You know you're an English major in England when...

You know you're an English major in England when . . .

you go to the King's Cross Station in London just so you can find Platform 9 3/4 AND you find it and then you see random birds fly through the station and you automatically think you've seen Hedwig.

you and your friend have a list of every book and movie that takes place in the country you are currently in and will randomly quote from the books and movies and sing songs that fit it ("It won't rain... you always say that, then it always does." Sense and Sensibility)

you spend 4 hours on a train from Paris to go to Amsterdam and stay in a hostel just so you can be at the Anne Frank Haus at 9am to make sure you can finally see what you've been reading and teaching about and so you can buy posters and books for your classroom and get a fun souvenir for your other teacher friend who didn't get to come.

you and your friend will spend 5 pounds ($10) so you can stand for 3 hours to watch a play and think it's really cool because you're standing in Shakespeare's Globe Theatre as groundlings.

you realize after having visited Mary Queen of Scot's Edinburgh house and seen where she gave birth to her son in the Edinburgh Castle and heard all about her terribly torturous and tragic life, that the scene that is reenacted in "Anne of Avonlea" the movie about Mary is wrong because while Elizabeth I was Mary's cousin, they didn't ever meet in life, so Mary could never have plead at Elizabeth's feet for mercy and laugh at the irony that their graves were both moved to Westminster Abbey in London where they are now buried next to one another.

you and your friend spend 6 hours round trip on a train so you can go to the Lake District to see William Wordsworth's house but then you see a sign for Beatrix Potter's house 2 miles away and you decide to follow the public footpath through cow and sheep pastures up a hill to the remote teeny tiny little town of Hill Top so you can wait an hour to spend 10 min. in her little teeny tiny house that was build in the mid 1600's and she added on to in the mid 1800's and left the house to the National Trust in her will so that nothing about it can ever be changed and sadly, never saw Wordsworth's house.

you and your two friends travel an hour to go wander around the cemetery of the Bronte Parsonage at dusk in the rain and then walk along the public foot path the Bronte sisters walked on a little ways trying to find the moors that are so famous in their books and you end up spending 45 minutes talking to a Yorkshire butcher (who rents 3 fields so he can raise horses and sheep) about US politics and the economy and then you drive up a hill for another mile so you can actually see and "feel" the moors (the butcher said we needed to "feel" the moors) then take random pictures of the town of Hayworth from the top of the hill.

you have added 10 pounds to your suitcase because you've purchased a guidebook for every palace, castle, house, tower that you've seen because want to read about it later.

you and your friend take all your luggage down to Stratford-Upon-Avon so you can see Shakespeare's house and make sure you see a play from his hometown and would consider your trip to England almost a complete waste if you didn't go there at all.

you and your friend are fascinated by wording on signs and wonder why do they say "Mind the Gap" instead of "Watch your Step" like we would in America? why do they say "Please do not let your dog foul this area" instead of "Clean up after your dog" or "Poop Pollutes" like signs say in Oceanside, CA? Why be confusing and ask "Is this for take away" at a restaurant instead of saying "Take out"? or laugh when a sign at the train station says "Anti-Social behaviour is not permitted here" and immediately think of taking a picture and putting it in your classroom.

you and your friend both-- independently-- packed books that take place in England just so you could read then while in their native country and have let these books inspire random quoting, discussions and trips to random places.

Finally, you are sitting at a computer in Harrogate, England typing up all the things you've done in the last 2 weeks that show you really are an English major at heart :)