't have signs for their names, so I don't know what they're called.


Kenwood House.


The English take their landscaping very seriously.



This side is particularly what was used in the movies I mentioned.


View from one of the trails around the house.