Tag: harry potter

#HarryPotter20

My life is marked by so many Harry Potter memories that if you plot them out on a timeline, you would see them spread out through about two-thirds of my life.

I’ve been celebrating the Harry Potter 20th anniversary for two years now (2017 for the UK anniversary, and 2018 for the US anniversary) and the last two years have been no less magical than the moment I read my first Harry Potter book. It’s definitely been a grand adventure, from the Harry Potter pilgrimage that took my friends and I from London to the wilds of Scotland (read: Cursed Child and the House of Minalima, the Warner Brothers London Studio Tour,  and Scotland I will write about for Harry’s birthday this year — come back to read it, please!) down to today’s festivities: a tea party to launch the Harry Potter 20th Anniversary covers by Caldecott award-winning illustrator Brian Selznick.

Continue reading “#HarryPotter20”

The UK Diaries Part 5: WB Studio Tour London

My second Harry Potter post for this UK trip is the Warner Bros. Studio Tour in Leavesden, the site where the Harry Potter films were made for ten years (and currently where the Fantastic Beasts films are being made). The Tour features the set, props, costumes, special effects and visual effects, creature effects, and the art department from the Harry Potter films.

At this point, we’d already gone to a John Williams BBC Prom (wherein we got teary-eyed within the first few bars of Hedwig’s theme), visited the House of MinaLima and watched the Cursed Child a few days before, and even met Evanna Lynch and Dan Fogler (but I’ll save those stories for another post). This time, on July 31st, we celebrated Harry Potter’s birthday and our last full day in London (we were leaving for Scotland the next day) at the WB Studio Tour.

Continue reading “The UK Diaries Part 5: WB Studio Tour London”

The UK Diaries Part 1: MinaLima + Cursed Child

It was one year in the making.

Remember how we were holed up at the Writer’s Bar at Raffles last year, reading Harry Potter and the Cursed Child over copious cups of tea?

Well, a few days after that, a new batch of theatre tickets to Harry Potter and the Cursed Child went on sale, and much as we bellyached over the content of the screenplay, we decided to join the online queue for a shot at the much-coveted tickets… and before I knew it I was on a trip that snowballed into me fangirling all over the UK.

It’s been a couple of weeks since I got back, and I’ve been tackling the pileup in  my workload (and my hallway library is in disarray), but I have so many stories and photos to share from this trip, so let me start with this one.

Continue reading “The UK Diaries Part 1: MinaLima + Cursed Child”

#FantasticBeasts: #Harryween Party Recap

img_1312

My cousin Dianne and I hadn’t been planning on another Harry Potter party so soon after the last one, and we wanted to focus on reading Harry Potter and the Cursed Child when it was released earlier this year. We think we’re just about done doing the run-of-the-mill Hogwarts-style Potter party (after having done it so many times, I guess?), but we couldn’t resist a Fantastic Beasts party in anticipation of the upcoming film, so we reserved it for Halloween this year.

We weren’t fans of the original movie franchise (and even stopped watching the films at some point), but I think we’re more open to Fantastic Beasts simply because we have no existing head canon for it. It just sucks that we’ll be in different cities when the film finally hits the big screen next week, but we’ll surely be messaging back and forth about the film when both of us finally get to watch it.

Continue reading “#FantasticBeasts: #Harryween Party Recap”