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?