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. ;)