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.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
"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.
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.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
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...
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...
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
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.
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.
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
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. ;)
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. ;)
Friday, September 21, 2007
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
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
Monday, September 17, 2007
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.
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