Gravestone with engravings wiped clean by time

I just realised that this plane doesn't come with individual TV screens when I'd been happily expecting to have Pride and Prejudice, Walk the Line and Elizabethtown ready for private perusal. I feel very cheated.
We waded back to the apartment and I found myself locked out because parents had decided to wander to Burger King for a bite. So I waited on the landing under the dripping scaffolding.
On first sight, the Globe Theatre was disappointingly shiny and new, though of course my expecting the actual theatre to still be standing was absurd. This second building was constructed with painstaking care to match the original. The revamp took fifty years.
The place is packed with schoolkids - not teens, not pre-teens, to be sure, but somewhere in the interesting middle of a middle. The tour included Americans. They always stick out once they open their mouths with questions that may not blaze with epiphany but display unflickering interest. The circling wooden 'O', painted heaven and hell (the trapdoor) and groundling area provide space for plays to continue in nice inspiring fashion. African Macbeth, Japanese Comedy of Errors, Indian King Lear - internationally, globalization + Shakespeare = complete sense in our times. It rounded up at a wrought-iron gate at the exit depicting examples of animal imagery Shakespeare had used.

"He bares his teeth - like an angry ape -"

We run for lunch at this comforting cafe, where mum and I order the special, steak and kidney pie with mashed potatoes, and dad gets scones, bang-up British style. I hazily eavesdrop on an uppercrust-accented couple at the next table and decide that British culture is certainly more impermeable than American. Perhaps I say this now because I've had time there to decipher their code. But MTV, jocks, wild college parties and road trips are part of media we grew up with. What has Singapore to do with separate teaspoons for cream and butter or arguments about the effective placement of trees in paintings?
Then the gift shop, where I again spend 500 years poring over the beatitudes of children's lit set in Elizabethean times and an absolutely delicious abridged, illustrated copy of Romeo and Juliet, then another couple of days choosing postcards for everyone.

There's nothing wrong with my mother's hair, it's just her Russian hat

Steak-and-kidney pudding - looking a lot less exciting than expected, but tasting a great deal better

Globe postcards on dorm wall - I cannot say enough about how much I love them.
Note the one on bottom right - that's Viola, or a man playing a woman playing in man in '"Twelfth Night".