Staunton

When we were visiting the Frontier Culture Museum, my friend asked the American farmer about a good place to eat in Staunton. Depot Grille Restaurant was the first one he suggested. It is located in the old freight depot of Staunton Station, and if you are sitting in the covered deck, you can see the trains drive by.

The restaurant had two dining areas and a 40-foot long Victorian bar. We chose to seat at the covered deck, and an old cuisinette was decorating the room. The restaurant had crayons and a paper, the size of the table, on every table. As it was my birthday, my friends and my husband drew a birthday cake with candles on it and wrote, "Happy Birthday." I guess kids and adults both enjoy drawing on the paper.

The food was simply delicious. My friend and I ordered Depot Grille's most popular steak, Choice Ribeye Steak ($15.95). My other friend ordered one of the meals of the day, Caribbean Trout while my husband ordered the Seafood Sizzler ($17.95). All of our entrees were served with a salad and two side dishes. After eating freshly baked bread with butter and a house salad with homemade blue cheese sauce, I was already full, but the food was so delicious that I not only finished my steak, but also sampled my husband's lump crab meat, sea scallops, and jumbo shrimp and my friend's spicy trout. My husband's Seafood Sizzler was so delicious that I put it in the list of foods to order the next time I visited the Depot Grille.

On a fine fall day we visited the Frontier Culture Museum. We started our tour in the exhibition center by visiting the exhibition center. After learning a little bit of background information we watched a free movie on who, why, when, and where people emigrated to Virginia. The movie was good as it helped me to envision the immigrants and their lifes in their home countries. And then our 3.5 hour tour of the grounds started.

Frontier Culture Museum focuses on farm life both in the US and the immigrants home countries. We learned that the 18th century Virginia frontier was settled mainly by Germans, Scotch-Irish, English and Africans. Therefore, there were farms from Germany, Ireland, England, and United States.

When we visited they only had a self-guided walking tours. We stopped at various farms and the volunteers and workers that enacted the life informed us about the daily life on that farm. What was so fun about visiting the Frontier Culture Museum is that you can see how they used to live in the old days. Walking in the rooms of the house, watching the workers go on with their daily chores makes you both nostalgic and at the same time grateful that you don''t have to live in that conditions. Still after our visit I discovered myself daydreaming about living in a farm in the old days and working hard to get ready for winter . . .

What was suprising for my husband and me was to see how linen was made. First, the farmers grow the flaw. Later, in autumn they cut it and put it on ground so it would get wet at night with the dew and would dry of with the sun during the day. Afterwards, the pieces of flax are beating with a machine, which seperates the insides and outsides of the flax. The inside is thrown away and the outside is spinned to make a big yarn. Later, it was weaven as a cloth. We don't work this hard to have a shirt anymore and watching how hard our ancestors work makes me appreciate them more.

The Blackfriars Playhouse is the only replica of the Blackfriars Theatre in London where Shakespeare's plays were staged in the Elizabethan days. The original Blackfriars Playhouse consisted of two theatres. (The Shenandoah Shakespeare plans to build the second theatre "Globe" in the future.) The idea of seeing a Shakespeare's play in a theatre that looked like the original theatre intrigued me for quite sometime.

I was excited when we purchased our matinee tickets for "King Lear". When we got to our seats it was fun to observe the stage and where the audience sits. The stage was two floors high with a balcony and there were even seats for the audience on the stage! The woodcarvings and the details were authentic, and to simulate the lights they had candlestick looking electric lights.

The theatre has four types of seats: Lords' seats, A, B and C sections. We sat in the first floor at the A section. The seats were simple wood benches, being a student for so long sitting on wood bench with no back was no problem for me. However, the older audience rented for $2 nice cushions, and another extra $2 for a seat back. (Did they have these luxuries in Shakespeare's days?). The theater was not as crowded as the original Blackfriars would be (I watched the Shakespeare in Love movie, I saw that it was pretty crowded in those days).

Then the play started. I was a little bit disappointed to see that the actors and actresses dressed in modern clothes. I thought if they had all the trouble of building a replica of the Elizabethan theatre they would be playing in period clothes. The Shenandoah Shakespeare Company states that when Julies Caesar was first played the actors did not dress in togas; they were dressed in Elizabethan period clothing. Another interesting thing was that the fool was played by a woman. The logic behind this was: in Shakespeare's times man played in all parts. These days anyone can play any part.

I was really impressed by the actor who played King Lear. In the play he looked very old to us. However, after the show we saw him and realized he is probably younger than us.

You can order your tickets online or from the ticket office next to the Staunton Visitor Center at downtown Staunton. There are discounted tickets ($10) for students right before the show if there are seats available.

If you want to travel back in time to the reign of Queen Victoria visit Staunton during the Victorian Festival, an annual three-day celebration. Local men and women donned the period costumes and transfer Staunton to the old days. We attended "Doc Fishburne's Magic Elixir and Traveling Medicine Show," watched the "4 in the Morning Barber Shop Quartet" serenade ladies, listened to the "Ridgeview Christian School Praise and Worship Band," and looked for some Victorian lunch (with no luck).

We also attended the Virginia Hot Glass Festival at the Sunspots Studios, which ran concurrently with the Victorian Festival. I was mesmerized when the glass artists blew hot class and turned into different shapes and colors. At some exhibits the artists would explain what they were doing and the techniques they were using. Watching the artists sweat in the hot studio taking a piece of lava like glass put it on a rod, blow on it and make it bigger, add on to it, add color, put it in and out of two different ovens took me to a different land, the land of the fairies. As the artists formed different shaped glass I watched them like someone in the middle ages observe the magicians. It seemed as if nothing was impossible. One moment the glowing red glass would be like a ball next minute it would open up and became a vase. As the glass cooled down it would lose its red glove and if no colorful beads were added it would be white. Sometimes the artists would add different colors together, cut the hot lava with scissors and I would dream that it wasn't a glass but candy.

If you are living near Staunton put your kids in your car and drove to have a really fun day. If you are living a little far, mark your calendar for the Victorian Festival you won't regret it.