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.

A London eye

By Tuesday I was ready to get out of Oxford. I could blame some of my weird temperament on having planned to get out of Oxford--I stayed up much of the night in an insomniatic fit, thinking of what clothes would be best to wear in the cold and rain, considering my small choice of rain-appropriate shoes, and I kept counting down the minutes in Dr. Eberle's class, waiting on the bus instead of paying good attention and talking in class. But, I do think it was time to get away from the constant studying (especially with Jane Eyre, which we overstudied in ENGL 3000 this spring, I just didn't want to!). So, what a good thing that several of my friends were going to London!

Julianna and I ran to the bus station, chatting about our favorite hot movie actors, having high tea some afternoon, and basically anything except class, which I could hardly get my brain around. We ate on the run in one of the many coffee/sandwich shops around Gloucester Green (I finally got a chicken and mushroom pie! everyone always takes them before I can get to them at lunch in the dining hall!) and then each took a row in the pretty roomy Oxford Espress. The weather was nice at the time, sunny all over except for the most sinister clouds I had ever seen heading, I thought, toward London, so I had a fun look around the outskirts of Oxford. I hadn't seen any of the three rivers before, and when we went over a bridge I saw some boats for punting (aka pushing yourself around the rocky water with a big pole instead of paddling or using motors like normal people--a strange hobby in the purportedly intellectual Oxford atmosphere). Must do that sometime before it gets too cold for me to laugh about falling into the river.

I passed out for most of the bus ride, but driving into the city was strange. At first it looked a lot like New York, with projects dotting a pretty industrial landscape followed by lots of light-up billboards. Closer in the city turned into a weird mash of antique white townhomes and office buildings, random circus-like gates and sculptures, modern apartments and hotels curved like sails or with round holes bored right through them, car dealerships in glassed-in rooms on small alleys that are completely inaccessible by car. We drove by The Dorchester and I dorkily said "It's just like in 'Wimbledon'!" Eventually we were dumped out onto the streets of London, conveniently right in front of Buckingham Palace, our first destination. We were a bit too early to meet Ashley and Mary Catherine, who had gotten to the city earlier to tour Parliament before it closes to visitors with the new session, so we took off down a smart looking street in search of caffeine. We had a close call with a snack bar called "Crumpets" (crumpets were actually not on their menu, so we scoffed and left), but an Illy coffee sign lured us to a cute cafe where a plump Italian man sang to us as he made our cappuccinos. So rarely do we ever let ourselves take a break in Oxford that it was nice to just sit, drink really slowly, and chat.

We caught up with the other pair in the not-so-proper queue at the less scenic side of Buckingham Palace. Per usual, we had to wait, go through security, and pick up our audio wands, and the new-ish tents and rooms we had to file through in this routine procedure didn't prepare me for how amazing the palace would be. We could peer out of the curtained windows into the front courtyard, which as soon as we saw became drenched in the weird, fluffy sort of British rain that has been puzzling me the last week (it looks like snow flurries! WTF, mate?). The hallway dropped us off in the low-ceilinged, red carpeted entry hall, where we were ushered up the grand staircase into the loftier royal apartments above. Everything was wrought, gold or porcelain or painted, and roped-off or strangely set behind plexi-glass so that no one could actually touch it, but the dozen or so rooms we got to see were nonetheless breathtaking. It was strange, as an American, thinking about the king that we hated paying taxes to having the money to make separate green, yellow, blue, red, and white drawing rooms. And even stranger to think that someone still lives there now, walking down the football field-sized galleries of royal portraits and marble statues, eating off fancy china with gold, Greyhound-dotted tea services, sitting on thrones! There was a fantastic exhibit of the Queen's wedding gifts, clothes, and jewels since this year she and her husband are celebrating their 60th anniversary, and all of their honors (sashes and brooches and medals) they have gathered during their marriage/reign were set out in the largest ballroom in the country. It did not rain as we walked along the south end of the palace's garden, but as soon as we had wound our way out to the street to meet Carly and Sarah it rained in the real, strong American style and we descended into a chaos of almost hitting old ladies with our pop-open umbrellas, finding a cab, dropping our (well, just Ashley's) cell phone in a mad dash across the busiest roundabout (read: scary traffic death-trap) in England, and settling in for dinner at the "American Italian" restaurant, Little Frankie's.

12:48 am Oxford time--I am so tired. You'll see why when I write the rest of this update tomorrow. --Lauren

12:30 am Saturday--Little Frankie's was like the restaurant Michael and Rita go to in Wee Britain in Arrested Development, when they get the baskets full of doughnuts. I think the immigrants who run it think that everyone in New York is Italian, listens to Elvis Prestley and Frankie Valli, and drinks milkshakes. Julianna and I shared an "American Hot" pizza, which was a thin, greasy thing covered in pepperonis and the most ascetic-looking jalapenos I've ever seen, but it was good. Also, for dessert, Mary Catherine and Ashley shared with us a "Boston Brownie" dessert with the least amount of brownie possible. It was a monstrous concoction of chocolate and vanilla ice cream, chocolate malt balls, chocolate and caramel syrup, and a few hunks of fudgy brownies--the Brits, as usual, wanted to put some red berries in there with it, but we demanded that the plate have no nutritional value.

We took another cab from Trafalgar Square to the Globe, and as we wound our way through a few roundabouts and along the Thames we heard the call to rock out and answered it. The cab driver had on this great rock radio station, and we asked him to crank it up when Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" started up. Amid singing, playing the air drums, and laughing crazily, we got an amazing view of the river--Big Ben peeked out every once in awhile from behind the parks in town, the London Eye was just lighting up, we pointed at St. Paul's Cathedral and that weird Fabergé egg-shaped building from Layer Cake, and several industrial-looking alleys brought us to Sarah and Carly the entrance of the Globe.

Seeing a show at Shakespeare's theatre was just... odd. At times it did not feel very remarkable, and at other times my head spun a bit as I thought of the building (or at least some version of it) being there over four centuries ago. Carly acted the true road dog when she lent me three quid to get a Pimm's and lemonade (apparently, a highly contested recipe of a popular gin drink, which has to have lemons, limes, oranges, and cucumbers dumped into it so that I could look dorky eating them after downing the glass), and we settled in near some nice guys who helped us take pictures and a group of middle or high school girls with all the same atrocious, fried blonde, mullet-like tapered long haircuts. One of the actors in the play had a role in Master and Commander, said the program, and another one (or possibly the same--I haven't seen Master and Commander) looked pretty cute until he smiled and revealed some typically British teeth. Apparently the Globe is under a well-trafficked flight path--every few minutes the voices from the stage were drowned out by a rumbling we were glad was not thunder, because the Globe is an open-air theatre in the round and any rain would have made us poor groundlings in the centre very wet. At intermission (before the play reopened on a scene at a picnic), the ladies in the play walked around with trays full of cheese to feed us! All in all, I didn't understand everything of Love's Labours Lost, but I can see how hysterical it would have been for my peasant forefathers. Lots of bawdiness, silly priests and people dressing up like Cossacks, and fun players who could act, sing, and dance.

Our homecoming was a little troubled--hailing a taxi on top of a freezing bridge over the river was drawn out a bit too long, a guy on the bus talked on his cell phone the whole way home after midnight, and a mean-spirited Oxford taxi driver grumbled about "Americans" on his cell phone on our very convoluted way back to Banbury Road. We got to sleep around 2, and I woke up at 8 to prepare for class.

Since then we've had some UGA at Oxford fun (read: brief, guilty, sober fun) to break up the last long days of the seminars. Thursday was Lindsay's 20th birthday and we finally got out to a real English afternoon tea to celebrate! There is a squirrelly alleyway under the glass bridge between the buildings across from the library, windy and full of colleges and people in strange robes, that leads right to The Rose, an incredibly cute cafe on High Street (which I need to explore much more than I already have--I hardly knew it existed until we drove by it on the bus on the way to London, and it's like "Main Street"!). A cute but kind of persnickety waiter helped us to our English cream tea, which meant we each got a pot of tea (I got Darjeeling, totally "the champagne of teas"), two fluffy, warm, buttery scones (a lot like southern-style biscuits), homemade strawberry jam, and clotted cream (like whipped cream, only denser and more dairy-tasting). We will definitely be going back at least once a week. We've also shopped at Primark (I got $8 shoes!) and Zara (I couldn't afford anything!), gone on several grocery runs, and watched Layer Cake. But, enough goofing off--I need to write two more papers tomorrow. ;)

Becoming Jane

I am still very content in Oxford. I'm not sure if I've yet explained how wonderful crumpets are. They are like English muffins, only the holes go right through to the top, so you don't have to split them. What you do is use a ton of butter (hi, Mom, and Paula Deen) to soak through the top of a toasted crumpet, and what you then do to make it better is to add a ton of jam. I eat two or three crumpets in this style everyday, but I'm still convinced I'm getting skinnier.

Biking is still fun. I feel like I have a little British guardian angel somewhere because it has yet to rain while I've been on my bike. One day, it was clear on my way to the dining hall for lunch, it rained for the 20 minutes they allow us to eat lunch, and then it was clear for my ride home. I have gotten a lot more confident in my not-falling-over skills, riding with regular traffic when the bike lanes end instead of nerdishly taking the crosswalks and driving as far as the movie theatre (in one direction) or my favorite movie store (in the other). Everything I possibly need is accessible.

Tuesday in particular was a really good day. I gave my presentation in Dr. Eberle's class and even chimed in during discussion. A lot! I figured it was time to just get over my nerves, and ever since I've really participating and even talking with Dr. Eberle after class. And everyone is so nice and encouraging that it's just like talking with friends anyway! I sat in the library industriously for most of that day (because, if I haven't proven it yet, I am almost always working), and even there it's fun just taking a minute or two to talk with friends. I worry that some of us are getting to know each other too well--at one point we all watched Kao leave a note on his computer, telling his roommate David not to mess with his paper or else he'd eat his brain, and then David came in and tried to mess with the computer like we all expected! It probably looks like a bland story as I've told it here, but it was funny to us and we all had to stop working for several minutes to keep laughing.

Wednesday, my not-too-free day off, I coerced Julianna, David, and Lindsey to go with me to the Odeon on George Street to see the movie Atonement. I had been wanting to see something so bad, so I'm glad they put me out of my misery. First of all, I have to say the movie theatres here are too cute. We had to stand in line for a lot longer than we should have, but we amused ourselves by looking at the concession stand and seeing "warmed popcorn" listed (like we really wanted cold popcorn! Thanks a lot, England!). Even with the student discount tickets were 6 pounds (like $12!), but the Brits do this neat thing where you have to pick a particular seat to sit in, so you can sit where you like with your friends without having to get there ridiculously early and save seats. It was a few extra pence for the "premier" seats, which were this posh suade things with cupholders, but even our seats in one of the back rows were great. They showed a lot of previews (that one with George Clooney looks great!), and before the film rolled they had a notice that it had been approved by the film board in Great Britain. So official.

Please don't get mad at me as I gush about this amazing film. I hadn't realized that it doesn't come out in the U.S. for another three months, so I definitely feel about as rock star for having seen it already as I did about anything at Cannes. It makes sense that it came out here first, where the book Atonement was a huge bestseller, so that the film will make enough profits to be able to get to the few art theatres that will proudly show it in places like Midtown and W Hancock Avenue. BUT on a less businesslike note, the film might be one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen. At first I worried it would be pretentious, but I had to let the typewriter-soundtrack-music go and focus on the rich shots and characters. It's hard to describe except by saying that it felt so big, like it completely absorbed what it was like to live during that time and in that family. Keira Knightley and James McAvoy indeed act with ugly stick notably absent, and the way the film shows each of them living their lives and thinking of the other felt as close to getting inside a character's mind as is possible on screen. And that 4.5 minute shot of the beach at Dunkirk...! Be prepared for some awkward laughs, and a lot of grief, but I think most people will enjoy the film as I did, as something so different from what you usually go to the theatre to see.

I'm about to hit the hay (or, rather, my bunk bed) early so that I'll have a long, productive day ahead of me tomorrow to polish up my one written essay and write my other completely mind-blowing idea for Dr. Eberle's class. It all, as well as two books and several long poems, needs to get done, because on Sunday I'm pretty sure we will finally go to London! More pictures to follow if I ever see anything picture-worthy (because everything here is picturesque, I need to be even more choosy), but always love from across the pond,

Lauren

Lauren hungry!

A fun tidbit: When it's dinner time in Oxford, it smells like dinner time. The streets smell like curry and sausages and, ah yes, potatoes.

Like riding a bike

My first week of seminars was (relatively) painless. Both classes I'm taking, Dr. Southcombe's English historiography of the Elizabethan period and Dr. Eberle's 19th century women's writing, meet for two hours apiece, but I have been pleasantly surprised to find that both feel like they are too brief. Dr. Eberle does a wonderful job of guiding the class when we seem to need a bit more direction in the texts, but we really haven't seen too much of Dr. Southcombe; he summarizes our arguments or corrects our logic if we didn't express ourselves best, and then he leaves us to discuss what we found interesting in considering the two questions he always poses at the start of class. Even though there are no more than 10 people in any of the UGA seminars, everyone is so smart and driven to get their thoughts heard, and I'm going to keep trying harder to get a word in edgewise/conquer my tendency to not say the occasional intelligent thought that enters my head... ;)

We read all the time. When we're not reading (eating, sleeping, walking to class), we're probably thinking about reading. I have 6 texts to know the finer points of by the end of the long weekend, and I'm trying not to let that faze me. It's really pretty enjoyable, and not at all difficult, to go to the library, request a few books, and read/take notes for several hours. I have two papers to write by next weekend and am pretty cheerfully going with the idea that eventually, before the week is out, they will be done.

It's only been a week, so I really shouldn't be as antsy, but I'm ready to take advantage of a bit more freedom/geography around Oxford. In efforts to effect this goal, I rented a bike for the term and have had an amusing time remembering how to ride one. It is totally not "just like riding a bike"! Julianna and several amiable locals watched as I wobbled around the residential streets (and a neat hidden garden!), skimming past parked cars and getting on/off the bike at stop signs with extreme caution and a lot of frantic leg movements. I probably still looked petrified as I said, "Pshaw, why not ride down Banbury Road?", but after one truck honking at me I sucked it up and made a pretty straight beeline to the Lamb and Flag, where I knew I could safely turn around and go home. I then got my books and rode back to Keble to get some work done and have enjoyed my bike ever since. It gets me everywhere so fast, and I will make use of the unexpected extra time by... reading? :P

A few of us around the house had been making grand plans to go to London over the weekend, but an overnight became a daytrip became a "maybe next week?" and I'm just as content to stay at home. After Keble's illustrious "Mexican night" (or should I say "canned chili on top of white rice with cubed vegetables night"? you may cringe, but "I just want to eat a goddamn avocado" girl was starving and thus thought it tasted awesome), we stopped by the Keble pub for a drink and then merrily biked/enviously watched the two smartest people in the house bike home to watch what became three movies on the glorious HDTV. Julianna and I actually sat through the so-bad-it's-good mess that was "The Abduction Club" (OK, so in the 18th century second sons couldn't inherit anything so they'd occasionally abduct wealthy heiresses to marry well and avoid entering the church--compelling, but not in this movie). The guys eventually got back from their walk home and, catching the end of the movie, demanded that they pick the next one, so we watched "Happy Gilmore." I don't think that one is any better, even for the wrangle with Bob Barker. But the night was still young, and Sara had found "Love Actually" in our amazingly rich VHS collection, so we made it a triple feature and I woke up humming "All You Need is Love."

I spent most of today reading on various sofas (or, as Jane Austen would say, "sophas"), but Mark, Kao and I walked to M & S for lunch supplies and I had the best microwave Indian chicken ever. I think a sizeable group of us will be going out for a pub dinner to make the weekend a bit more exciting, and another movie or not (come on, "Run Fatboy Run"! Please?!) I'm very content. I definitely can see myself living here for another 11 weeks, and even though there's no other option I'm glad.

Playing catch-up...

Here goes my newer attempt to describe my fun day of studying (?!). I wrote this on a break in the Radcliffe Camera, so if I rhapsodize over it a bit it probably came from just looking around myself. Enjoy! --Lauren 10:50 p.m. Oxford time

On Monday a handful of the girls got up early to test the capricious system that is dining at Keble. Gabriel had contacted the office about meal times over the weekend and heard that breakfast would be served from 9:00-9:15, "seriously." We bolted out of the house at 8:40, and the long walk left us only a few seconds to gasp at the meticulously trimmed front quad (they're just begging for you to walk on them! I have never walked by more dangerous lawns in my life!) before running up the stairs into the lofty dining hall.

Oxford has instilled in us a sense of hierarchy very quickly, so even though we were allowed to sit "just this once" at the high table situated horizontally at the top of the room we picked to admire the general splendor/wolf down our toast from one of the three long tables. The hall is a four or five story arch of mottled brown, white, and red bricks, with seemingly Indian scalloped flowers and ribs along the ceiling (you might be able to tell from the pictures that the samemotif was used in the Taj Mahal--a neat/eerie relic of the colonialism thriving at the time of Keble's founding). Along the walls there are portraits of the college's most celebrated dons in a variety of poses (a lot of options to consider for how we we each should be commemorated once we are famous intellectuals... I think I might test the red carpet, over the shoulder look, yet unpainted). Breakfast in the end didn't seem too fast, as we all had time for gaping/our cards not working/popping coffee pods into the oddly hip instant beverage maker.

After quitting the dining hall we figured we could trespass in the unopened college a little longer and followed Gabriel past the chapel (which has a pre-Raphaelite painting we supposedly must see), the college bar (where Keble subsidies makes the drinks cheaper! President Adams would probably cry!), and the mini-gym that I might join if I feel like the 3+ miles of walking per day isn't enough. We also ventured into the covered market in town, where Gabriel showed us the best places for cheap food (Fasta Pasta and some pie company) before Julianna and Sarah and I split off to get Julianna a "rucksack" (a.k.a. backpack) at Argos, some weird communist store where you look through a catalogue in the small front room and the cashier goes to get your purchase from the back.

One of my favorite parts of Oxford thus far revealed itself to us when we breezed past the "visitors not allowed" sign to enter the Radcliffe Camera. A friendly old man checked our Bodleian cards and bogs and explained the reading rooms to us, and we went as quietly as we could among gasps of "Bitchin'!" into the lower reading room. The circular "basement" reading rom is made up of eight stone domes of shelves, long desks with personal lamps, and wrought-iron gated windows encircling a central reference desk, which makes the room feel at once huge and secluded, cavelike, and warm. We ventured into the brighter upper camera, with its two stories of shelves, svelte iron spiral staircases, and white columns, but I could tell that I felt more at home in the basement. Even a look at the Bodleian--its square staircases around old dumbwaiters, its "cloakrooms" (or bathrooms), its closer-set desks bathed in orange lamplight, and its musty shelves of original manuscripts and first editions in the mahogany Duke Humphrey's library (a.k.a Hogwarts library)--could not keep me from going back and reading "A Room of One's Own" in the lower camera. It feels too surreal and pretentious, but somehow the atmosphere encourages me to think better, and to feel that everyone wants me to think better; studying oddly enough has become my most anticipated activity every day if I can sit and think there.

The rest of Monday, post library crawl, is a bit foggy. I know we ate lunch with some of the Keble students who run the college activities over the holidays. They are all very friendly and want us to play frisbee with them (they seem to think all Americans are very athletic), and I hope that I'll feel less awkward/find more to say to them soon. I'm sure I studied a bit, and that I spent a fun hour in the kitchen puzzling over the title of an old movie with Julianna and David, but my memory stops there. I keep feeling like I've been here so long and have the right to be exhausted and useless after every long day/refreshed and full of thoughts the next morning--have I really only been here a week?

Stonehenge, Bath, and the Bod

I feel like a lot of what happened on Saturday can be covered by looking at my photo albums (picasaweb.google.com/elmorelt), but for the sake of refreshing my own memory I'll rehash a few things here. Whoever tells you that Stonehenge is intriguing and/or breathtaking is probably high. It is mysterious indeed that people thousands of years ago wanted to drag these 4 ton stones into the middle of nowhere, but after hearing about/seeing Stonehenge in so many history books and films seeing it in person didn't do anything new for me. You don't even get to "get up close and personal" (as one UGA student put it) with it anymore! It was a cold morning, so most of us took a few funny pictures with the rocks to lighten the mood and generally scurried past most of the numbers posted on the ground that guided our audio tour. If even a historical society can't make heads or tails of Stonehenge, I figure it is best left a mystery.

We drove another hour to see Bath, the town which houses England's only natural hot spring. Jane Austen lived in Bath for a few years, so I was ready to get a bit more into her mindframe as several of us set out for the Jane Austen Centre in a northern area of town. We could see how Bath was a fashionable social center as we walked up rows and rows of shops (including The Disney Store?), and the fancy clothes/small rooms/traffic around the residential streets made Bath for me as well as for Ms. Austen a fun place to visit but nowhere to dream of living. The Centre was pretty small, with only a few decorated rooms, a costume exhibit, and a tea room that we didn't have time to visit, but I am pretty glad that we went. The girl who gave a small talk on the Austen family's time in Bath was enthusiastic in a nerdy but cute way, so I could envision myself having a job like hers if I lived in Bath. Since we were in the neighborhood anyway, we passed through the townhomes known as The Circus and the Royal Crescent--the huge scale of the architecture was overwhelming the the best of ways, and I could have sat on the sprawling grass park in front of the Crescent just people-watching for the rest of the day.

Eventually we did amble back to the center of town, and, upon the advice of a passing group of fellow UGA students, we coughed up the 9 pounds apiece to go in the Roman Baths. Money well spent! I laughed about the balmy atmosphere around the percolating, green pool reminding me of home in Georgia, and even though we were not allowed to bathe we enjoyed taking pictures from all possible angles, listening to the fun/fact-filled tour over the "audio wands" (much cooler than their Stonehenge counterparts), and imagining what the largely unexcavated ruins must have looked like in their prime. We skittered in and out of the abbey next door before we had to return to the bus; the hodge-podge of family crests and tombstones dotting the floors and the walls of the old building made a neat contrast with the vaulted ceilings and hundreds of stained glass windows above. There even was a modern evening service going on during our tour! With what I've seen of England so far, I am constantly impressed by the attitude of renovating and reappropriating history--as weird as it might look to tour the baths with a glorified walkie-talkie, or to sit in a Victorian house typing on a computer, you can never ignore the wonderful history of this place.

We took a bit of downtime once we got back to Oxford (I had to lay down, since even sitting has aggravated what feels like an arthritic hip I've gotten from walking so much!), but then several of us decided to hunt for the elusive Turf Tavern. We found it with little difficulty, but we arrived just after they had stopped serving food at 7:30 and I split off with the group that went in search for supper. We saw a sign for "excellent food" on the side of the King's Arms, a pub on the corner of Broad Street across from the library buildings, and, having eaten two bowls of cereal earlier, I had just to sit and be jealous of my friends' "veg lasagne" and "bangers & mash." I enjoyed my cider with the best of them as we relaxed and chatted along one of the pub's long, wooden tables, and, despite having chugged the last third of my drink on a dare, I think I'll enjoy pub culture in the nonchalant Oxford student way instead of in the debauched Georgia student way for the rest of the trip.

Sunday was our first breather of the trip, even though we ended up walking over a lot of the city again. I cleaned up my room and read most of the morning, and by 2 or so in the afternoon Sarah, Carly, and I wandered into Summertown for coffee and groceries so that we could meet Julianne, Kao, and David in the City Centre to seek the Krispy Kreme soon thereafter. Sarah and I got to Cornmarket Street after idling in the UGA house's backyard for a bit (while she, Carly, and Zach smoked, I looked around the back fence and found a peartree! It's like the Oxford equivalent of the peachtree, since lots of streets are named after the trees but few are actually inside the city), and soon enough we had indeed found the Krispy Kreme in the castle ("Kastle"?). Their hot doughnut machine was broken, but we all enjoyed some of the baked doughnuts and didn't mind having to make plans to return for the real deal very soon.

Dinner at the UGA house was fun and crazy as we tried to cram all 30 program members/staff/families into the dining room for pasta. It took everyone to get enough chairs into the room and enough dishes washed afterwards, but it was neat to see everyone in one place. Dr. Bradshaw, the professor for one of the first seminars and the organizer of all of our tutorials for the trimester, visited and gave a very funny speech inspired by a cat he saw in the backyard. The night was pretty quiet after that, and I tried to get ahead in some of my reading for Dr. Eberle's class, but I had a bit of a scare when I apparently got stung by some insect that had wandered into the library. My ankle swelled incredibly, similar to the infamous "tater toe" incident, and I got a bit lightheaded. Even though I eventually found Gabriel, who gave me some Benadryl, I was a bit shaken. I have to be looking out for myself here! Thankfully Benadryl knocks me out pretty quickly, so I couldn't sit up and fret about it for too long.

To be continued (5:40 p.m.)...

(11:40 p.m. 9/11/07) Or not, I guess! It's been a fun but busy day--going to two seminars, reading, and of course the long walks to and from Keble--so I'll try to get in an update tomorrow afternoon. Lots of love as ever from Oxford! --Lauren

New Shoes

The group flight from Atlanta to London-Gatwick airport was pretty pleasant. I met about 8 of the people on the trip--Gily had the excellent idea of wearing her UGA at Oxford shirt, so I had no excuse to not sit near them and I think we all enjoyed have people to talk to during the 2.5 hours we had to wait for the plane after getting to the airport 3 hours early to be on the safe side of the long security lines. I knew I wouldn't be able to sleep on the flight anyway, after two tries at 8+ hour flights this May and June, so I had resigned myself to watching the crappy inflight movies, but I soon learned that the 767 we were on, though being more cramped than I remembered, had personal TVs so we could pick our own movies! I rushed through Meet the Robinsons and Shrek 3 in my excitement. I then tried to sleep, then tried to sleep with my iPod on since I was bored, then tried to watch The Office. The lights snapped on at 1 am Georgia time (6 am England time), and I enjoyed my pre-packaged but oddly fresh/warm croissant (ah, the miracle of science) while I watched our approach to the island. I first thought "Wow, check out Ireland!", but realizing that the landmass I saw was way too narrow to be its own island/country I checked the map to see that we were flying over a bay between Wales and south England. England looks a lot like Iowa since so much of it is still organized in neat little packets of pasture and farmland, so I felt at home. But then it looked like there were no roads between all of farms! Apparently every English road has to be surrounded with bushes and trees (for privacy?), so I imagined roads where all of the neat lines of trees were.

Navigating the airport was not so pleasant. It's laid out as crappily as JFK in New York where you have to walk around in a circle almost to get to baggage claim. My knee was killing me after the cramped flight, and my carry-ons full of books already felt too heavy. Thankfully customs was very quick (I bungled my departure date a few times, but the agent must have realized it was too early to be asking anyone anything more than a yes/no questions). Baggage claim tested me a bit since my bags came out on a different belt that some of my fellow flight members and when I found them the bigger (read: 72 pound) one's handle was broken. I can't roll it properly anymore, and I found this out when I rolled over my toe and removed the top half of my toenail. I bled all the 2 hour bus ride to Oxford, but since several people had helped me with the bag crisis and since I discovered some bandaids in my backpack I felt cheery enough listening to Seu Jorge and The Shins in traffic.

Driving up Banbury Road only just prepared me for our awesome new house. We're in, apparently, the rich part of residential Oxford, surrounded by huge houses with huge gardens that must belong to some of the colleges or some of the people who named the colleges. We could tell we were home by the flaming red double doors, and inside we were treated to that wonderful "new house" smell. I am in a triple room at the front of the house (the one at the first landing), which was great yesterday because I could hardly stand dragging my bags up any more stairs and will be good for the whole stay here because of the wonderful view. I have the top bunk and the center desk in front of five bay-style windows that overlook the road; try as I might to capture this glory in a photo (which, by the way, can be found on my new photo website picasaweb.google.com/elmorelt), it is impossible to recreate. You'll just have to imagine me looking at it as I write this post. My roommates, Carly and Ashley, are both really nice (very accomodating, like me--we took a long time deciding who got which cabinets since none of us wanted to step on any toes), and we mostly filled the room to storage capacity as we unpacked.

The afternoon is a bit of a sleep-deprived blur for me at the moment. I know I set out to Summerville (a few blocks up Banbury Road from the UGA house--Oxford to Summerville is like Atlanta to "Midtown", only Summerville is LESS expensive) to get some more bandaids (or "plasters" in Britspeak), and I ended up meeting Laura and Carlye to go to Co-op for groceries (including Empire magazine!) and to this Lebanese restaurant for a cheap lunch of falafel. I stayed back a bit to get the milk that was too heavy to carry the whole way, and the evening sprawled into a weird stretch of unpacking and sitting around after I looked around a lot of campus with Sarah. Somehow I missed the boat on going to dinner with a lot of the group, but then I had time to find the two incredibly nice girls from Florida, Sara and the third Carly, to eat cereal in the amazing main kitchen (where I will probably cook tonight as soon as I can muster the strength to walk to the grocery store!). I passed out at 10 and woke up only to the sounds of Kurt banging on a pot to tell us we only had 10 minutes before we left for the tour of the Bodleian Library.

To be continued--5:20 p.m. Oxford time

7:00 p.m. Oxford time--Had to take a break, but after the last walk I can manage for the day and an awesome dinner from the grocery store of the gods (Marks & Spencer) I feel awesome.

So yeah, totally thought they were joking about wake-up today. I hadn't set my phone correctly, so the alarm went off at 9 and not 8. I have never dressed that fast in my life! It was so nice and cool out this morning, so the 20 minute walk to Broad Street was not that bad. The library, like most buildings in the college, was set behind one entryway to a quad, and we were ushered into a really severe looking room by a really nice looking lady. She explained to us that the room has been used by University government as well as British government--Parliament would occasionally be held there when things like the plague drove the court out of London. The ceilings were high and super-intricate, and family crests dotted most of the building, commemorating the nobles who donated to build the University. We didn't get a tour of the library like I expected because it took so long for all of us to get our cards and recite the Bodleian oath (to obey library rules, to not damage any books, and, most importantly, to not kindle flame in the building), but after a quick coffee break up the street we returned to take a tour of the campus.

We met our tour guide, Debbie, in the middle of a spat with a University official--some hawkish lady snapped at the folks who brought food into the *outdoor* quad, and Debbie fought with her a bit, continuing a vendetta she later said began when that lady had tried to plow into her tour group on a bicycle (the #1 weapon in Oxford, I'd say). Debbie claimed early on that she was different from most Brits ("because I have a sense of humor"), and she led a really fun, spontaneous tour through the City Centre. We saw a 300-year old tree, the beautiful chapel of Exeter College (where J. R. R. Tolkien and Philip Pullman studied), the Radcliffe Camera, and the most-exclusive All Souls College. We didn't see anyone walking on the quad behind their fence, but we were assured that, when they do, they float.

Several groups broke off to go shopping. Most peeled off to get cell phones (which Sarah and I did yesterday! So smart!), but Sarah and my roommate Carly and I went in search of bigger game. We found Gloucester Green, which is surrounded by a lot of neat-looking coffee shops and pubs, and eventually we asked someone and found Primark, a really cheap clothing and home goods store. I got towels there (yay for having to do the laundry less often, which is good because right now we can't get into the laundry shed...?), and at Boots on Cornmarket Street I loaded up on essentials (it's like Target and Ulta in one cosmetic-shopper's heaven). We looked through the edge of the covered market to get really cheap and delicious sandwiches for lunch (the one I went to was playing Paolo Nutini--old hat for Brits, I suppose, but I was enchanted), and I agonizingly trundled off the quickest route, looking for the poster shop (lame for dorm decorating, but good for souvenirs), before getting home.

Even though my legs really hurt from walking so much the past two days, I was already planning where else I wanted to go when I was walking home (yoga and video store in Summerville, for starters). I'm looking forward to having a bit of free time on Sunday to check things out, find my favorite coffee shop, etc. In retrospect, the Cannes trip was definitely a great prep for this longer stay abroad--I've gotten so self-reliant that I'm ready and willing to find the things I want to find, when I want to find them, to have fun, and I don't feel as much of the need to travel in big packs. It'll be good to have excursions, like the one we're going on tomorrow, and big classes for the first few weeks, but I can tell I'm really going to enjoy my "me time" here.

The evening's been pretty tame. Carly and I both agreed that a bit of time just to sit down was heavenly, so I took my time uploading pictures on the super fast Picasa and updating a bit of this journal before heading back out for dinner. Summerville is cheaper and, more importantly, closer than City Centre, so I got a small group to walk over to M & S to get some prepared meals. I had this awesome stuffed chicken and got some cereal for later whose ingredient label rivals the delicious Casino granola that I would eat five times a day in France. I think I'm going to grab a shower now while the house is pretty quiet--need to be ready for another early morning since we're going to Stonehenge and Bath tomorrow!