Shakespeare in Ashland

I'm currently in Ashland for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and am here with a class from my university. I'd been planning to make a travel vlog to share on YouTube, but am having trouble finding a good place to record. I could use my hostel room, but I'm worried about sound carrying and bothering others staying there. I could also find a quiet place at the local park, but it's too freaking hot for that. So I'm finding myself coming back tot his blog, as I've been meaning to do for quite a while.

So far we've seen two plays: The Merry Wives of Windsor, and 1 Henry IV. I'll leave descriptions of them for another time, because I need to write about both performances for school anyways. I'll probably put those writings on my book blog. In a few hours we'll be watching Shakespeare in Love, which surprised me because I had expected that we would only be studying Shakespeare's work. That's still our focus, but I suspect this last play will lend itself to discussion that we already have about how people today interact with the idea of Shakespeare and his works.

I haven't done much during this trip aside from seeing the plays and meeting with classmates for discussions about Shakespeare. What little I have done is visit the local park, get food, and find my way to my hostel. I might have done more if I hadn't been so tired; I got no sleep Thursday night and had been awake for well over twenty-four hours by the time I got to sleep at about midnight last night. Despite almost five hours of sleep I'm still tired, and was having trouble keeping my eyes open at times during 1 Henry IV. I'd been considering finding my way back to the hostel for a nap before the evening play, but the battle scene woke me up. It turns out that gunfire, strobe lights, and the smell of smoke will wake a person up.

Yes, they seriously brought the sense of smell into play during the battle scene. I've never seen (or smelled) that done before, and although I hope that anyone who needed an inhaler had one handy, it added a sense of reality to the fighting that was incredible.

A dream of whip cream

Did I say that I'd wait to talk about the plays? Oops. Let's just say that I'm still excitable about how they did the battle. Even with the warning ahead of time of what we the audience should expect I was still taken by surprise at its effect. 

...so now I'm sitting in a coffee shop, having given up momentarily on trying to make notes on the performances to keep them fresh in my mind for when I need to write about them. Writing this post is easy enough, but that's difficult for some reason.

And because I want to share some kind of photo, but would rather wait until I've had a chance to properly go through my photos before sharing any of Ashland, here's a freaking amazing drink that I found. It has whip cream in the middle. EEEEEE.

Now it's back to attempting to write notes on the performances. Hopefully this will have jump started me enough that I don't freeze up again. And hopefully this post doesn't require too much editing, because it's not going to get any. Such brain power is needed more elsewhere.