The Blog of Persuasion

5

TARDIS Paper 3

The plane was taxing into the lane to take off. Then the whoosh of the engines starting and the plane starts to take off. I can feel the excitement start to well in my stomach, or maybe it is the feeling of the G-force of plane taking off. I would like to think that it is just the excitement. This excitement is my feeling of going on vacation for the first time without my parents. This is my feeling of growing up, finally leaving the nest.

            Of course this flight wasn’t an easy one. At the time Colorado was teaming with storms. Greeley got hit with a couple of tornados; the east coast was also getting storms. When on a plane most of the time you will get your first drink about fifteen minuets into the flight and if it is a long flight a meal will be provided within the first half hour. That wasn’t possible on our flight it was going to take up to an hour or two to get our meals. The turbulence was just that bad.

            The flight attendants finally had to give us our meal even though the flight was still very bumpy. I had the chicken platter with a diet coke; I even had a crunchie bar. That is a chocolate candy bar from England with a honeycomb center. After dinner the coffee cart came around, I distinctly remember asking the guy who sat next to me if I could use his cream. After drinking my coffee I fell asleep.

            That was the beginning of my trip to England. Over the course of those three weeks I learned about my family and grew up as a person. This was my first trip out of the country without my parents. I also brought my best friend, who I will call Dani, who has never been out of the country. I stayed in Nottinghamshire with my grandfather.

            My favorite thing to do in England is go to the wax museum Madame Tussauds. Every time I go the museum changes. Madame Tussauds is in London England, so when we went there we also took a tour of London. The first stop was the museum itself. The first room looked like a red carpet event, flashing lights and upbeat music. There are many wax figures of famous celebrities. I had my picture taken with Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Harry Potter,  and I have a tendency to tell people that I actually met him. I did the same thing last time I went to Madame Tussauds in 2003, my mom and I got a picture with the wax figure of Simon Cowell. I also got a picture with Graham Norton, who is a talk show host in England, that first room was rhythmically interesting.

            The next few rooms were very different than that first room. There was a room of old movie characters. I have a picture of superman, Charlie Chapman, and other cool characters that I would have to look in my camera to see who they are. There was also a room of terror that had scarily realistic looking heads on spikes. In this room there was also a live action show of terror. I didn’t see it but Dani and my grandfather saw it. I obviously am still as afraid of horror as a genre as I was when I was younger.

            The rest of the museum was the same as I remember, and by that I mean the hall of presidents and old kings and queens. There was all of the US presidents, the most famous kings and queens of England and many of the diplomats from other countries. In this room there was also the Beatles. It took forever to get a picture of them, since everyone wants a picture of the Beatles. The end of the museum was a ride of old London wax figure style.

            On this trip my friend Dani and I went to my parents’ friends’ house in York to see a different part of England. The coolest thing we did was go to a coal miner’s museum; I actually went down a coal shaft.  It was a scary thing, but it was also a very interesting thing. I learned a lot about coal miners and the different ways that mining changed over the years.

            Before going down the miners shaft every one has to take off any of there electronic devices. That includes watches, mobiles, cameras, and any other electronic item. After giving any of the items over to the person on the other side of the counter they gave us a huge battery and a miner’s cap, which was a heavy item to carry while walking around in an uneven environment. After everyone was caped and checked to see if their lights were working we were finally able to go into the shaft.

            I don’t quite remember every single thing that I did but I do remember some of the things that happened. The first room that we came to was shut entirely and the lights all turned out. When the lights were turned back on there was a fake rat on the floor to scare all of the youngsters that might have been there. In that room there were also figures of a pony and a family. That was to show us that there were once a time when an entire family would work in the mines, but unlike us they didn’t have any light so the children had to sit in the pitch black and wait until they heard their parents knock on the door of their area. It was a scary thought that any child would have to live through that.

            As we went through the mine museum the instructor that was bringing us through told us of the new inventions that helped miners as they went through the changes in technology. I even walked the back way of an area, which means I walked through the machinery and got to see the inside area of the machines. At the end of the tour through the mine the instructor asked us if we knew anything that coal was used in. It was interesting to find out that it was in makeup and even in toothpaste; apparently coal is a great whitening product.

            My favorite part of the trip to England was when Dani found what we called “the Doctor Who store.” The store was actually called Forbidden Planet and there was more than just Doctor Who merchandize, there were comics, other sci-fi television show paraphernalia, and many other things. I used most of the money I brought to England on items there.

            The reason I loved that store was because I am a big fan of the British TV show Doctor Who. My favorite actors are in this show, David Tennant, who most Americans will know as Barty Crouch Jr. from Harry Potter, and John Barrowman, who was the main tenor in the song “Springtime for Hitler” in The Producers. For a little background on this show David Tennant plays The Doctor, a Time Lord from a different planet, who is a time and space traveler. His space ship the TARDIS, which means time and relative dimension in space, looks like a blue police public call box.

            Watching the show in England was an amazing experience, the season just started this month in America. I even got Dani to watch it with me, she once saw an episode and thought it was a bit looney. It felt more authentic to watch the show in England since it is a British show. But that is another story for a different memoir.

            Back to my original story about the store, I bought a lot of Doctor Who merchandize. When I first went into the store I bought two books, a “decide your destiny” style book. Before leaving England I bought seven of these books, I got numbers two through eight. I was very excited when I saw that they had a TARDIS. I bought it before anyone else could, it’s a coin bank but I think it is brilliant. I even got a picture of my favorite actor John Barrowman that was signed by him. The last two things I bought were a poster of The Doctor with the TARDIS and a poster of the main cast of the Doctor Who spinoff show Torchwood.

            On the plane ride back home I thought back on what I did while in England. I didn’t do everything that I wanted but what I did do was very exciting. While in England I also bought my first autobiography. I read the entire book within a few hours, randomly telling Dani a few of the anecdotes that I saw in the book that I thought were funny, like for example when he talked about a state, which I can’t really remember which one it is, that is as flat and curve less as Paris Hilton. I don’t think he said it quite like that but that is all I remember.

            The end of my adventure into England was the ride back to America. My thoughts on the trip went pretty much in the same order of my Memoir, which wasn’t in chronological order. I feel that this trip made me grow as a person, even if I still don’t spend my money as wisely as I could. The end of my trip is kind of like the end of John Barrowman’s autobiography, “My ending isn’t written yet, my show’s not over. Stay in your seats. This is only the intermission.”