Yeah, so by tomorrow, I guess I meant two months from now. Oops
So where was I? Ah, yes, on my way to meet the boy wizard. After a kind of swanky dinner at the hotel restaurant (I had a 75 pound a day food allowance!), sleeping (finally!) in a comfy bed and eating some pretty sweet room service for breakfast, I got in a little van with a handful of other faux-journalism types and headed to an airplane factory about an hour outside of London. Okay, it used to be an air plane factory, but it is now a giant building filled with movie-making materials. Seriously, it's so big that people ride bikes to get around inside.

They had a big tent set up inside for press that was filled with lots of cool pictures and props from scenes they already shot, which was awesome. (So that means I know what happens in the one scene they added that's not in the book. I won't spoil it for you. I also think they might put a curse on me if I said anything about it on the interwebs.) As soon as we sat down, they brought in the boy wizard himself to meet us. I mean, literally as soon as we sat down. It was a little unnerving. He was very sweet and charming, and I was only sitting a seat away from him, so I got to see his costume and his scar and everything up close and personal. He was a good interview, telling some funny stories, giving thoughtful answers and sounding all British. You know, all the things that would make him totally endearing to American reporters. At one point he used the phrase "larking about" and then stopped himself to say, "Did I really just say larking about? I must be 80-years old because I don't think anyone's said that since the 1920s." Adorable, right?

Next up was his ginger-haired friend who was quirky (he drives an ice cream truck and plays the didgeridoo!) but a really frustrating interview. Seriously, if he said, "I don't know, really," in response to one more question, I was going grab him by the shoulders and shake him. Okay, I wouldn't really have done that because I might have gotten tossed off the set, but I really wanted to. These questions aren't that hard, Ginger. I bet people ask them a lot. So come up with an answer! Anywho, after him we interviewed the new girl with a colorful name. She was sweet and adorable. It's her first real movie role, so you could tell how genuinely excited she was.

Then we headed down to watch them film a scene. We got headsets and got to watch on monitors and stuff, which made it seem all official. This part of the day wasn't actually that exciting because we watched them film the same 45-second scene (really, I timed it) over and over again. After awhile, I pretty much had the whole thing memorized.

They were getting ready to break for lunch, so we headed to the commissary (how British!) for lunch. The food was really yummy. I had tiger prawn curry and a Kit Kat for dessert. (Mmm ... British Kit Kats are so much better. Just thinking about it sort of makes me hungry.) Eating there was really funny, though, because it felt sort of like we'd snuck into a modern-day wizarding school. Everyone was still in their costumes and joking around with their friends. It was adorable.

After lunch, we interviewed some producers (woo hoo) and then headed out on what was my favorite part of the day. The tour! It blew me away how they were able to coordinate all of the different sets. In one place, they'd be building a brand new set and across the way they'd be prepping another one that they'd just taken out of storage, all while they were filming a little farther down. How it all gets done blows my mind. A lot of the sets that they use all the time are just there permanently, and we got to go in and see them. (A guy with a giant set of keys walked around with us and unlocked them. Security is tight because they don't want things disappearing and ending up on eBay, which makes sense.)

Here were my favorite stops: the ginger-haired friend's family home. They just shot there the day before, so it was still all set up inside. So adorable. The big hall. Those giant tables are really impressive in person. The famous common room, and there we got to go upstairs to their dorm room, too. I sat on the boy wizard's bed! It's actually much tinier than you'd think. (Apparently the boy wizard is the only one who can still lie down on his bed. Everyone else got too tall, so you'll only see them setting on their beds. Watch for it.) The headmaster's office. I sat at his desk! There's this really awesome two-story old-fashioned telescope and a whole separate sitting room, both of which never appear on-screen. They just felt like he would have them, so they wanted to include it to keep it true to the character. It's all the little details like that the were just amazing. The paintings on the walls and the props on the tables in the common room (wizarding comic books!) that never make it into the movie, but are there to make the environment at whole and real as possible. Sorry, I'm getting all sappy about it, but this really was that part of the day that impressed me the most. We also got to stop off of at their creature workshop, which was pretty cool to. It's where they make all the animatronic stuff like giant mechanical spiders and the original models of what they scan for CGI stuff. A lot of it was pretty creepy.

After the big tour, we went back to watch them film some more. (Same scene, shot from a different angle, I believe.) We got quick interviews with the two remaining female stars and the directors, and then, about 10 hours after we arrived, they put us back on the shuttle and sent us back to London.

A long, strange trip
The rest of the time went really fast. We got back, and I had a three-course dinner with wine at the same swanky restaurant. (I love having a food allowance. I wish it happened more often.) I'd kind of wanted to go out for a pint while I was in London, but I was so wiped out after that long day, that it didn't happen. I just went up to my room and curled up with a book about the boy wizard.

The next morning, I walked around Kensington Garden and took some pictures, stopped to buy a few souvenirs for people and then checked out and headed to the airport. Checking in and everything went smoothly, and we even boarded the plan on time. But that's when things went wrong. It was a 4 pm flight, so we boarded at about 3:30. And then we sat on the runway for hours. Seriously. They kept feeding us to make us happy, but we finally got out of a flight attendant that a plane had landed with out it's landing gear locking, so it was stranded in the middle of a runway. (No one got hurt.) That meant that were was only one runway operating both into and out of Heathrow. Awful. Which meant that from the time I'd gotten on the plane, it took us about four hours to take off. Add that to a flight that already takes eight hours. Ugh. It was a good thing that the boy wizard book was so thick because I finished the entire thing and still had time to watch part of a movie. We landed about 11, so by the time I got my luggage and got a cab home from Newark, it was about midnight, and I'd just spent 12 hours straight on a plane. But I was a champ and still managed to get to work on time the next day.

So that is the long overdue story of my trip to see the boy wizard. I'm planning to post a quick overview of what else I've been up to this year. I'm not going to make any promises about when it will happen, though. Maybe that way it will actually happen in a timely manner (or at least before next year).