"Not all who wander are lost"

Life as a house is interesting. I feel like I’m on Real World much of the time, especially since there are seven of us. I like living in a house, though, because I feel like I really /live/ here in England, not just that I’m staying somewhere for a brief visit. I even refer to it as “home”, which I’ve never called my dorms at Mary Wash.

Our house is relatively drama-free. Relatively. I guess there’s drama and I’m just not in it. Thank goodness. My roommate Melissa and I are basically two peas in a pod. We go walking around Bath together on all our days off and stay in together sometimes when everyone else goes out to get drunk. She taught me a card game called Skip-Bo, and the first day I learned we played it for three hours. All the apples from our apple tree are gone, but we cut up and froze a LOT of them so we still make applesauce from time to time. We take turns cooking dinner sometimes, too. Luke and Liam are good guys to get put with because they’re easygoing. Luke has lived with girls before in his college suite, but poor Liam never even had a sister (he’s one of four brothers). Luke and I get along well. Molly and Diana and Brittany do everything together from Yoga to clubbing, but even though we’re very different we all seem to get along alright.

English plumbing is a nightmare. They don’t have integrated hot and cold water, so water is either hot or cold, not inbetween. We have a shower IN OUR ROOM. Without even frosted glass. It’s really awkward looking but really it’s just funny. At least we don’t have to fight the rest of the house for the main shower.

We get four channels of tv, and BBC owns two of them. It’s ok because we don’t really watch tv anyway, but I do miss Gilmore Girls. When I get back home, for the first day when I am jetlagged I’m going to do nothing but lay around and watch all the episodes of Gilmore Girls I’ve missed. And laugh, and cry, and be surprised.

On our trip to Wales, we did not get to go on our big hike. It had rained too much the week before. I have little room to complain, though, because for the most part, the weather has been very blessed. We went in some caves instead, but I didn’t enjoy that too much because it was so damp and cold. But what we got to see of the Welsh countryside was beautiful, and we got to see Tintern Abbey (an 11th-century Cisterian monastery, also where Wordsworth wrote his famous poem), Caerphilly Castle, and a town called Haye-on-Wye that was composed 90 percent (I’m estimating) of used book stores. A lot of people bought tons of books, but I didn’t buy any because they are difficult to carry back. And my reading list is long enough already of books I don’t have time to read because of school.

We stayed in a hostel in the middle of nowhere (we had to hike to get there) but it was pretty cool because our program (all fifty of us) were the only people there. So it was a good bonding weekend.

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