Sep 2006

After sending out a long e-mail yesterday to everyone about Oxford, I don’t feel like recapping it all over again. So I’m going to skim over what was really a very packed week with this list of highlights:
-punting (pushing the boat down the canal with a metal pole)

-Christchurch (service at the Cathedral, standing where John Wesley was ordained, the
“Harry Potter” dining hall, the fireplace that inspired the stretched neck in Alice in Wonderland, the “moving staircase” from Harry Potter)

-Alice’s shop (where the real Alice used to buy sweets, and was the inspiration for the Sheep Shop in Through the Looking-Glass)

The Eagle&Child- pub where C.S. Lewis and Tolkien and the rest of the Inklings met

The Terf- tavern as old as the 1200’s, was the setting in a large part of Jude the Obscure (one of my favorite books), and also the place where President Clinton supposedly “smoked, but never inhaled”

Blackwell’s at Oxford- the largest bookstore in England

-sketches by Leonardo da Vinci

-dinosaurs, mummies, and shrunken heads

-Einstein’s blackboard, preserved with his chalk handwritten equation, from his second lecture on the expansion of the universe

-my first and last martini. Yuck! but I was excited that I looked 18 and didn’t get carded.

-VERY formal dinner for which we all got dressed to the nines…very fun…and another night we had a dance at the university bar

OK, now that that’s said and done, I’ll come back and revisit parts of it later.

A quick rundown of my weekend:
Friday (no classes on fridays) after the gym I went on a walk with Melissa and Liam from my house. We went on a quest to find Shake-Away's, a milkshake place with (get this) 150 different kinds of milkshakes. Yeahh. They're not icecreamy like in the states, they're just sort of milky, and then they add basically anything in the world to it. So I had a Cadburry Egg milkshake. It's our new Friday tradition, so next week I might try Nutella or Oreo or banana. There are plenty of thinks you WOULDN'T want to try, like liccorice, blueberry nutrigrain bar, or Wheetabix, which is a healthy cereal. So that is our weekly treat.

Saturday was one of the UK's Heritage days...when lots of things are open and free admittance. So Melissa and I got up early and walked to some of those places in Bath. The coolest was the Masonic Hall. I felt like I was some privileged scholar learning the secrets of the Da Vinci Code. 364 days a year it's closed to anyone who's not a Mason. But inside I learned a lot and saw some of the world's oldest photographs (not THE oldest but from the same few years) and the world's oldest gas appliance (older than the Bunsen Burner by 15 years). I learned about freemasonry and some of the symbology and a lot of the histrory. Very worthwhile.

Saturday night we celebrated a friend Annie's 20th birthday with pizza at one of the houses. Sunday Melissa and I got up again and took a free, two-hour walking tour of Bath. It was interesting. I saw some parts of the city I hadn't seen before and learned a lot of history.

Monday at Oxford I walked from the train station to my tutor's house instead of taking the bus. It took almost two hours (that includes stopping to take a few pictures and to buy a baguette sandwich to walk with) but I got to see the center of Oxford and all that goes along with it. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Starting this Saturday the whole programme will be in Oxford for a week.

Last night I went to my first rugby game. I've never even been to one at Mary Washington. But this Bath Rugby game was quite an experience. It took me until almost the end of the game to figure out that the ball isn't dead until it goes out of bounds (that's how sports-savvy I am, haha) so most of the time I was trying to compare it too closely to American football in which the ball is dead when the man is down. But once I picked up on a few of the rules, I was able to follow it and enjoy it.

I guess I'll do some reading in my Yeats poetry book before creative nonfiction starts in an hour. Note to self, I need a stapler for that class. Hmmm.

later!

Last night I saw Waiting for Godot at the Theater Royal here in Bath. I went with some people from my Irish lit class, because we're reading the play later this semester. It was a really good production, with talented actors (it's going back to London after this week) but a lot of the ideas went over my head. Still, I'm glad I saw it.

I joined the gym, and the most challenging thing about that is trying to use the metric system. I don't do kilometers. How far have I gone? How fast am I going? But it's a really nice facility.

I can't decide on a favorite class between creative nonfiction, in which we're writing our memoirs, or In the Courts of Princes. My classes are wonderfully small:

Spanish- one on one with a tutor at Oxford (I have to take the train there and back)

In the Courts of Princes- six people

Creative Nonfiction- nine people

Irish Literature- ten people

It's fantastic. It is going to keep me on my toes. You can't get away with not being prepared, not even for one class. Classes only meet once a week, for two hours. That means lots of work outside of class, but it's not harder than M'dub. Supposedly this should be one of the easiest semesters of college, from what I've heard.

More later,
Les

This is short because I'm tired and I want to go back to my house, where I currently am not getting internet, and relax. But it's been a couple of days and a lot has happened.

Yesterday was Stonehenge, Salisbury, and Avebury.

Stonehenge was more exciting than they told us it would be. Probably so we wouldn't think it was the coolest thing ever and then be disappointed. We got there in the morning and the weather changed from cloudy to sunny about 15 times in the hour we were walking around the stones. But that meant we got to see them in all kinds of light. Then we went to Salisbury, where we walked around the town which has stuff from medieval times all the way to present, the highlight being the Salisbury Cathedral. There we saw one of the original 4 copies of the Magna Carta. Pretty impressive stuff. You can get a lot closer to it than you can to the Declaration of Independence. I couldn't believe it was still in such mint condition since 1215!

Our last stop was Avebury, which is MUCH BIGGER than Stonehenge. We hiked around the stone circle (it's huge) and I was distracted by the sheep. Yeah, we were walking through sheep pasture. We all smelled like sheep, too. Eww.

Today I went to Oxford for spanish. I found my tutor's house, and the lesson was really helpful. I'm going to learn a lot. I got to Oxford 2 hours before I needed to, because I thought I'd do some sightseeing. But Oxford is much, MUCH bigger than I thought it was. I didn't realize before that there's an actual city, not just a conglommeration of 39 "colleges"

So I walked around for those 2 hours, but I didn't see anything significant because I had no idea where anything was. I'll do better next week.

My roommate Melissa taught me how to make applesauce in the microwave from the apples in our yard, and it's my new favorite thing. I'll make it for all of you when I get back. nothing like the applesauce in containers.

I'm drained from the day. Catching trains and switching trains and walking around Oxford and catching buses and trying to think in Spanish for the first time in months...today was really the first time with the exception of the train from London to Bath that I have been on my own, an American amongst the brits. Everytime I thought I was going the wrong way today, I started to panic if I let myself think "I am in another country"...so I just had to keep stopping myself fom thinking about it. I haven't gotten lost yet, knock on wood.

Tomorrow is creative writing, my first class here in Bath, and I'll get my first diagnostic back. I hope it's alright.

love you all, and really really miss being able to talk to you guys on the telephone. i'm finally starting to get homesick now, but it's nothing bad. i havent cried or anything. haha.

cheers!
les

Boots I do not have...yet.

Walking I have done...lots.

Bath is a bigger, more bustling city than I was expecting. I'll have to look up how many people live here.

The Roman baths were beautiful. So many roman artifacts! The self-guided tour was cool. I'm so glad we went before they stopped openging them (and lighting them up) at night.

Yesterday I got my books, and walked around the city some, got a tour of Bath University nearby, walked back rather than taking the bus, which turned out to be about 25 minutes of a downhill walk...my calves are still tired. Then we had a study skills session which was really intimidating. The professor leading the session was from Oxford, and I quote him from his schpiel on the importance of citing sources correctly:

"If you misquote a line from Shakespeare, I'll know it. But if it's a comma I think is out of place, I may have to go back and check so you should have your sources cited with all information."

A man who knows every (punctuated) line of all of Shakespeare's works by heart? That's not natural.

But basically, the biggest difference between classes here and classes there is the reading. At home, there is required reading. And if you're a good student, you do all of the required reading. Here, if you're a good student, you do all of the required reading, and then the RECOMMENDED reading. So maybe I have to read a play for a class, and that is required. But the suggested reading might be a book on the author's life, or another play from the same time or author. And if you want to contribute to the seminars here, (25 percent of your grade), you will need to have read from the suggested reading list.

I'm going to be very busy these first few weeks. What people on the program have heard from people before is that eventually you figure out how much work you can get by with, and it really isn't that bad at all.

My first class is at Oxford on Monday. I have to take the train, and then the bus, and find my tutor's house. I'm a little nervous about finding my way. This first week I'm just going to go in really early in the morning, because my tutorial is not until 2, and wander around the colleges at Oxford for awhile.

Today is shopping day. Everywhere is having big sales, because the fall collections go up after today. My roommate and I walked around for awhile in the middle of our grocery shopping. (Grocery shopping is by far the most difficult thing so far, but if that's all, then life is not worth complaining about). I found a cute flouncy denim skirt for 3 pounds. That's six dollars. But the annoying thing is, it's a size 10. For anyone who might not know girls' sizes, I'm nowhere near a size 10. I'm a 2 or a 4. Luckily Julie had already warned me about how skinny European women's clothing is, so I'm not panicking about suddenly wearing a size 10. I might go shopping some more, just to look around. I'll be happy if I find a black clutch, and some rainboots. I don't plan on buying a lot of clothes while I'm here. It's too expensive trying to travel and eat and go out.

We had a reception last night with all of our tutors. We sipped wine and strolled around a Victorian art gallery and mingled with students and tutors (a tutor is the equivalent of an american professor...in england professors are more like the very top of their field). I felt about 25. Then everyone went out to this club, my first European club experience. I didn't really like it. I guess you have to be drinking to enjoy yourself at those kind of places, or at least be a really great dancer. I don't think I'll be going along from now on.

But aren't you proud of me for at least trying these things? I'm really putting myself out there. And as for new experiences, I think I'll go try to catch some of the cricket match in town before walking around some more. Tonight feels like a good night to settle in with a cup of tea and do some reading, because we have to be up early tomorrow to go to Stonehenge, Salisbury Cathedral, and Avebury.