London is good and done with! Yahoo! I had forgotten just how horrible and expensive and horrible London transportation is. Don’t get me wrong. Once you figure it out, everything runs rather smoothly. It’s the ‘figuring it out’ that’s hard.

First off, I forgot about the border control. Every other country I’ve ever visited is part of the Shengen Union, which means when I get off the plane, no one questions me and I can go skipping off into the ether. The UK is special however, so border control happens both when leaving Copenhagen and when arriving in London. This means extra wait time — a full hour of extra wait time on the London end, in fact. And since my plane was scheduled to land at 8:05 and I booked my Harry Potter tour for 10 and the bus-train combo takes over an hour and my plane landed late, this spelled disaster. I wasn’t sure how strict the ticket time was, but the Warner Bros. website made it clear that arriving late could mean forfitting your entrance with no refund or reschedule. I paid over $45 for this! It was one of the only reasons I came back to London this time around! I needed to see Umbridge’s disgustingly pink wardrobe with my own two eyes, gosh darnit! So…. taxi.

£40 ($54) and 30 minutes later, I arrived at Warner Bros. Studio tired, upset, and slightly less wealthy. (Note that London taxi cabs are actually ridiculously roomy and kind of nice. Still would have preferred a crowded seat on a bus for a third of the price.)

My mood shifted the second I saw these beauties:

Yes. These are some of the actual chess pieces from the actual game of wizard’s chess played by the actual Ron, Harry, and Hermione in The Philosopher’s Stone. (Okay technically it was played by Rupert, Daniel, and Emma, but let’s not get nitpicky.) They’re huge! Imagine the terror!

I was then subjected to The Most Thorough Bag Check Ever, which included me taking all the clothes out of my backpack, explaining what a plastic nail file was, and promising not to stab anyone with the bottle opener (“knife” according to security) attached to my nail clippers. Yeesh.

The tour was worth it. I read every little plaque, watched every little video, and took pictures of nearly everything. Here are some favorites:

Costumes and set pieces at the head table of the Great Hall

The sorting hat! (One of several)

Hermione’s dress from the Yule Ball. In the books, her dress was supposed to be blue, but Emma Watson looks better in pink, so the costume department bent the rules.

One of the Hair and Makeup vanities covered in actual hair and makeup (almost all the characters wore wigs, it seems)

The Mirror of Erised (won’t tell you what I saw!)

A broom setup for filming flying scenes!

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I had more pictures I wanted to show, but the wifi and general cell service is not great in Edinburgh, so this was all I could get the upload.

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The production team behind this series was absolutely bonkers in the best way possible. You know the glass prophecy orbs  from The Order of the Phoenix? Over 15,000 of them were hand made (glowing and all) before the director decided to use CGI instead. Remember when Lupin went werewolf in Prisoner of Azkaban? An entire animatronic suit was made, capable of moving, blinking, etc., but it was too difficult to control, so they scanned it in and used CGI instead. Do you recall the magnificent Buckbeak introduced in Prisoner of Azkaban? The creatures team made THREE full sized animatronic Buckbeaks, each of which had real feathers hand painted and hand placed one-by-one, but obviously after all this work, the Buckbeaks simply couldn’t move around fast enough, so they decided to use CGI instead. Notice a trend? So crazy.

Some remarkable non-CGI was the 17,000 hand-labeled and one-of-a-kind wand boxes in Ollivander’s shop, the moving serpent door that was the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets, and the Hogwarts Castle itself.

I can’t explain how gorgeous Hogwarts is in person. Mind you, it is a 1:24 scale model, but it still engulfed a gigantic two-story room and seemed about as real as can be. I stood there and stared at it for at good twenty minutes. I can’t imagine what it would be like to walk up to the full-sized castle as an eleven year old, right after discovering your wizardlyness, no less. It was hands down one of the prettiest castles I’ve ever seen, real or otherwise.

Okay okay. I could go on for days about the studio and everything in it, but my phone died halfway through so I don’t even have pictures of a lot of things. In fact, I couldnt even take a picute of The Actual Knight Bus. ): Did I mention I spent over six hours there and missed my slot for the world’s longest slide back in London?  Oh well.

ALSO. Butterbeer… Gah… So good…….

After hanging out at the British Library for a while back in London, I went to bed because I was positively exhausted. By the time I fell asleep, I’d been awake for thirty hours straight. The jetlag, man. At least I’ve gotten that over with so I can just be normal tired. Stay tuned for London Part Two. Until then.

Venlig hilsen/ Best regards,

Lizzy-wa