Request/Two General HP-Related Questions...

[Ebony AKA AngieJ]

No: HPFGUIDX 21961

Hey, list...

As some of you know, I made it safely to the UK last weekend and have 
been enjoying it here ever since.  I always loved reading about 
England, but never had even the slightest desire to visit until last 
summer.  I'm enjoying myself more than I have on any other summer 
vacation thus far in my life!

REQUEST

Best of all, I've managed to fit HP into my summer coursework in a 
way that's perfectly acceptable to both of my tutors.  We have a 
informal ("fun") presentation that is required for education majors 
(along with 3-4 brief papers a week and a "serious" extended research 
project), so I'm choosing to present an illustrated travel miniguide 
for classes following the life and times of five British middle-
grades and young adult authors:  Tolkien, Lewis, Carroll, Pullman, 
and Rowling.  OF course, most of this will be easy--I'll include 
aspects of the Inklings tour, I can see Christ Church from my bedroom 
window, and Pullman actually *taught* at the school where one of my 
tutors was headteacher, so the only other left to really concentrate 
on is Rowling... and other than King's Cross, I am drawing a huge 
blank.  I'd welcome any suggestions of what sites would be of 
interest to HP fans via private e-mail.

QUESTIONS

Two quick questions that I've thought of in my first week here:

1)  Is the Hogwarts Express the only way that kids get to Hogwarts?  
I'm having a hard time believing it.  I knew the UK areawise is 
nowhere near the size of the US, but I had no idea that England is as 
big as it is until I got here... it actually took us a good hour to 
get to Stratford from here (on a map, to my American eyes, I thought 
we'd be there in five minutes), it takes an hour's travel in another 
direction to get from here to London, and even our school visits 
around various places in Oxfordshire have taken a good 15-20 minutes 
commute at minimum without us being stuck in traffic! 

Scotland's *much* further away from the South than I thought.  Why in 
the world would wizard kids from Manchester or Liverpool or Aberdeen 
come all the way to London?  You can't Floo to King's Cross that we 
know of, underage kids can't Apparate, we haven't seen anyone attempt 
to balance a trunk on a broomstick yet, it's illegal to enchant your 
car, etc. etc.  It'd be stupid for Scottish or Northern English 
parents to drive all the way down here so their kids could catch a 
train back in the direction they just came from.

Of course, we do not know conclusively that Hogwarts is in actual 
Muggle Scotland, do we?  Could there be another train into Hogwarts 
that we haven't seen yet?  Or are the vast majority of the kids from 
the south of England, and the few that aren't find some other way 
into the school?

Or is the Hogwarts Express the *only* way into the school?  
(Actually, CoS proves that it indeed is not.)  So does the train just 
run for students, or are their regular trains that run on a 
daily/weekly/hourly basis?  The transportation system over here is 
quite fascinating.  Some of us are renting cars, but I'm a little 
nervous about doing so.

2)  Why does no one have tea in the books?  Heidi has a fascinating 
theory about this that I buy (she was a history major once upon a 
time), but why no tea in the wizarding world, yet house-elves wear 
tea-cozies and tea-towels?  This tea thing is really so much a part 
of the culture here that I immediately wondered about its absence in 
the books.  Unless I am forgetting something...

Speaking of which, it's teatime now.  ;-)  Be interested in hearing 
your thoughts on this.

And yes, I *finally* purchased my UK editions of the books... and 
when GoF comes out in paperback here on Friday, I'll grab that one up 
too.  :-)

--Ebony AKA AngieJ