Oxford 6

They say that time flies when you are doing other things. Unfortunately, those 'other things' do not include writing in my blog. I've just come back ('just' as in 'last night') from a Bing-sponsored weekend trip to Edinburgh, Scotland. In the course of running around medieval castles, musing at modern art, drinking strawberry beer and watching Eurovision (Jedward should have won!!), I have amassed a substantial homework debt. Let me not linger on that, but suffice it to say that there would probably be better uses of my time right now that writing a blog post.

However, there are worse allocations of procrastination time. For example, the 23 games of free cell that I won last week and the 3 games of free cell that I lost. The majority of those were played between the hours of 11 pm and 6 am. Poor life choices...

Allow me the brief space to loosen up my writing muscles for the essay I am about to write, by offering a brief ode to Scotland.

O! Scotland! City of moss and mist and rain and witch trials and Sir Walter Scott and kilts and 6-story tall split level buildings perched on granite rock. You are wonderful. Everyone who visits the UK should also visit you.

Ok, so that was not very profound or serious. A poor indication of my time in Edinburgh since the emotions that the trip incited actually tend more towards the profound and serious. I love cities of intense juxtaposition: old/new, high/low, nature/culture. That first category is satisfied by almost anywhere that I might travel in Europe or the UK. It is impossible for Europe to hide the remnants of centuries past. Edinburgh seems to glory in the close proximity of the old and new. As for high/low - I don't mean social class. I'm thinking of geological levels. The city is built on an ancient volcanic rift that provides massive rock protrusions with rugged cliffs - that is, the perfect locale for an optimally defensible medieval castle! Within the city itself, this extreme topology means that you can think you are entering the first floor of a building when it is actually the fourth floor of a split-level construction. It's not unusual to realize that you are on a bridge three stories above a street that you were just walking on, without remembering the ascent. As for the nature/culture juxtaposition, it is undoubtedly the chief attraction of Edinburgh from my perspective. Green - seemingly evergreen! - hills linger in the distance, spotted with sheep. The rugged lay of the land inevitably leaves areas that no person ever saw fit to build upon. Look up 'Arthur's Seat' to see what I am talking about.

Oh, and did I mention the accents?

I've just left, but I am already imagining ways in which I might be able to return to the city some day. For now, to the land of Narnia! (with a brief excursion into 18th cent. London and Bristol in Frances Burney's 'Evelina')

Oxford 5

Imagined one-way conversation between me and my computer:

"Hello, it's me again. I know it's been a long time. No! It's not you. It's me. NO. It isn't someone else either. YES, I still care about you! Yes, I still want to share every waking moment of my life with you! (Well, not really. It's just a matter of speech...) But it's difficult sometimes, you know? I've just been... busy."

You may ask: what has this selfish, unsympathetic, one-sided person been 'busy' with?

Well, since you asked:

-Pubs
-Salsa lessons
-Royal wedding (tv)
-Tortoise wedding (live!)
-Laundry
-Waking up at 5 am on May Morning
-Listening to choristers singing from the top of Magdalen tower, me, surrounded by people in the middle of High Street at 6 am on May Morning
-Reading smutty 17th century plays and novels (for class!)
-Contemplating an orange and writing about it (for class!)
-Composing a piano piece and playing it, embarrassingly (for class)
-Going to afternoon tea at Corpus Christi
-(15 minutes later) going to afternoon tea at The Rose
-Reading about C.S. Lewis
-Writing about C.S. Lewis
-Walking around Oxford searching for things related to C.S. Lewis
-Dr. Who
-Dr. Who
-Dr. Who
-Shocking my tutor with a well-written but severely over-interpreted thesis
-Dr. Who
-Practicing my British accent
-Making British friends
-Practicing my British accent for my British friends
-Hearing my British friends attempt an American accent (with the expression "Fuck yeah, America!" proposed by Molly)
-EVEN better, hearing one British friend do an impression of his impression of ME that sounds something like this: "HELLOOO! I AM HEIDI, SON OF THORRRR. I like to study MYTHOLOGY, especially VIKING MYTHOLOGYYY!!!" - as the wise Peter Pham once said, I have become a parody of myself
-Eating paninis beside the Magdalen deer park
-Cooking by throwing things in a pot until it tastes good
-Plotting a costume for the "dead famous" themed "bop" - it's like a dance
-Failing in the first round of a pub quiz
-Failing miserably in the second round of a pub quiz
-Failing passably in the final round of a pub quiz
-Resolving to go to another pub quiz sometime that doesn't involve exclusively British knowledge ("If you were watching cricket near Pemberley and were forty kilos from Southampton and one-hundred and twenty meters from Kent and thirty quid away from Manchestertonvilleburgh and miles and miles away from understanding this question, where would you be?")

I write all these things with the understanding that, once again, it will be impossible to convey the bulk of the things that I have been doing, enjoying, exhausting, and laboring over. I started this list with the intention of going into more detail, but now I am hungry and well on the way to convincing myself that this list is actually a pretty accurate description of the present.

Parting is such sweet-but-actually-savory-in-this-case-because-its-lunchtime sorrow! The rest is silence. Farewell, fair cruelty! Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow...

O brave new world, that has such people in it!

'Sibling' Blogs

You know, just in case you wanted to triangulate my every move while in Oxford through the words of others.

Victor Liu - http://beginwiththesenses.posterous.com/why-is-the-question-of-being-a-fundamental-qu
Molly Keran - http://bildungsromantic.wordpress.com/
Benamy Yashar - http://livinginspires.blogspot.com/

That's all I can come up with for now, but I may add others as time goes on.

Oxford 4

A wise fat boy on an otherwise deservedly obscure reality TV show once said: "life isn't all rainbows and sausages." You tell it, child! I've since added to my lexicon a great French idiom which reminds me of the former: "life isn't all beer and skittles." I suppose the version of this idiom for my own trip could be "life isn't all beer and Cadbury Eggs" or perhaps "life isn't all scones and clotted cream." Or, perhaps most accurately, "life isn't all chocolate brioche, cider, and DoctorWho/Game of Thrones/BBC miniseries."

One might speculate that these comments herald the beginning of my real work in Oxford - my academic work. It is true that this post and the academic acceleration coincide. However, my thoughts are probably more related to my [first of this trip] excursion into London, of yesterday, with the intent of seeing a play adaptation of Frankenstein - one of my FAVORITE novels. I knew that there was a possibility of not being able to get tickets, since the show is completely sold out for its run. I was optimistic, but open to second options upon discovering the line of 40 people waiting for an uncertain quantity of returned tickets to be released. My other three companions and I (team "Frankenstein," so called to complement another small group of Stanford students who entered the city with us to see Legally Blonde) decided that we still wanted to see a play and headed off to Leicester Square to find half-price tickets for (a) Umbrellas of Cherbourg or (b) In a Forest Dark and Deep. BOTH were sold out. In a last effort to make an event of the journey, three of us purchased tickets to "The 39 Steps" - a comedic adaptation of an early Hitchcock film. I watched the film today... it's not funny. But its not really trying to be funny. The play wasn't very funny either... but it was trying.

By all physical accounts the trip to London was a failure. We almost missed the bus back to Oxford since nobody in Victoria Station could tell us where it was leaving from. Listening to music barely overshadowing the gossip of the other students immediately behind me as they discussed Legally Blonde and potential hookups within the Stanford House, I mostly wanted to get to bed. Yes, because I was sleepy; but even more so because I wanted to start over again.

Failure is such a brutal word; such a subjective concept. If the previous few days hadn't been the bliss of rambling around Oxford in the daytime, watching media and drinking cider in the evening, then the London trip wouldn't have been a 'failure' at all. Most importantly, like all life 'failures' it brought me back to the reality of things. 'Reality' - that word that keeps popping up in my thoughts and, consequently, in my blog - the thing that makes studying abroad so much more than a vacation.

I would like to warn the reader not to be confused by any of the things that I write on this blog. I am having a wonderful time! It wouldn't be wonderful if I couldn't think about it in the melodramatic light that I sometimes tend towards.

Most recently I come from a dessert social that actually involved Oxford students (granted, I was in my pyjamas - my 'nightgown' for those who get a kick out of that vocabulary word - and not very inclined to socialize with anyone who had the advantage of street clothing and a British accent). Nevertheless, I am very excited to start meeting local students! Our college orientation is tomorrow. I can already see the younger population on the streets of Oxford subtly increasing.

Oh, I wasn't able to go to the dance event last Sunday because it was canceled for Easter. That remains something to look forward to!

Classes have been good thus far, and occasionally great. I particularly enjoyed my early women writers class this morning. Our professor, unlike everything else in Oxford, appears under the age of 35. She takes her studies very seriously, something that I notice a lot in younger academics, while retaining a humor that is more relevant to the student generation. I look forward to reading the sex and scandal of many a gothic affair!

Still looking forward to my tutor meeting on Thursday... which reminds me that I ought to continue reading Surprised by Joy by C.S. Lewis. Less than 100 pages to go and enjoyable reading (I was reading it in the Radcliffe Camera section of the Bodleian Library earlier today).

Chocolate pudding in my stomach from the dessert social = eupepsia and the promise of a productive evening!


p.s. I did not get saved by a British man on the punting expedition, though it does turn out that I am quite bad at punting. Alas! maybe next time...

Oxford 3

In this episode our occasionally-brave-but-usually-quite-timid hero decides to organize a punting expedition in an upper fork of the Thames River. Her punting stick becomes hopelessly stuck in the mud, causing her to cling to it instead of the boat that she is standing on. She finds herself clinging to the pole in the middle of the murky, treacherous waters until a mysterious stranger with a northern English accent comes rowing around the bend. He stabilizes his boat to let her jump in (effectively saving our hero) and the pair row to safety - but not the same punting port from which she originally left. Instead, he has rowed them to a secret island featuring a spectacular library housed in an old cloister. They stumble upon a cellar in the cloister full of Nutella, and spend the rest of the afternoon under an unusually blue sky eating strawberries (picked fresh from the riverbank) and devouring the contents of that ancient cellar.

Okay, that was fiction. But it could happen: tomorrow, when I've planning a punting expedition in the river that's just a step outside of the Stanford House.

I'm in Oxford! England. The country I've idealized for a not-insignificant proportion of my adolescence (most of this relates directly back to Victorian literature). The best thing about ideals and expectations is that they are not true. We can hardly ever flush them out to a level of reality that would be satisfying to actually live. Ideals and expectations also have the capacity to have the opposite effect. However, I think that if we exaggerate things enough then we never actually expect them to be true, and the simple realness of things - the power of place - is enough to make the journey worthwhile.

Consequently, one of my favorite things to do upon arriving here, like the walking through NYC thing that I mentioned, is simply staring out of my window at the tourists (and some locals) walking on High Street. The Stanford House could not be more ideally located. It is right across from Magdalen College (alma mater of C.S. Lewis) and short walks away from nearly every Oxford College, tea shop, clothing store, grocery, church, bookstore, etc. I am roommates with Haiy Le, a friend who I've spent a lot of time with at Stanford through religious studies classes and events. The room is enormous, and as mentioned the view is wonderful. I'll post some pictures at the end of this post. We've already visited pubs, eaten an expensive and classy meal with the Bing funds, experienced afternoon high tea, gone on a walking tour of the colleges, and dabbled in collaborative cooking ventures. One of my favorite things so far was watching North & South, currently my favorite BBC miniseries, with a group of about 5 people until 2 in the morning.

It's really impossible to summarize.

Work is exceptionally minimal so far. My first meeting with my tutor is next Thursday, and its purely introductory. I will be starting on reading (Lewis' Surprised by Joy), but mostly because I can, not because I have to. I'm taking a fairly heavy load of classes but I'm so excited by all of them that I don't want to drop any. I'm convinced that it is the right amount for me, especially given that one of them is "The Oxford Trans-Idiomatic Arts Practicum" - a course in which my primary responsibilities are seeing art, writing reviews, and them making art. For our second class we performed a flash mob piece in the courtyard of the Radcliffe Camera, part of the Bodleian Library, which involved tapping stones together and doing rigid movements to a musical score on special wristwatches (designed by our Prof. Mark Applebaum). My other two 'class' classes start next week - creative writing and women writers. I have yet to determine the rigor of those two classes, but I'm thrilled to start.

At the moment it is 6 pm and I can hardly contemplate dinner after stuffing myself with a scone and cucumber sandwiches at high tea. (It's all about the clotted cream, by the way.)

Weekend plans: punting, as aforementioned. Jazz festival, to watch. Museums, possibly. Church (at the most ideologically progressive church I could find) on Sunday, followed by social dancing there later that night. Monday, likely a trip into London to see a dramatic adaptation of Frankenstein.

All the Oxford students and faculty are still enjoying Easter break, so it will be a while before things feel 'normal' in Oxford. It will be nice, though, to feel like a resident here before the universities start up and I feel like a stranger (i.e. an American) once again.

Pictures!

Our third roommate: Basil. Good for cooking and company while studying

The long-awaited scone eating picture.

High tea fare.

Window view (left).

Window view (right).

Oh-so-spacious room (my bed is near the window).

My side.

Awesome kid-sized shark shirt for sale in the covered marked - a great place to buy oriental clothing and pillow-covers (if you're into that), Ben's cookies (not 'biscuits', but wow! delicious), and an onion for 69 pence if you can find the change amongst quarters and dimes to make that.

The only surviving image of Heidi in NYC last week, for posterity.

Also, a final thanks to Adelaide for inspiring my melodramatic opening in this post.

Oxford 2

So, this is a little outdated for my geographic location, state of mind, etc., etc., but here goes (also - no scone pictures yet! But I will get on it).

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Just as a note, I am writing this on April 26, 2011 (and not whenever it is posted) because I am currently sitting in the Newark Airport and I don’t want to pay for WiFi. Beyond that, I actually decided that I want to write something for the blog during my 1.5 hour remaining wait. I thought I would take advantage of the spirit of the moment and write this to post later, especially because I’ve been up to quite a lot this past week.

Some of those things I will not write about extensively. One of the main reasons that I wanted to stop by New York was to visit family that I haven’t seen in five years – 15 yrs. old to 20 yrs. old is a significant change. There is much to say about family visits, but perhaps not much to say on a public blog. I was also tempted to make a stop here because it is so close to New York, and because I had the overwhelming urge to explore a part of my own country before searching for things foreign, abroad. You can find many things that are foreign in one’s own country; consider that the flight to the east coast was about the same length a journey as the ocean-crossing I am presently anticipating. The goal originally was to stay with my cousin Becky on my dad’s side in NYC, but conflicting plans made it so I got even more of a tourist’s – no, wanderer’s – perspective. I say wanderer in part to be pretentious/romantic about my plans, though I really did avoid most of the stereotypically tourist areas. And of course, I was travelling alone.

Itinerary (times estimated):

9 am – left New Providence, NJ on 1 hr train ride into the city

10 am – met up with cousin (other cousin, Hilary, on my mom’s side; 2 yrs. older than me) for breakfast; ate somewhat expensive waffles in Howard Square

11 am – subway initiation! Accidentally get on express train uptown in my efforts to reach central Central Park; decide to head to The Cloisters instead; see the infamous unicorn tapestries – please may Morielle be reading this post

12 pm – 2 pm – After exiting subway and walking about 15 blocks through Washington Parks and the park at Fort Tryon, I visit The Cloisters; discover that admission also applies to main branch of the Metropolitan Museum à more options!

2 – 3 pm – Once again board an express train accidentally to arrive at the lower western corner of Central Park; decide to walk to the Met (which I wanted to do anyways) though it is pouring rain, and it’s windy; see the lake and Belvedere Castle along the way – at this point, I’m feeling that my sojourn has been remarkably medieval

3 – 4:30 pm – Eat delicious cinnamon raisin pretzel in front of the Met then enter; coolest exhibit: “A Room with A View” on 19^th century painters’ experiments of including windows in paintings, sometimes making them the primary subject **reminder – look up quote from exhibition**

4:30 – 5 pm – Journey to hostel, including brief and successful subway ride and a soaking, solitary walk across Central Park in order to get to a convenient station; at this time my boots are soaked and I look like a wet poodle, as my hair has curled and frizzed to the extreme in the humidity and wind

5 pm – put stuff under my bed in female dormitory with 12 other occupants; those who are there at the time speak French and ignore the wet poodle

6 pm – escape from the hostel to dinner; when in Harlem… eat African food!! Delicious Ethiopian cuisine on the corner of 113^th and Frederick Douglas; eating alone at a somewhat classy restaurant I exhibited the habits of a middle aged man but the appearance of a conspicuously white, grungily attired student (when in New York, eh?...)

7 pm – return to social isolation in hostel and wet boots; decide to go to read a little then go to bed early so as to wake up early and do exciting things when I feel comfortable walking around Harlem – in the daylight

9 pm – awakened by German hostel-mate who bemoans that the concierge (if you call them that, in a hostel) didn’t them my bed on the bottom of the bunk; I am half asleep and don’t care anyways, so I offer to take the top bunk though the mattress, I discover, is significantly less comfortable and makes me feel liable to fall through it; at least everything is very clean

That evening I vaguely, VAGUELY remember the sounds of the other women coming in from late nights of clubbing – things I suppose I might be interested in if I was there with somebody else. MAYBE. More likely swing dancing – the historical sight of the famous Savoy Ballroom is not too far away! – though I thought I should probably get a good deal of sleep anyways for the subsequent day of travelling. In regards to any disruption from the other inhabitants tumbling in at odd hours, I got my ‘revenge’ when…

7 am – alarm goes off! I leave somewhat stealthily to get breakfast at Amy Ruth’s, a local Harlem place know for its Southern; my waffles with apples were served with a complementary biscuit and were infinitely more delicious than my waffle in Harold Square

8 – 9 am – walk around Northern Central Park and discover Central Park in sunlight; dogs and dog walkers are everywhere; the water was perhaps dirtier than in the lower lake, but to me Harlem Meer was the most beautiful part of Central Park

9 am – 10:30 am – walk to Columbia University and Grant’s Tomb; get a cappuccino

10:45 am – 12:45 pm – Palm Sunday service at the Riverside Church, a bastion for liberal Christianity in the east (not far from Union Theogical Seminary); the sermon wasn’t particularly strong, considering it was an interim minister as well, though I really appreciated the Prayers of the People; waved palms to the sound of African drums; decidedly the best racially integrated service I have ever been to

12:45 – realize that I am probably going to miss my 1:11 train, so I stop by Times Square for a tourist moment and two tantalizing slices of NY pizza; those flavors lingering on my tongue, I am convince that NY beats Chicago

2:11 – board train back to NJ

Four hours later, I’m waiting in the airport for a red eye to London. LONDON!!

Now, for some philosophical and psychological ramblings that are necessary after rambling in a city. Whenever I visit a place, I am always stressed to ask if I did enough; if I should have done more or just, differently. I’m fortunate in that I’ve been the tourist in NYC before, when I was just a kid, to hit all the main attractions. I never made it to the World Trade Center before 2001, which I still regret. I didn’t visit the Ground Zero this time, which I possibly regret. It is only the slightest of regrets though. The kind that you feel when you accidentally order a different kind of pizza than the one you expected, for example. Still, it’s a tasty slice of pizza and you know you couldn’t have ordered every slice. Some people would call my uptown-bound itinerary dull. At one point along the way I was also beginning to things so – somewhere along the path between Columbus Circle and Belvedere Castle when I was trying to cross the span of 25-some blocks with an insufficient umbrella and boots. Nevertheless, I have to say that my favorite things about visiting New York were the mundane things. Not even visiting the Met, which is mundane by clubbing standards. I enjoy the really mundane things, like walking down Frederick Douglas Boulevard at 7:30 am past piles of damp homeless crud and dozens of blown-out umbrellas (I am now convinced that Harlem is an umbrella cemetery). I enjoy hiding my camera deep in my backpack and feeling that I could pass as a local, walking confidently through primarily black neighborhoods with boarded up shop fronts and trying to ignore my exhausted feet. Later, passing crowds in Times Square like a NY taxi passes minivans with out-of-state licenses. I am probably romanticizing it, but if using imagination makes my travel experiences even better then why not?

The whole time I couldn’t help but think of San Francisco (as you probably know, I’m a big fan). I found myself watching sports attendees wearing blue and red jerseys on the subway and wishing that they were orange and grey. I found myself wishing that Central Park was just a little less charted. Manhattan is huge – far larger than I even remembered. I could imagine myself living there someday, for a short while. But for now, New York mostly gives me nostalgia for a place that feels like home. And then I worry that maybe I’m romanticizing that too, and I’m leaving on an airplane in 50 minutes, and I’m a little thirsty, and I’m going to a foreign country, and maybe I don’t know what home is, my home.

So I’ll probably give myself a cliché and listen to my ipod when I’m finished with this post and turn on ‘Home’ by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. And, yes, it’s a cliché. But maybe it’s also truth. I love you, friends and family. Happy belated birthday, Liesl!

Oxford 1

To begin, I have every reason to expect that blogging will be very difficult for me. I've never been able to keep a journal, or a diary (what we call journals when we are little, with a particular emphasis on playground romance). I actually have a distinct tendency to start journals with one or two entries, whenever some significant life change occurs, and then leave them - 98% unfinished - on my already overflowing bookshelf.

The benefit of a blog is that I am, at least theoretically, writing for other people. The problem with this is it leads immediately to second thoughts on whether or not my life is actually interesting enough to share. Do I presume a level of unmerited importance in the world by starting a blog?

Well, I am willing to suspend all of those misgivings for the moment because I am going abroad. And frankly, when one is abroad, communication is difficult. So this blog is for you, and for me... so I don't have to retell the same stories over and over again when I'm "catching up" with people. So I can ramble when I feel like it (i.e. now) and stay silent when I feel like it - I can suffer the consequences of telling and retelling the stories from those times later.

This, now, is just practice. Hopefully I'm setting myself up for more than a 98% complete blog, though at least I'm not wasting paper or a lovely bound notebook with a cheap brass lock. The facts: I absolutely thought that I was supposed to leave for Oxford, via a 5 day stop in New Jersey/New York to visit relatives, tonight. It turns out that I am mistaken, and I am instead leaving tomorrow. Yay! one more day of packing. Yay! one more day to hopefully finish reading the novel that I checked out from the local library (Howard's End, if anyone was interested).

Life these past two week as been a confusing paradox of boring and busy. I could of done much more, but I didn't; and in any case I moved my mother into a new house - a very tangible mark of progress. Moving is also accompanied but the pleasant and occasionally unsettling events of discovering long lost artifacts of past lives (first grade, fourth grade, etc.). One of my favorite discoveries was a life-sized model of the vegetable-sucking bunny, Bunnicula, from the popular childrens book. It must have been from a book report - but look! Isn't he handome/terrifying?


I tried to read the Chronicles of Narnia in preparation for my tutorial on C.S. Lewis but failed in favor of my cravings for some kind of Victorian novel. I failed those cravings by checking out an early 20th century novel. I am beginning to worry about my ability to finish it before I board my red eye tomorrow night. I would read it now but first I have to finish packing and before that I have to finish writing this post and before that I had to finish all other manners of procrastination. (My favorite among them, reenacting the facial - facial? - expressions of great white sharks with a label reading as such on my forehead. Nobody quite understands you like sisters, eh?)

Heidi, as great white shark; Dana, as giant squid

Dana as giant squid - my personal favorite. I hope this is anonymous enough for her taste.

Wow, that was a sensational post. Tune in next time for my interpretation of sea cucumbers... oh, and I won't be in California then! That would be significant.