Thanksgiving

The past week, with the clock ticking until I leave Oxford possibly for good, I've gotten myself out and about a bit more. I love biking over to Keble around 12:30, scoffing at the freshers queuing for crappy fatty food at the dining hall, and dodging through the narrow paths around the pub to pick up a chicken sub and one or usually two Cokes to take home from the cafe. I figure UGA is probably earning money from all the crappy dining hall food I paid for but have never cashed in on, so I'll go to the "prohibitively expensive" cafe every day until I leave. :P I also have gotten back out to the grocery store to indulge my good and bad habits for buying too much delicious-looking food on an empty stomach. Mid-morning is a good time, time to get crumpets or welsh cakes (these delicious scone-shaped but flatter and moister cakes with black currants and nutmeg) before they sell out but also to get through the U-Scan lines before all the children have their lunch break and pour into M&S to run around and scream or mope in their school uniforms. My particular vice in Oxford has been juice--they make so many great ones here, like tangerine juice (the grown-up's orange juice), and generally they don't add sugar or water to it so it's nice and fresh and full of vitamins. Dr. Eberle had to stage an intervention, though, because when she was reorganizing the refrigerator to make room for Thanksgiving supplies she noticed six half-full cartons juice with my name scrawled on them. My name is Lauren Elmore, and I have a drinking problem. Mainly fruit juice.

A more community-friendly result of my market-prowling was my world-famous carrot cake! (World-famous because I've told friends in France and now England about how fabulous it is.) Dad had scanned Mom's recipe into an e-mail for me near the beginning of term, but I had waffled about actually baking one for so long because, baffled by degrees Celsius and measurements in grams, I was worried I'd bake something horribly burned or salty or something and no one would believe my stories about life-changing pastry. In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I got into the kitchen Tuesday night and peeled and shredded and blended and sifted to my (and Julianna's) heart's content, watching the cakes in the 180 degree oven like a hawk until I had to run to dinner and fretting like a mother away from her children all through another of Keble's culinary catastrophes (they actually figured out how to mess up potatoes). Once I got home, I had a small army waiting for me to frost the cakes in the clammy, cinnamony kitchen, and I think their anticipation paid off. The cakes looked and tasted just like normal, the only flaw being slightly runny frosting ("icing sugar" is a little different than powdered sugar, I think), but even then its sliding out from between the two layers gave the sides a pretty, drizzled look. I bought way too many carrots, though, having no conception of how many carrots make three cups of shredded carrots, so I'm making carrot cake 2.0 in the next day or so, as well as a salad with 12 more carrots chopped on top.

Wednesday evening we had our dons party, or, as I'd like to think of it, a university-sponsored indulgence in alcohol with our tutors cautioned to attend. :P No, funny as it was for our student fees to be applied to 48 bottles of wine, the affair was very classy and a very fun group of most of the students and their tutors broke the "no liquids in the library" rule as politely as possible. I spent the first hour of the party in the kitchen, shifting 10 batches of pre-made hors d'oeuvres in and out of the oven and onto platters--no one else had immediately stepped in to manage the kitchen, and I had the double motivation of having a foodie family background and of feeling at first a bit awkward to get out and mingle with other people's nicely dressed tutors. Eventually (after several "vols au vent" and Belgian truffles) I made my way into the stuffy library and found things pretty fun. Carly picked up a gin and tonic for me, from resident bartenders Will and Tony, and I enjoyed chatting with Mrs. Bradshaw and her husband (Dr. Bradshaw of UGA at Oxford fame--it's good that he knows of me by reputation as a good maker of carrot cake, because I'd be too nervous to say anything smart to probably the world's premier Virginia Woolf scholar). As the night wore on, several of us raided the mini-fridge--me characteristically stealing a box of orange juice and drinking it without a glass--and lounged in the armchairs thrown around the library to chat and scare passing children (OK, not everyone on that last one--Matt Williamson scared Leila from across the garden when he walked by the window with a Venetian mask on, but all was well when she saw that it was just the guy who yells at the football games). :P

Continued, 25 November 10:15 p.m.-- I woke up on Thursday morning feeling like I do every Thanksgiving--I just wanted to shlepp around in my PJs, watch football, eat lots of food, and pass out. Thankfully, we had all planned ahead to do just that. Several of the guys had hooked up a computer to the television to watch NFL games all day, so the small furor of boys crunching potato chips and occasionally screaming at the television comforted/distracted me while I finished up a history essay/gabbed at my friends in the library down the hall. By about 6 good smells were wafting out of the kitchen, and by 6:10 everyone who wasn't cooking was banned from the kitchen until dinner, so we all clustered around the ground floor, most of us in festive-colored sweaters, to collectively grumble about being hangry and three (THREE!) false alarms about it being dinnertime. Eventually we made a line about as big as any Elmore Thanksgiving line that wrapped around the kitchen island and its plate upon plate of mostly homemade food. Dr. Eberle made some great herbed stuffing (she was worried about having added tablespoons instead of teaspoons of herbs, since we don't have measuring spoons and just use actual coffee and soup spoons for baking, but I thought it tasted great!), Gabriel made scalloped potatoes with gruyere and creme fraiche that I seriously ran back for seconds of, and some of the second floor kids made four adorably homemade pies that were surprisingly tasty. Weird as it would seem, it was pretty much like a family Thanksgiving as we all sat down around the dining room table. Some people got nostalgic as the night wore on, and even though I entertained the group by telling the one family Thanksgiving tradition I could think of (my mom "dancing" with the turkey as she cleans it in the sink--seriously, I thought everyone did this) I never felt sad to be away from home on Thanksgiving. My family was still there, and I called them the day before and a few days later for their bigger family gathering during the UGA-GT game, and how could I be sad to be in Oxford?

In hospital

Sunday morning I made the horrible mistake of reading WebMD. Extreme sore throat? I had that! Flu-like symptoms and fatigue? I had that too! Stabbing pains in upper abdomen, right under the ribs? Oh my god, that's my spleen, and it's about to explode because I must have mononucleosis. I called the emergency hotline to pick a doctor's brain about it and see if I could put off going to the GP until Monday, and he seemed a bit miffed that I didn't have any violent vomiting or diarrhea, so it was hard to get a good answer from him. I napped for two hours in the middle of the day (making myself buy into the "fatigue" symptom a bit more when I'm sure I just hadn't slept enough the night before), and by the time I was walking to dinner the horrible pain in my chest kept going even when I wasn't stretching, and it felt like a knife was heaving up and down between my ribs with every step. I got a Coke with Carly, Sarah, and Zach before dinner and cracked a few jokes about my spleen being a time-bomb over a really horrible stuffed eggplant, but on the walk home I had pretty much decided I was going to call a taxi to the hospital.

I've always liked to be discreet and handle my problems on my own whenever possible, but that "appalled" Mary Catherine, Julianna and Dr. Eberle as they all eventually discovered me looking pretty pained in the kitchen and called Mrs. Bradshaw to drive me to the hospital. As the wait in the E.R. wore on to about four hours, I was really glad I had someone nice enough to wait with me that long--I didn't know the British healthcare system, so it was good to have Mrs. Bradshaw there to tell me what kind of things they find important (bowel movements, apparently, which was pretty embarrassing to talk about even though the doctors brought it up like small talk, and also that I need to pipe up for painkillers because they won't give you any if you don't ask). In a very weird situation, we also had a pretty good time just chatting. I pointed out a few good French films I'd seen in Cannes as she looked over a brochure for a French film series near Oxford, and she told me about her really fun-sounding five-person yoga class in a cottage near the Cotswolds as I employed some deep-breathing to get through the E.R. doc's taking a big vial of blood from the back of my elbow (can that be called an elbowpit? I'd like that). Around 2, once they had shunted me over to a gurney in the "Clinical Decisions Unit" (essentially the "sit here while we figure out what's wrong with you" unit), I tried to act brave and let Mrs. Bradshaw go home to get some sleep. She had been so nice to sit with me all that time (six hours!), and I felt like, having tried to just take a cab to the hospital on my own, I could probably handle the night by myself until they diagnosed me. Things got a little hairy when a surgical consult came by--he didn't have the best bedside manner, so I didn't trust him when he said it didn't seem like a serious medical issue, and when he poked the area between my ribs that hurt the most I burst into tears with the pain--but miraculously Dr. Eberle showed up to chase nurses and insist upon my being admitted since I still wanted to know what was wrong with me.

In the morning I finally got some painkillers and water (but no food!) and they moved me to the only empty bed in the surgical emergency ward, in the "resuscitation room"/supply closet, to await an ultrasound. I got maybe an hour and a half of sleep the night before, so I was glad to doze off in a real, fluffy bed until 11:30 when Julianna showed up with my pillow and iPod. She did an excellent job looking out for me, too, running off to ask the nurses "Well, WHEN is she going to see the senior doctor?" We both had a good laugh when the ultrascan doctor, like all the other doctors, really, told me she was "going to take a look at my tummy," like "tummy" was the most appropriate medical term. Eventually they decided that I have an inflamed muscle across my ribcage from the infection I'd had over the previous few weeks and from all of the violent coughing and that the best thing for me to do was to get a big pack of codeine (or, my favorite, co-codemol, a blend of codeine and paracetamol that sounds like Coco Puffs!) and just watch TV/read books/not move. So that's what I've done the past few days.

The whole British hospital experience was pretty funny. The NHS is good and bad, just like any healthcare system I guess. It was too rad to not pay a pence for my overnight "in hospital" (it's like an adjective, not a prepositional phrase, for invalids in England--I almost laughed when one of my nurses asked if my parents knew I was in hospital). I had asked several of my doctors over the night whether it was a problem that I wasn't a UK taxpayer, but they all said not to worry about it because it was most important that I got care when I was sick. But, for all the time it takes in ERs in the States, I'm pretty sure I would have had that emergency ultrasound within an hour, instead of after a long, sleepless night where I could have been waiting for my spleen to explode. We also saw a woman with the tip of her finger nearly severed from slamming a door on it wait to see a doctor for an hour longer than a girl with a headache! Mrs. Bradshaw chuckled a bit about it not being the rosy picture that Michael Moore would paint, but all in all I feel like I eventually got all the attention I needed, and definitely a lot more than I paid for (7 pounds for my codeine, which is the flat rate for any prescription). I'm not sure universal healthcare would work in the States (we ain't socialists!), but I'm sure there's a lot we have to learn.

My life in Oxford had been slowing down a lot anyway, but with the "inflamed muscle" I've retreated from the outside world even more. I feel like an old woman, calculating which is the shortest route to get wherever I want to go or whether I even need to go out at all because of how painful it could be, which makes me so much more grateful for how healthy I am 99.9% of the time. As I've emerged sporadically the past two days to get to classes and Keble dinner, I've walked myself around (instead of biking, much to my chagrin since it takes so much longer and really doesn't feel much less painful to walk) listening to my iPod like I'm some moody emo-kid in an indie film with my own soundtrack, and I think I've started to mourn. I walk to obscure libraries or down certain alleys and wonder if it's the last time I'll walk there, because I'm not sure when (if ever) I'll return to England again. But bundled up in my peacoat and pashmina, peeking into restaurants and pubs and cafes where I've had fun with my friends, I feel like I have so many good memories to last me a long time.

My life as an invalid

A few days after my return from the Lake District what had been a cold on it's way out became some strange strep throat/flu hybrid on it's way in, and I've been out of commission for most of the past week. As most of my congestion has drained away and I've gotten peppier over the past two days, I figure Eleanor could tell Mrs. Dashwood "She's out of danger," but I'm still walking around the house and running into people I feel like I haven't seen for weeks. A few highlights of my Oxford-style immersion in learning how to take care of myself:

Making scrambled eggs with cheese and a peanut butter crumpet works for all meals. I feel good about my protein intake as well as my domestic skills while stuck in the house, and all the coughing makes people avoid my food like the plague--no more theft!

You can get out of any awkward/irritating conversation by feigning (or actually having, I guess) a coughing fit.

If you can't get out and see England, you can take a pretty good tour of the country by watching some carefully selected movies. Some of my picks were Wimbledon, Bridget Jones's Diary, Notting Hill, The Holiday, and Arrested Development (oh wait, that was Wee Britain in Los Angeles, not the real thing... could have fooled me :P), as I watched between two and three movies per day.

And my personal favorite tip: Most cold remedies need to be drunk, not eaten. I went to Shakespeare tutorial on Monday in pretty shabby condition, if no longer contagious, and my super-sweet don said "Lauren, I'm worried about you. England doesn't seem to be doing you right in the health department. Take a few of these--and let me know if you suddenly feel like a new woman, because my mum swears she always feels like a new woman when she uses these." The little atomic yellow Tums- or Smarties-looking tablets were called "Hairy Lemons" and come from Australia, where that kind of blend of caffeine, guarana, and strange vitamins I've never heard of before is legal. I got home a little too excited to try one and took a big bite while sitting at my desk. Big mistake. Imagine me biting into an Alka-Seltzer tablet--my mouth filled up instantly with yellow foam, and I was laughing too hard along with my roommate to be able to choke it down quickly. I had fun putting the other half in a glass of water and watching it fizz for two minutes before it had dissolved, thinking about the similar fate of the bitten half bobbing around my stomach.

I felt a bit better and way too cooped up by Wednesday morning, so I got up early, stuffed a big pack of "tissues" (TP stolen from the housekeeping closet) and cough drops in my purse, and took myself to London to see the Millais exhibit at Tate Britain. I studied my underground map while on the Oxford Tube and knew right where to hit the ground running (or, rather, walking officiously) at Victoria Station. One stop up to Pimlico (sounds like a gas station, I think, but is a station in a snazzy riverside part of town) I followed the amusement park-like street signs to Tate Britain, a huge, blackened white stone building that looked like a sculpture itself on the banks of the Thames. The walls were painted with "Millais -->" directives like the ones I smile at at the High in Atlanta (wouldn't it be a fun job to officially vandalize the walls of a museum every time a new exhibit needs some explanations?), and I quickly found the stuffy part of the basement where about 150 of one of the 19th century's most popular artists' works sat to be swarmed by a lot of old people, art students, and me. I have to say that, as much as I usually don't like or "get" art exhibits, I really enjoyed this one. Millais was this crazy child prodigy--they had this photograph-like sketch he did of a Greek sculpture when he was 11!--and his early work with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood is precocious and vivid like the Romantic poetry I like best. He could capture women's faces with this incredible sensitivity to emotional shades--"Ophelia", the painting of the Shakespearian heroine that graced the tiles of many a London subway station wall the past few months, has the most haunting expression of a person giving herself up to suicide, and Millais's wife's sister, Sophie, posed for a portrait that made me wish I had that much magnetism, now let alone at age 14. I considered buying a print for my new apartment, but I was too frustrated at their quality--when Mariana's dress on the poster looked just navy, whereas the real 150-year-old painting has her in this warm, jewel-like cerulean that looks just like velvet, I just couldn't bear it. The makings of an art snob...? Probably not, but I'm definitely on a quest now to seek out the PRB works around Oxford, since the Ashmolean has a lot and Keble Chapel itself has the original "Light of the World" by William Holman Hunt. They are just too intriguing not to see in person!

I had been wanting to see Kensington by day, so after my leisurely amble through the six rooms of the Millais exhibit I flew up several blocks and several connecting trains below them to get to the High Street Kensington station as my base of operations for a much less erudite afternoon. It probably would have been cheaper to just go to McDonalds outside the station (even the classy folks need their Big Macs), but I was itching to explore the Whole Foods we had seen on our night tour of Kensington a week or so earlier. They really do have everything like in the States--including shelf upon shelf of Emergen-C sachets near the checkouts for the germaphobic vitamin junkies (me, the past few weeks!), and reusable jute grocery bags that say "Whole Foods-Kensington" that I should have bought to look cheeky at Whole Foods-Alpharetta--and I got a blood orange tonic and a plate of food from the hot lunch line to take to the upstairs cafe and brood by a window. (Again, kidding!) The salad I got to go with my mac and cheese was made of red onions, sugar snap peas, and purple potatoes! Purple like easter eggs! I had to enjoy their color and crisp texture, since I still can't taste anything very well with my sick nose (dead from too many tissues) and tongue (dead from too many numbing cough drops), and I ate slowly while watching nearby tables of some posh high school girls grabbing lunch and Facebooking, a young couple having a muffled fight over fresh fruit smoothies, and two young mothers breastfeeding (?! in public?! I still think it's weird) over the sushi they could finally eat again.

I had time before nightfall (at 4!) to zip into some of the classy, white plastic and metal (iPod-looking!) shops outside the Whole Foods windows. Urban Outfitters was a funny stop, because I realized that all the over-priced, flimsy, boho (hobo?) clothes are actually staples here. That's how the cute, pixie haircut, super skinny and pale British chicks dress. I felt like I wouldn't find anything unique there. I skimmed through Zara, but the crowd there was a bit too rich-looking, bouffant-haired, middle-aged brunette--for all my fast walking and studied nonchalance, I felt too much like a preppy college kid to be smelling perfume and trying on trenchcoats with them. Uniqlo, the Tokyo import next door, totally did the trick. Their clothes are a lot like the Gap, classic and preppy, but they fit better and are a lot cheaper than British Gap! I took a long time trying on a pile of clothes I had to shift in and out of my dressing room to stay under the try-on limit, and I modeled lots of cute mini-skirts, skinny jeans, and floppy sweaters to a great soundtrack of John Mayer, Jet, and other poppy folks that really cheered me up. I left with a great sweatery minidress for only 18 pounds (they had a student discount) and merrily carried a big shopping bag on the Tube like any young woman in London before I hopped the Oxford Tube to get home, have a few coughing fits, make scrambled eggs, and pass out at 8:30.

My trip to the land o' Lakes

My trip to the Lake District with Julianna began auspiciously enough--even though we had taken a few extra minutes to wake up before dawn/unpack and repack/eat breakfast on the run, we got to the bus stop outside our house just as a bus going to the rail station pulled up (we didn't even know that line existed!). After cappuccino apiece and a cute "Watch out for lairds!" text from Julianna's mother in the small rail station, we contentedly boarded the train to the North. It takes pretty long to travel up pretty much the entire length of the country, and while Julianna diligently spent much of the 5 1/2 hour trip reading I frittered away the entire time listening to my iPod. Still not sure if I would have missed that little indulgence if I didn't have it, but I sure enjoyed schizophrenically brooding/rocking out to Margot and the Nuclear So & So's, Paolo Nutini, and Weezer as I watched the best of industrial Britain blur past me backwards.

After a quick lunch on a bench where we got off the train in Windermere (with some stolen napkins from the tea room we didn't want to pay the VAT to sit in!), we caught a bus to Hawkshead. Windermere had its own "World of Beatrix Potter" tourist trap, but Julianna had read about a gallery of some of Miss Potter's original drawings in her husband's old office/cottage in this much smaller peripheral town. The bus ride alone felt worthy of being called a tourist attraction, since we had to wind through the "big," hilly town of Ambleside, with its adorable flocks of families playing putt-putt on the town green, and then 20 minutes more of stacked stone walled-in "streets" surrounded by hills dotted with sheep and the occasional cute cottage until we got to Hawkshead. Although it was small, we both really enjoyed the gallery--seeing the original watercolors of Tom Kitten and Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle took me right back to my childhood, and Julianna bought a copy of Peter Rabbit in Scots to indulge the inner kid of our Ecossophile (? my word for Scottish folk fanatic) friend David once we got back home. It only took five minutes to cross to the other side of town where William Wordsworth went to primary school, and we could have even seen his original desk but, not wanting to pay the two pounds entry fee, we instead chose to leer around the corners of the building, looking in open windows and doors before we roamed around the church grounds above to get a better view of the town. Hawkshead from above looks like an exaggerated but true combination of maybe 30 old families, their 20 dogs apiece, and the scads of outdoor gear shops they where they all meet each other everyday.

Our bus from Hawkshead to Keswick, the closest town to our first hostel, was late, but we enjoyed people-watching before and beautifully changing weather/scenery during our eventual crawl through the Lake District's "rush hour." Wordsworth himself would have gasped when we drove by a file of five cows, walking one behind the other, up a hill--how often does that happen?!--and I amused myself trying to invent some saccharine lines about the leading chestnut cow that broke into a run on the narrow slope and how he might represent the trials of life. After a brief layover in Ambleside, we took a connecting bus through the heart of the national park to get to Keswick, and the lonely hills looked dazzlingly sinister as the rain clouds descended--looking out the bus windows to the almost vertical slopes next to the road, the mists that hung claustrophobically between peaks around the lakes, and distant forests so dense they almost looked black, I felt dizzy, and I really realized we were out in the wilderness.

We got into Keswick after sunset, and I must say we did a pretty good job of picking our way up the main blocks of shops and pubs to get accounts settled before we found a night's rest at the hostel. Julianna picked up a marvelous raincoat (with one of those Inuit, masklike rain hoods/muzzles!) at an outdoor gear liquidation sale for only 20 pounds, and we didn't have to wait long in one of the warmest-looking inn pubs to be able to dig into the best Cumberland sausages and mash Cumbria could offer. We had smiled as we saw a familiar Virginia Woolf quote about eating well painted over the pub's entry, and we agreed with her after three huge curls apiece of sausage that put our Oxford standby dish at The King's Arms to shame. Another small miracle occurred as the rain stopped right when we began the 2-mile walk to the lakeside YHA Derwentwater--we didn't make it too far after the street lights on the Borrowdale road petered out, but we felt lucky that it didn't take more than a few dry minutes for the taxi we called to carry us up the gravel path to the hostel. The best we knew of our location was that it was a very clean, quiet, stately old house where we quickly passed out, and thus we were pleasantly surprised when we looked outside our door the next morning.

Continued, Nov 1--Julianna and I gasped, she said "Oh my gosh" and I probably said "Holy shit," and a few of our fellow early rising hostelers chuckled goodnaturedly as we looked out at the lake that was right outside our door. We had heard water running on that bit of a nighttime path, but that had only given me more reason to want to call a taxi (to not drown). We charged down the little green hill that separated our really pretty 200-year-old house (with waterfall! it was pretty mini, but still a good selling point) from Derwentwater, and we merrily picked our way over the black rocks of the lakeside path and quacked at the ducks until we decided to wind closer to the road and bleat at the sheep along the pasture path. We met our goal of catching the 10:30 bus from Keswick to Grasmere, but before then we covered about half of the lake shore; we even found the actually pretty short "Friar's Crag," with its mysterious obelisk to John Ruskin set in the middle of a crop of fall trees and if not "one of the three most beautiful views in Europe" then something pretty high up there.

Grasmere struck the best balance between the almost college town-like sprawl of Keswick and the 20 homes and 200 dogs of Hawkshead. Roads from all directions will hit pastures immediately before entering the small town center, and just as green a walk can be had for the 5-10 minutes it takes to canvas the little cluster of old homes, inns, and Wordsworth-themed shops since plenty of trees peek out from behind buildings and line the banks of the river that runs next to the church. We had to hit the church first so that I could fall and weep at the great Romantic's grave. Kidding--no falling and weeping was done, but I almost bought myself a memorial daffodil to be planted in the little garden behind the church. We had heard that Grasmere was religious about its gingerbread, and it proved true when a bewitching smell led us to a cupboard-sized shop adjacent to the church; for 35p apiece we each got a huge piece of Sarah Nelson's wonderful, aromatic gingerbread, which I thought was almost like eating tea.

Continued, Nov 3--Julianna had the brilliant idea to drop our backpacks off at our next hostel, the YHA Butharlyp Howe (Butterlip House to the non-Scottish, I think), and we soon could travel unburdened to Dove Cottage, Wordsworth's house from 1799-1808 (his most fruitful period of writing poetry). We got to the Wordsworth complex, which was almost like its own little village full of shops, museums, and galleries, half an hour before the next guided tour of the cottage, so we had time to look around the Wordsworth Museum first. I really got back into Romantic mode when I saw all the paintings of Wordsworth and his literary friends (sometimes with their likenesses painted into scenes with Christ, a funny/self-righteous aside) and looked at some manuscripts written by the poet himself (compared to his wife's and sister's writing--they took dictations of the poems he composed while walking around the Lakes more often than he sat down to write himself--his writing on a copy of The Prelude looked pretty scratchy :P). I chuckled that all of the big writers of the time had some place in the museum except Shelley, who effectively excluded himself by writing that scathing sonnet To Wordsworth. But of course my favorite artifact in the bit of the museum we saw was a lifemask of John Keats--I now can imagine a face looking over my favorite poems as he wrote them.

Dove Cottage has to have one of the best old house tours I've ever taken. I'm sure it helped that I was thinking of William Wordsworth grinding coffee in the kitchen and storing food in the cold room with the river flowing under it, or of Dorothy sleeping in the canopy bed upstairs fearing rats and spiders would fall on her from the unfinished roof, but I really enjoyed looking at all of the old, homey comforts that I was typically bored with on plantation house field trips as a child ("Look, children, a chamber pot"). Several of the original, most famous portraits of Wordsworth hung in the cottage, and our spunky tour guide pointed out that Wordsworth, "not the most modest person," actually didn't like the youthful portrait of him that's featured in so many textbooks today because it was "too flattering"; an older sketch, beaky nose and all, delighted him because he thought it made him look like a pirate. After the tour, we wound through the little Wordsworth village to a great tea room, where we got our one good rest of the trip eating a slow lunch with tea/sultana (raisin) scones after. I'm sure I bored Julianna a bit as a rhapsodized about the Romantics, but the tale of Shelley's drowned heart always deserves a retelling, right?

(OK, it was the only thing that didn't burn when he was cremated by the sea after having drowned in a [possibly intentional] shipwreck. His friend, who had found him on the beach, gave the heart to Shelley's wife, who carried with her in a silk bag until she died. Now, that's a pretty juicy story!)

A cold rain had blown in while we lunched, but we were prepared--Julianna had bought a new raincoat at an outdoor gear sale in Keswick, and an adorable blue hat from Grasmere was ready to keep my ears warm under my less rugged raincoat, AND we had already bought a walking tour brochure. We set off for a 4-mile hike around Grasmere up the gradually steeper lane in front of Dove Cottage and followed directions like "turn after the row of cottages in the woods" and "cross the street next to the red mailbox" through the hills and to the lake. It really is astounding how well the National Park services keep the paths clean, with black gravel leading the way over the rockier paths and signs and gates directing hikers through private estates. The rain stopped by the time we reached the highest hill on our path, and we could look down at some other hikers' dogs splashing in the silver lake from a dry perch rather close to the clouds/hanging mists. Our collection of quaint English cottages was complete after we took the road back from the lake past sheep, more sheep, and eventually Wordsworth cafe after Wordsworth cafe to stop by the hostel to blow-dry our hair before dinner at the Dove and Olive Branch, a pub in town built in the spirit of the original pub called the Dove, Dove Cottage! (They stopped boozing it up there about 4 years before the Wordsworths turned it into a family home, but I like to think some of the lush lifestyle reappeared when Coleridge would visit. ;D) Not much more to say except that dinner (and dinner company!) was fantastically fun.

We got up super early on Sunday, since 6:30 would feel more like 7:30 to us after the midnight time change (they have daylight savings time here too, except this much further from the equator than the States=no change in morning brightness despite the sudden change to 4:45 p.m. sunsets!). It was drizzling again, but most of the crappiness let up by the time the sun was rising over our walk past the river (which had taken over a field and all but a few feet outside of the small road/someone's house!). Lots of loose sheep hopped around the steep, rocky path toward Helm's Crag, and eventually my old-lady knee made me stop to lean on a fence and commune with them while Julianna looked a little further up. I could still see across the pastures upriver from the lake and through the leaf-carpeted hills to waterfalls so distant they looked like little gray hairs. And then, as I tried to take a picture which of course did no justice to the scenery (damned lack of depth perception!), a slug almost crawled across my hand.

We had breakfast scones in Grasmere and then waited for a bus. We had lunch in the fancy grocery store in Windermere and then waited for a train. It would be useless to describe in detail all the waiting, standing in claustrophobic corridors and walkways, and nervous stealing of reserved seats on the 5 1/2 hour direct train back to Oxford, but it suffices to say that National Rail needs to provide a lot more Sunday trains so that we all don't have to stand pressed up against a touring Irish singer who hasn't showered or changed for three days. However, when we got back to Oxford, the McDonalds on Cornmarket Street never tasted better, and the rows of steeples and turrets on the castle-like colleges didn't look any less majestic. Despite the glories of the Lake District, I'm still pretty astonished that I call Oxford home.

"If you want to write a perfect piece of literature, write a haiku."

After several days of schlepping around with a cold, I felt up to ignoring my growing pile of books and papers for one more day for a trip to London. Gabriel had tickets to the exhibit of Chinese terracotta soldiers at the British Museum, and escorting her to the train station quickly became a pro guided tour of her favorite places around London. We dodged our way through consumer-crazy Oxford Street to get to a working underground station (continual work going on to prep for the Olympics... in 2012?!) and emerged at Leicester Square, where Kao, Zach, and I danced to some familiar songs at a multi-story Burger King (OK, they watched as I looked awkward dancing in public :P) and where I longingly looked at the huge Odeon and at least three other movie palaces around the square as they quietly screened some prohibitively pricey movies for the London Film Festival. Ambling up and down a few streets nearby, we found Chinatown and took lots of pictures of the lanterns and arches and scads of restaurants like Asian tourists. Gabriel led us up several narrow flights of stairs in a restaurant that looked like it should be an apartment building, and on the top floor she ordered us noodles and about 12 different dishes of dim sum for a cheap, shared feast. I marveled at the quality of the scallops in the scallop dumplings I had requested, but the best dish had to be these white bread dumplings filled with barbecued pork--they were like barbecue marshmallows! I ate a whole tray of them (only three, but I still felt like a pig) and must a) figure out what they are and b) try to make some myself ASAP. Our leisurely lunch lasted through several pots of jasmine tea, and by the end I had to laugh with Julianna about having a "Room of One's Own" moment, where the good food set a glow in the base of the spine and led to great conversation with friends.

As a party completely composed of English nerds, we had to poke around Charing Cross Road and all of the old, first-edition bookstores. I pawed through a lot of amazing prints of maps, portraits, and advertisements that were over one hundred years old and sitting in 1, 2, and 5l. bins along one of the alleyways of bookshops, and I dodged into the new age bookstore with Sarah to reminisce about my "rock box" collection in elementary school over the cases of mystic crystals and to read the back of a memoir written by a guy who has stopped eating and is "living on light." Gabriel found some quality prints from a magazine from Oscar Wilde's time (she studied the originals!), and Sarah found the British first edition of her favorite Hemingway novel to get for her father, an avid book collector. After awhile, though, I felt a little adrift--I don't study many modern-ish novels that I could find first editions of, and I would hardly know a first edition if I saw one. I felt like I should be interested in and know about these things, but I didn't. A walk past some more inviting bookshops, like Waterstone's and Blackwell's, cheered me up, and by the time I hit the serpentine shelves of Foyles, full of new and not moldy books of old poems whose margins I could write in without committing a crime, I was back to myself.

We got to the British Museum with plenty of time to ooze through the single entry door (seriously, England, get with the queues!) and gawk at the white upon white of the enclosed marble courtyard, the reading room the size of the Globe inside it, and the milky glass of the spidery Millennium dome above. Gabriel peeled off to visit China, and the rest of us stuck together long enough to see the Rosetta Stone. I wound my way to the back of the Greek and Roman rooms to walk along the Elgin Marbles, the facings of the Parthenon "rescued" from vandalism by Lord Elgin in the early 1800s. I scanned the walls like I scan pages when I don't have time to read a whole book, and I easily found the most important part (to me) of the eroded marbles in a back corner, the depiction of a cow being led to sacrifice that we're almost sure inspired part of Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (it even said so on a panel of wall under it). I didn't have my moment of falling and weeping, but it was pretty cool to think that about 200 years ago my favorite poet looked at the same frieze, and then went home to write a poem.

We took a twilight tour of Kensington, Gabriel's old neighborhood (and one of the wealthiest in London, by the by--Hugh Grant lived in a smaller house one street up from her parents' ex-pat housing, and she'd often see him riding his bike :P), after one more foray through the crowded subways. Never take the Tube on the night of an England rugby match! We plodded by the stadium-like Royal Albert Hall and followed its spotlight to the majestically phallic Albert Memorial just before a security van screeched up, lights flashing, to tell us the park was closed. I noted the Uniqlo and Zara that I'll have to return to (and the closest underground station that I'll do so by), and we walked into the schmanciest Whole Foods I've ever seen because Sarah had never been in one before. I suppose Kensington is a lot like Buckhead, and indeed every other Buckhead street would have to have its Whole Foods or else the masses would starve. We got our dinner at a really nice Lebanese restaurant where Gabriel said her brother (and often she, too) would go for a shawarma every day after school. I can see why. My chicken shawarma was possibly the best sandwich ever, and for only 3 pounds I'll feel free to travel to the most expensive section of London to get one several more times.

I shuffled around the house and moaned most of the next two days as I finished up my history paper over what seemed a decade and finished a box of "drug tea" (that sick people cold and flu tea that has something special in it to make you feel better while you're really getting addicted) in record time. Monday night I skipped Keble dinner not to make a bowl of vegetable broth and a crumpet but to go sit in on a conversation with Philip Pullman at the University church. I walked a scenic alley between the Sheldonian theatre, the Bodleian quad, and the natural history museum and watched the lights from the cleaning scaffolds glint off the hundreds of 6" square glass panes on the Divinity School walls; I have to say it was one of the greatest sights I've seen here. I stopped by the Radcliffe Camera gates to brood (kidding :P) until Julianna met me to claim some of the remaining seats at the back of the church and two cups of the nonalcoholic mulled cider. The hall was packed (but somehow we ended up sitting behind another group of Americans? I swear Oxford is really just an Ivy League school), and speakers on the centuries-old walls chirped "the people's atheist's" banter with one of the University's Anglican officials. I worried at first that the talk might take the uncomfortable path of trying to convert Mr. Pullman--the clergyman, like most English people I've met, grilled him with pointed questions and blunt, "Of course YOU'D say that" answers--but eventually Mr. Pullman was willingly given the stage to talk about the impact of his beliefs on his writing and the movies (he likes them!) and even had time to throw in gasp-inducing comments about his new story about Lyra relearning the alethiometer, the title of this blog entry, and a quip about Dumbledore's very public outing the day before ("J. K. Rowling has started something completely new in literary criticism--she outs characters after she's published the books!"). My friends who had not gone to the Woodstock talk went to chat and get his autograph, but I biked home content after another fun evening with one of my favorite famous people in Oxford.

I mean it. He's like Michael Stipe is to kids in Athens. He's always there, but you feel really lucky to see him and have to tell all your friends about it like he's just become your new pal, from across the supermarket/roundabout/auditorium.

Northern lights...

Thursday morning I went to another lecture. I've decided that, more than learning experiences (we covered much of the ground the Austen lecture's covering in Dr. Eberle's seminar, and this new addition, Practising Criticism, is basically a freshman class), lectures are social spectacles. I asserted myself, with Julianna, through the crowd of confused freshers to some good seats in the narrow, stadium-style benches and desks of one of the lecture theatres; we sat in the middle of this florescent-lit pit, looking down at the professor and up at the few fashionable students on display in the balcony seats reserved for latecomers. The professor (still not sure of his name) hooked the hormonally percolating youths into "practising criticism" by analyzing some racy texts like The Starr Report (which reveals a "mysterious bit of presidential cross-dressing" in its poor editing) and a Danielle Steele novel. I laughed along with everyone, but I split my time between watching a cute, preppy boy sitting at the balcony (I swear he is not 1) English nor 2) gay... :P) and puzzling over the professor, whose wit kept tricking me into thinking he was more attractive than he really is. I figure, even if I only learn a few tidbits about "practising criticism" to take back to the States (a good idea, since I'm about to write some criticism for my senior thesis), I will always have these more shallow sources of interest. ;)

Jenna arrived, somewhat to my surprise, in Gloucester Green on Friday at noon. I lugged around my laptop (read: ball and chain) as we canvassed central Oxford to get her oriented/fed/checked-in at her bed and breakfast, hoping that I would get a moment to edit my final paper for Dr. Eberle, but I was very pleasantly distracted by getting to catch up with my best friend. We ate lunch at the cafe where, it is suspected, coffee was first served in Europe, and we took a very scenic walk down High Street, where we both discovered some of the older colleges, the entrance to the Oxford Botanical Gardens, and the residential areas around Iffley Road. Her bed and breakfast looked... Well, I can't exactly say decent, and the receptionist was a little off, but we were glad to know she'd have a safe, relatively comfortable place to sleep for the night. Jen took the chance to look around Broad and Cornmarket streets while I dived into Blackwell's for a delicious cappuccino and paper-editing session, and after she rejoined me we got some groceries, she held the eggplant while I parked my bike and showed her around Keble, and we made our way back to the UGA house for curry night. My first real bit of cooking in the house turned out well, thanks to Jenna--I cooked as good of an eggplant curry as I did the time we tried it out in Alpharetta, and this time she figured out how to save my crappy stovetop rice skills by putting some in the microwave like her mother does. Julianna also helped by making some wonderful naan, which had to rise for 7 hours! We fed about a third of the house, and then we indulged in some melting-middle chocolate puddings (did you know that almost all English desserts can be called "puddings"? It's just how they do) and the new version of Persuasion, which for all Julianna's and my snarky commentary (it wasn't at all like the book in some parts!) had a very attractive actor playing Captain Wentworth...

Saturday was really a banner day. Jenna stopped by the UGA house early to drop off her luggage/get a cup of drip coffee (she's been cut off from it in France! among other cruelties, her weird host family doesn't make coffee!), and she took a tour of the Bodleian and of Christchurch (home of the quad scenes and the Great Hall from the Harry Potter films!) while I got a bit of reading done. We met up at Blackwell's and were able to snag lunch at The Rose before we had to catch a bus at Gloucester Green--even though we were too early for the whole ritual of cream tea (we missed out on the scones and clotted cream!), she got a club sandwich, I got a quesadilla (surprisingly correct for this side of the Atlantic, except for the interesting addition of some fresh avocados in the center), and we shared a piece of lemon cake to soak up our pots of tea. We had plenty of time to amble to my preferred route to the bus station (a quiet alleyway instead of the crazy pedestrian bottlenecks in Cornmarket and George streets) and meet Lindsay before we bussed off to Woodstock.

Woodstock is a very cute little town about 30 minutes outside of Oxford--I'd say it's about the distance from Duluth to Alpharetta, and the town centre is about the size of Davidson (or Nevada, IA!). We walked by several cute family-owned shops in the old stone, three-story buildings--"Hampers" fine foods and "Silken Dalliance" clothiers looked like they would have been my favorites--but eventually we were glad we hadn't wasted any time before we walked the 15-minute path down a family friendly, suburban-looking street to Marlborough School, where Philip Pullman was going to give a talk as part of the "Woodstock Celebrates Books" festival. Blackwell's had two long tables full of Pullman's books for sale, which boded well for our hopes of getting his autograph, and once we each had bought a fancy, 10th anniversary edition of "Northern Lights" (aka "The Golden Compass") we settled into some great seats at the middle of what looked like my old middle school's gym set up for a kids' musical. Mr. Pullman spoke for about an hour, and despite my typical starstruck haze I remember some high points being his appraisal of Daniel Craig (a good pick for Lord Asriel, and "a great pair of swimming trunks") and his readings from "Northern Lights" and "The Subtle Knife." He did a great bear voice when he read the chapters where Lyra and then Will met the armoured bear, Iorek Byrnison, and I felt as excited about the stories as I did when I picked them up in middle school and practically memorized all the words I was now hearing the author speak. I got really nervous standing in the book signing queue (or, rather, one of the two--they were both pretty orderly, but I swear I have yet to see a proper, civilized British queue), but when I approached the table to thank Mr. Pullman for speaking and to ask him to sign my book I felt very comfortable chatting with him a bit, like I was talking to a friendly uncle. I only started shaking again as I carried my book like a grail away from the elementary school and back into civilization, where not just anybody had a book signed "To Lauren--Philip Pullman."

Saturday night was a long night. Jenna, Lindsay, and I stopped in The Marlborough Arms to pass the time over our respective merlots, Peronis, and pints of Scrumpy Jack (what a delicious cider! Couldn't leave a drop...)--we knew it was a classy place when, as we approached the bar, the sound system started pumping "The Final Countdown." After teetering to the front of the top of a double-decker bus back to Oxford, we met "the closest to an English gentleman you'll get," Ed, and his band of two girlfriends and several mates going into Oxford to watch the England/France rugby match, and we yelled our laughter at each other all the way to George Street. A clockwork exchange of bikes took place when I lent Lindsay my bike to drive home and Julianna, whom we caught as she was biking around a street corner, pulled her bike into the now-empty space in front of The King's Arms, where we took Jenna to a proper English pub dinner. I got my usual sausages and mash and treated Jenna to a foamy Bulmer's cider, and we only had to catch the beginning bit of rugby-watching insanity as we had a quick, chatty dinner in one of the back rooms. It's all blurring together now, but I'm sure we got back to the house, drank some coffee, watched Ugly Betty, Skyped/mobile phoned some friends, watched two minutes of Casino Royale and the whole of Strictly Ballroom, and read "Northern Lights" until Jenna's taxi arrived at 3:45 a.m. to get her to her bus to Stansted Airport. I feel like we had a really fun weekend (few to no snags, once we actually got her here), and I'm glad I learned that I didn't have to spend the whole weekend being a bookworm--I finished my two essays for tutorials the very next day!

Since Jenna's visit, I have been able to make microwave rice like a pro to go with two leftover curry/curry-in-a-can lunches, and I have survived (alright, and enjoyed ;) ) two more tutorials. I don't have class again with Dr. Goldman until two weeks from today (he's going to the most respectable country of the United States to lecture/vacay in Boulder, CO), and I don't have any essays due until Monday the 29th anyway. I'm thinking that it will all add up to a trip to Blenheim Palace this Friday, possibly a trip to London over the weekend, and, finally, the anticipated pilgrimage to the Lake District sometime next week...

Roots and fruits

The past two weeks in Oxford my life has been yo-yoing between an uneasy kind of idleness and a merry kind of chaos. Last Thursday, I finished my two seminars (well, with the exception of a paper for Dr. Eberle's class, which I assure you is percolating in the back of my mind at this very moment), and they ended so abruptly that I'm just starting to grasp that they're over. Strenuous as it was to write two papers every week and to keep my mind engaged for four hours of classes some days, I enjoyed walking down to the dining room for a good discussion on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The long room seems very empty and purposeless now; good forbid it actually be used for eating, but I think I'm going to need to host a curry night or something there to get some of the good minds together again.

As a not completely digressive side note, I love getting papers back. As many critiques as Dr. Southcombe would scratch in the margins of my historiography papers, I eventually got the A-'s and a note that I have shown much growth in my literary/historical analysis. Dr. Eberle said some even nicer things about my close reading in my last paper for her (which shouldn't make me too complacent, because I'm anxious that my longer comparative paper should look just as good). I can, and do, read nice comments about my work over and over and still feel like I want to keep getting better.

Tutorials have started this week, and I'm so thankful that both of my seminar professors pushed me to speak up more in class. On Monday afternoons, I have class in Hertford College (pronounced "Hartford", not "Hurtford" or "Hareton" ;) ), one of places of learning so important that they made the Bridge of Sighs between it and the History Faculty library so that even bad weather would not disconnect scholars from its knowledge. (P.S. I saw students walking across the bridge the other day! Without any long robes on to validate their crossing! I thought only dons were allowed to use it! I figure I need to break out some of my Cannes-style quick walking and important airs so that I can use the bridge, too.) It's Intro to Shakespeare, and it's just me and Lindsay and Dr. Emma Smith, a young don with boyish hair and a tendency to say "bloody" a lot. She told us straight off that her teaching style is meant to help us discuss our opinions and respond to each other with confidence (definitely not the "bad cop" style she pinned on Keble's beloved Dr. Ian Archer), and she meant it--she will wait until pauses are unbearably uncomfortable before she will step in to suggest another passage or theme we should consider, and we rarely hear what she thinks about the plays. But I really like it, because it's giving me room to think of and say everything I want to about the topics we discuss (instead of working up the nerve to suggest something only for the professor to lecture for 10 minutes and steer the conversation in the completely opposite direction), and Lindsay and I are having a lot of fun turning the play inside and out and asking each other questions while Emma looks amusedly on.

The next morning is history--Britain in the Age of Revolution--with Dr. Lawrence Goldman, a meeting which I am no longer dreading like I did this particularly calamitous Tuesday morning. I swear, the morning I am feeling my most inadequate, after stressing over and structuring and restructuring a history paper I wasn't sure how to write, and then learning that I was the only student of three to write a paper (so I was forced to read and test the waters, like it or not), the internet in the UGA house goes down with 30 minutes for me to print my paper and get off to class. In the rain. With help from Sara's flash drive I eventually stuffed the paper into my bag, wrapped it in a shopping bag, and made the huge mistake of biking in the rain. I dragged myself into Dr. Goldman's office carrying at least 10 pounds of water in my soaked jeans and feeling like I had inhaled the same amount into my sloshing, constricted lungs. But I read my paper with the confidence I could muster, and he seemed to like it! He's the type of teacher who will bring attention to all of the good things a student does in a paper and will use them to lead into the topics that might have been overlooked, instead of saying "You're such an idiot! Why didn't you mention the Protestant nonconformists?!" I felt good talking a lot in class (I even remembered a population statistic, totally out of the norm for an English major who has tried to forget her numbers!), and I'm glad I got the chance to make a good first impression, even if I didn't exactly want it at the time.

Finishing my tutorials early in the week is nice, since I can indulge my lazy streak like I did with my screening of Cate Blanchett's Elizabeth yesterday afternoon and still have the next four days to get back on track. I wanted to start today with a bit more structure, so I went to a lecture at the St. Cross buildings like any other Oxford student. Lectures are required for most Oxford kids, who take "papers" on a particular author or literary movement where they will have a tutorial in their college and then supplementary lectures by the best critics in the University. Any kids taking a paper (or kids who sweet talk the lecturers into letting them in "for fun," like me ;) ) can get into the lectures, and the Jane Austen lecture with Dr. Fiona Stafford this morning was packed. A variety of plain/sporty girls, artsy girls with wavy bobs and scarves and leggings, popular girls with fancy boots and lots of makeup, and even five guys filled up all the seats and most of the floor in room 10, and I did my best to look like one of the privileged few among them that deserved a seat at the table. Dr. Stafford talked really fast and fit a week's worth of food for thought about Austen's popularity among her audiences into the one hour she gets with the generally independent readers--she even employed a Jane Austen action figure, to great effect. I really liked the lecture and will be sure to be there even earlier next week.

Other than lectures I can organize my day around library trips (I always snag the best of the reading lists, reserving books at the lower reading room in the Camera or checking out a few gems from the Keble library before I can get shushed for some daft reason by the omnipresent shushing bitch), or coffee shop trips (Caffe Nero makes the best double-shot hazelnut cappucinos! They taste like magic!), or grocery store trips (crumpets disappear so quickly, but I finally got there in time to get *the last* package of Warburton's). I might go to London some days--last weekend we made the pilgrimage to St. Paul's Cathedral that is documented (with some hilarious captions, I might add) on my Picasa page (picasaweb.google.com/elmorelt), and I have five round-trips left on my bus pass to get me to some similarly picturesque park tours or museum exhibits or the London Film Festival screenings that are so expensive that I can only sit outside and drool over...

I laugh a lot here. My friends are a hilarious sort that are always joking about my labeled food in the kitchen, or their silly posts on the message boards, or our mutual favorite British TV show, Coupling. Sometimes I'll just be by myself, though, and something will amuse me on my morning bike rides, or on a walk through the UGA house, and I'll laugh out loud. With so many good people and good thoughts here, it's very easy to be happy--I'm becoming more conscious, and less self-conscious, of it.