Bike Part B

At the behest of my mother, I'm including the second half of the bicycle saga here...I don't really have time for this (two essays by the weekend, ah!), but she's the reason for the second half of the saga occurring at all, and anyway I can't concentrate because of words like "concept," "sprocket," and "monkey bike" that keep zooming through my head.

Speaking of zooming...

No, I think I'll back up and explain first that I woke up this morning to an emailed entreaty for photos of the new bike. I do my parent's bidding (no okay fine parents') and so I went out to the bike house this morning to take some pictures in a surreptitious fashion. Unfortunately, after five or so minutes of lurking around the bicycles, I realized (a) that people were going to see me insanely taking pictures of rows of bikes – possibly even their own bike, hey, who's the loony taking a picture of my bike?! – and, (b) that the clock had just struck 11, which meant that in real time it was 5 minutes to 11, which meant I actually had to mount up and zoom off to lecture or face the consequences.

And now we've reached the zooming...that's progress, eh? Well not really, because my instinct to BIKE like the WIND rapidly disintegrated into the physical reality of me pedaling along like a maniac because I couldn't figure out how to get out of 1.1 gear. Or however you label bike gears. Finally, I managed it - sort of - with a horrible grinding and crunching of chains, but I still seemed to be pedaling along like a circus monkey on a mini bike. I wisely chose to dismount.

I walked the Concept to class on screaming legs, feeling like I was in the midst of a heart attack, and faced the aforementioned consequences of arriving 15 minutes late (namely, walking into a large lecture hall, running into the doorframe, fumbling with some papers, and parading all the way down the lecture theatre stairs to the empty row directly in front of Dr. Mark Buckley and the Entire Second Year Oxford Psych Class).

After lecture, my breathing had roughly regained normality, and I had about an hour to kill before returning for a linguistics experiment. I walked to a different bike shop – not Back on Trax, psh – and explained that while, granted, I hadn’t really ridden a bike for five years, I didn’t think I was thaaat out of shape. The friendly bicycle repairman (see Monty Python) found that the breaks were basically on a permanent state of "on," and fixed that for free, but then recommended that I not change my gears at all because my chain might fall off. This is where a sprocket might come in. They could fix it for twenty pounds…tomorrow. Fantastic – the Concept is stuck in monkey bike mode.

I did a small but heavy amount of grocery shopping (Positive: the basket still works. Also, the wheels now roll.), getting three types of juice (mmm!) and some milk and some olive oil. Walking back to the Psychology building, I managed not to mow down any pedestrians with my now highly mobile and unstable Concept while talking on the phone to the BoT repair guy, who fantastically agreed to come by and have a look…gratis! Looks like I made a friend. (Sidenote…several days ago a man in a van marked “asbestos” waved enthusiastically at me while I was waiting at a crosswalk for the light to change. ???)

Leaving my groceries outside, wedged in their basket, I trusted both the elements and the population of Oxford to be kind to my purchases while I linguisticked away inside. My trusting nature did not, surprisingly, lead me astray: the outdoors remained refrigerator-like, and no one stole my olive oil, although my digestive biscuits sort of seemed like they had been peered at. I girded my loins and cycled back to campus slowly and frantically. I was not hit by a bus, and I did not fall into a pothole. It's all positive.

The BoT repairman was waiting for me as I rolled into LMH, and in addition to fixing the breaks and the gears – they must have gotten a bit squashed in transit, we think – he also adjusted the seat position, tightened up my bell, and gave me a little bit of electrical tape for a tiny rip in the cover of a break wire. Yayyy! And there you have it.

Fin.

My Kingdom for a Bike

In the vending machines, there is a flavor of chips (okay, a flavour of crisps) called “roast ox.” Hmmm…but enough about that; I won’t need to visit the strange and overpriced vending machines any more, because I have bought a bike!

As a student at LMH, a bike really comes in handy, even more than for your average student. Oxford is completely walkable, but we’re located all the way to the north of the town, past Norham Gardens and everything. There tend to be those days where you’ve got five minutes to make it to a meeting with a tutor in a building that’s a mile away, and two wheels are a lot faster than none, most of the time.

I guess the exception to that rule would be my bicycle in, shall we say, its natural state. I acquired the Europa Concept at the porter’s lodge cycle auction (which, by the way, is another point of confusion: how do you react if someone starts a story, “so I was on my cycle today when…” because I react with confusion). The auction started at noon on a cold but sunny Friday, with a rabble of students standing around as the porters, looking both florid and rotund, wheeled a collection of twenty or thirty bikes around from the shed. Or the field. Or the duck pond. And I suppose I should say hauled rather than wheeled, because a lot of the bikes didn’t exactly have wheels, or if they did, the tires were flat, or the frames were bent, or maybe the seat was missing, or the chain was rusted, or there were no pedals. One particularly exciting BMX-style bicycle had dead ivy all through its spokes.

Before the head porter started heckling the small crowd, trying to convince us that he was giving all of these things away, and what about his family, and so on, we all had a good look around, and were understandably slow to snap up these excitingly dangerous-looking machines. However, after one student jokingly opened with an offer of two hundred quid, was not beat out by any higher bids, and suddenly became the owner of a bike without handles (although fortunately with a reduction of 199 pounds), we got down to business. After that point, the bidding started at a pound. My fuchsia Concept went for 3 pounds, although I could have had it for less if a suspicious old man hadn’t popped out of the woodwork and driven up the price by a staggering 150%. What kind of man wants a purpley-pink ladies’ bike? Apparently the sort that goes around to college cycle auctions and tries to steal from poor hardworking students. I think he left with four or five fixer-uppers. Horrible.

The next challenge was to make my Concept into something rather more concretely rideable, which meant calling up Back on Trax, your friendly mobile bicycle repair service. Trying to cut corners and pay half of what a new bike would cost sort of backfired on me here, but I did manage to come in significantly under the figure most people pay for bike, lock, lights, etc (130 quid, eep!) and my bicycle is now fitted with every luxury (except a kickstand and a water bottle holder). It’s also registered to the school (so the porters won’t come around in a week and throw it back in the duck pond to get ready for next year’s auction).

Still, even though I’m not completely in the black, I’d say I was pretty lucky: the demand for pink girls’ bikes was fairly low, and three pounds is not a bad deal for a bike frame – with basket and bell – that I’ll be able to use to go anywhere I want in Oxford. Dave, one of the other Americans, bought his for ten pounds and then had it declared “unfixable” (I told him to get a second opinion). And the repair costs I’m just going to mentally equate with gas prices were I still in the States, especially with the exchange rates getting better and better…plummet, economies of the world, plummet! No, stop.

Well, I’m now off to get some groceries, or maybe buy some shoes online with the help of Owen and his British credit card. For some reason my American one won’t work online. Yes, I think to shoes…biking can’t get you everywhere, after all.

What Do You Mean, “School”?

It seems like I’m forgetting something. There’s been a lot of prattling on about Oxford as a town and a social scene, but perhaps you’ve picked up on a glaringly large hole in my descriptions. Whatever happened to the University? In my defense, I don’t think I can be blamed entirely for neglecting to detail academia thus far: I’ve joined the Food and Cooking Club, the Oxford Inter-Collegiate Christian Union, and the Women’s Campaign; I’m still considering the Fencing Club, Dancesport, Amnesty International, the Oxford Union, and Oxide Radio; I’m shortly going to be a subject in several Psychology Research groups (Brains! Electrodes! MRIs!). You’ll be pleased to note that I’ve asked to be taken off the Bacchus Wine Tasting Society and the Oxford Coxen mailing lists. The latter especially was a wrench, but I decided that I’d rather row than shout at people to row, and I’d rather sleep than do either. But this is still an educational experience, right? So what happened to all the learning? Classes? Labs? Seminars? What exactly am I doing here?

Briefly, I’ll describe an Oxford education. School here is not like it is in the States, or anywhere else for that matter. I’ll just reassure everyone that Oxford is not simply a set of old crumbly buildings with a reputation. There are big, scary names and bigger, scarier ideas to shore up both the buildings and the reputation. I haven’t yet run into Richard Dawkins, but I do know someone who spotted Kevin Spacey…as for ideas, there are at least three libraries full of them that I access whenever I want: the LMH college library (it’s literally next door to my room), the Radcliffe Science Library (just down the road), and the Bodleian Library (which apparently receives a copy of every published book in Great Britain).

So…University of Oxford. For one thing, it’s not called school (that’s for little kids), and it’s not called college (that’s a building you live in, or a community you hang around with). What one does at university is this: readings, lectures, and tutorials. First, readings: after meeting with a college tutor the first week of term to discuss the things you’d like to study, you are given reading lists. These lists are rows and rows of citations several pages long that are updated weekly and are designed to destroy the unwitting student who tries to cover them all. Instead, students read the starred and double-starred material, and then choose things that interest them out of the rest of the list. At Oxford, I don’t think there’s a good database that students can use to search for articles; apparently anything you might want to read will be on the lists that older and wiser people have prepared for you, and you shouldn’t have time to do your own research anyway. Lectures, the next element of an Oxford education, are optional…sort of. No attendance is taken, but if you don’t go, you miss out on all sorts of useful insights and notes that will tie everything together for the last bit of the university system: tutorials. Tutorials are the most unusual thing about Oxford – they’re only to be had at Oxford, in fact (well okay, and Cambridge). Traditionally, a student prepares an essay for a tutor based on reading and lectures, goes to the tutor’s rooms at least once a week, reads his work aloud to an old man in a leather wingback, and then stands back and takes it while said old man drinks port and verbally shreds the essay. Nowadays, it’s a little bit different – students and tutors can be women, as well as men. No, sorry…I guess I should disabuse you of the misconception that this is ye-olde-universitie. The psychology lecture theater here is the same as the one I sat in all last year, except that it’s a theatre, and I have yet to be offered port by a professor – all port apparently comes from the Christian Union, and the professors only dole out champagne or espresso.

As a visiting student, I’m taking one primary tutorial (this term: Brain, Learning, and Memory) and one secondary tutorial (Developmental Psychology). I met my primary subject tutor for our first session not in an oak-paneled room, but in a closet-sized office with a lot of metal filing cabinets and an incongruous stained glass window. She didn’t offer me wine or tea or even apple juice (as my college tutor had), but we did spend the first half hour discussing the plan for the next seven weeks in a friendly way…it involves a lot of reading and a short video series yayyy…. She seemed excited to learn I’m interested in neurobiology in addition to cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics, and she tried to introduce me to a graduate student in her lab who is also from Pennsylvania. How can I be that person? We took a fieldtrip down to the photocopier in the basement, travelling through the narrow hallways of the Sherrington anatomy building through which interns carried cadavers in the slightly more nefarious days of anatomy studies. Who knows. Finally, we got around to discussing my essay. There were lots of check marks and good point!s in the margins, and her only real criticism was that it was a long read. It was a longer write, I thought…it turned out that overlong was the theme of the day, and we had to cut the meeting short so that I could grab a falafel wrap before lunch turned into dinner.

Well, I should probably stop writing here and start on my next tutorial topic: perception and associative memory!

While Waiting for My Sheets to Dry

I did some laundry today. In general, I advise all of you college-goers and dormitory-livers to avoid laundry rooms on Sunday evenings: there’s always a line and your clothes get piled up on the tops of the machines or thrown on the floor and it’s uncivilized and complete mayhem. However, I’m trying something new, which primarily involves not doing any work on Sunday, which means Sundays are slow and involve a lot of walking and ruminating and walking out to look at the ruminants in the back pasture. And apparently, laundry. I’ll let you know how the whole Sunday thing is going later, because right now I want to write down my thoughts on currency. Quantum leaps, right?

I’m not talking about electrical currency, although that’s different in the UK, too – I think I may have burned out my hair dryer even though I had it on the right voltage setting…why is the current so strong here, anyway? – no, I’ve got my mind on more monetary matters. Before you shy away from what looks like the beginning of a horrible economics tirade, let’s get back to the laundry room.

I really like doing the wash, actually. It’s not strenuous work for me (or for anyone – thanks, washing machines), so I don’t feel like I’m cheating if I spend Sundays cleaning my clothes. It appeals to my obsessive-compulsive and tactile natures. There’s the whole sorting of colors and fabrics bit, and the smell of cleanliness, and warm fuzzy cloth, and the sloshing and rumbling of washers and dryers. Something I don’t get to experience during the routine back home, either in Richmond or in Pittsburgh, is paying for getting my laundry done. Probably this is another thing that you can’t imagine me actually wanting to do. However, as I was sitting on the windowsill and waiting for a washer to free up, I got a chance to pay attention to British money, and I can honestly say that it quite draws me in. Compared to American currency, the pound just has so much panache. I think the same thing can be said for the Euro – bright bills and clinking coins are much more interesting on this side of the Atlantic – but I believe the GBP did come first, chronologically. Also, Euros are harder for me to wrap my head around because every time I have to handle them, I’m in the middle of a market or a crowded shop and someone is shouting at me in a language I can’t understand because I’m having a panic attack about the possibility of not getting back the right change. Pounds are happier.

First of all, in addition to being color-coded, the paper money is sized differently, I think? I spent my last five quid earlier, so I can’t be sure, but that sounds about right. How much sense does that make? I mean, nothing says your bills all have to be green and uniformly rectangular. But let’s not dwell on bills because coins are what I have to feed into the slots if I want to wash my sheets or my favorite jeans. Also, coins are round objects, and I like round objects. So just think about this: there’s a small copper one penny coin and a large copper two pence coin; there’s a small silver five pence coin and a large silver ten pence coin; there’s a small heptagonal twenty pence coin and a large heptagonal fifty pence coin; there’s a small gold one pound coin and a large silver and gold two pound coin. Incredible! It makes so much sense (cents…hahaha) for there to be no tiny dimes and giant nickels and strange incremental gaps.

I hope I don’t sound to money-mad by now, because I’d like to add some final miscellaneous observations about British currency. First, the GPB has apparently been drinking the koolaid and has updated their money by including cultural details on the backs of some of the coins. But they’re interesting heraldic designs, like crowns and dragons and lions and…fronds…and Celtic knots and so on. Secondly, I enjoy the feel of a one-pound coin in my hand – it’s surprisingly heavy for its size – and the heptagonal twenty pence is fun to roll around on its edge. Lastly, the sound of the coins as they hit against each other in a change purse or pocket seems less flat than with American coins. I don’t know why.

Well…I’ve got to get back downstairs to make sure no one unloads my clean clothes onto the linty floor. While I wait, I think I’ll practice flipping a quid into the air and catching it in my palm like a real American gangster (which I am) to the regular thumps of the slightly unbalanced dryers.

The English Eccentric: Alive and Well and Living in Oxford

Something I’ve noticed recently is that everyone I meet seems to be really satisfied with who they are. Not in a stagnant way, I mean, but they all seem very comfortable in their own (often eccentric) skins. I’m not implying that this is a miraculous feature of the UK, that everyone here is jolly and merry and brilliant (as it were)…maybe it’s just an Oxford thing, or a first-week-making-friends thing, or maybe I’m just searching too hard for something to write about. But everyone, from the painfully shy geologist student to the self-assured neurology tutor, from the sports-mad Turk to the spiritual Scot, everyone seems happy to be whoever they are. I really like them for that.

As I mentioned though, this leads to a lot of eccentrics. Today I was walking through the park on the way to an early-morning psychology lecture, blinking sleepily at the frosty playing fields in the white wintery light, when I glanced behind me and saw a falconer. And a falcon. Where can I get me a falcon?

When I came back through the same area of park, there was a guy juggling in the same spot. Juggling alone.

At the Fresher’s Fair, eccentricity abounded. You’ve already seen some of the groups who sent me emails, but I haven’t mentioned the Celtic warriors grouped to one side, wearing blue paint, fur, and not much else, and bashing each other with…cudgels? Could that have accurately been described as a cudgel? Or a mace, perhaps. There was the Doctor Who fan club (oh I very nearly joined that one, yes). Or any number of other groups of people that were totally unashamed to stand there advertizing their oddness.

It makes me feel (ugh I know, I need to get out of this introspective rut)…I feel very fluid and malleable, and never know how to introduce myself in groups. Emily, reading psychology (But I’m a bio major in the States – and then do I explain what a major is or do I elaborate on where in the US I go to school, or where I’m from? Try the latter…), from Pennsylvania. What is the first thing that you think of when someone says Pennsylvania? Maybe you summon to mind the city of brotherly love, the Liberty Bell, and lots of old men dressed up in tights like Ben Franklin. Maybe you envision strapping blue-collar men fueling fiery furnaces, playing football, and shoveling down pierogies. Or maybe, you’re British and you immediately think of…vampires. Or the Amish.

Of course, that’s not always the case, and I hate to insult some geography student or politics scholar by explaining where Pittsburgh is. But on the other hand, I need to make it clear that my eccentric nature doesn’t involve driving buggies hell-for-leather and biting people on the neck.

Attack of the Giant Stereotypes

Why is it that I always get my best ideas right as I’m drifting off to sleep? Or at least, I think they’re my best ideas. I guess that doesn’t make them particularly good, just better compared to the others. Maybe it’s just that I’m in a particularly welcoming state of mind when the lights go out (try to get past that sentence right there without any comments)…these cold pills probably give me illusions of grandeur. Delusions of grandeur.

Anyway, it’s not fair that I get Freshers’ Flu…I’m not even a Fresher! I swear!

So…everyone’s behaving as they ought to, stereotypically (see title). I was reading a book and biting on a pen yesterday in the park, sitting peacefully against a tree, when an Asian girl came up to me and asked if she could take my picture. The shady German neighbor next door is being shady and German, knocking on my door by day and offering me coffee, drinking vodka and playing European techno by night. I went out this evening (ignoring – denying – signs of sickness) with a group of third year Americans, and we ended up at a good ol’ U S of A restaurant that was surrounded by pubs and pan-Asian bistros, eating ribs and fried chicken. I checked the student “survival guide” when we got back…two out of five stars. Classic. Of course, the Brits are still biking around, saying “bloody” and “cheers” a lot…I met a fantastic Welshman and a Scotsman, but I don’t know enough about the Welsh and didn’t talk long enough to the Scot to determine how they were conforming.

This afternoon, I headed out to the Thames – also known as the Isis? I don’t get it – to try out Oxford rowing. (What flu?) The weather was perfect…blue skies and a slight breeze. It’s a good half-hour’s walk down to the river, though, so I’ll definitely have to invest in a bike if I want to pick up this jolly old tradition. Apparently I have good form, but I think my rhythm needs work. I don’t know any of the lingo, and our novice boat nearly crashed into another boat, causing my oar blade to get jammed between the two vessels, which caused the other end to whack me under the ribs and make a mighty attempt to launch me into the water. I made it, though. Dangerous stuff, messing about in boats…or hey I could be a cox? Ramble ramble…the Nyquil sets in…

No one else seems to be sick, and I think I know why. When I was a little girl living in England, my parents’ good friends would sometimes have us over for tea. On one occasion, I believe just after the family’s first child was born, my parents commented on how quiet the baby was being. “Oh, that’s because he’s out in the garden!” was the response. “What, on his own? Is that safe?” enquired Mom, somewhat appalled. “Oh yes, quite safe, he’s asleep, napping in his pen.” Or something like that. Which explains a lot, I think. Mom should have taken up the practice of airing out her children, because then maybe the fire alarms that keep going off in the middle of the night wouldn’t disturb my immune system so much. Wet hair and freezing toes hasn’t seemed to faze any of the Brits.

Well, before I fall into bed, I think I’ll give you a few hints of what’s to come…here are some of the subject lines in my Oxford inbox:

[FOODCLUB] Welcome to AFTERNOON TEA!
~~Fresher Rowing~~~
BEGINNER’S FENCING *Free Taster Session*
Bop Tonight!!!!
Oxford Union Michaelmas 2008
Pistol Club Induction
And
Oxford Blind Tasting Society!

As you might be able to determine, I have recently put my name on rather a lot of email lists. I think once tutorials and lectures actually start (aka get assigned), my panicky nerd persona will show up and I’ll back out of most, if not all, of these clubs I’ve signed up for. Until then, I’ll continue to make up for all the standard behavior everyone’s displaying by acting completely extroverted and out of character. Or, kind of. …’Night!

Re-Fresh

“I envy you going to Oxford. It is the most flower-like time of one's life. One sees the shadow of things in silver mirrors.” -Oscar Wilde

Yes, it’s true…in the tradition of all bad high school essays, I’ve started an entry off with a quote. At this point I’m sure you’re wondering why I would do such an awful thing so early in the year. Have I just gotten lazy, or have I completely lost all shreds of writing ability amassed over the summer? Maybe I can only perform in English when there’s no competition, say, when everyone’s speaking French. Maybe, ever since my author paper of 10th grade, I have developed a blind spot the exact size of one Irish/Victorian/homosexual author/poet/playwright/aesthete. To which I would reply: yes, probably…but if Oxford is going to lump me in with all the freshmen, I might as well act like one.

While I never anticipated (or desired) going through orientation again, it’s not unfitting. For all intents and purposes, I am a freshman, or Fresher, again: I walk around with a heavily creased and marked map; I join every group, club, and event email list that comes my way; my cheeks hurt at the end of the night from smiling and my feet are sore from standing around at mixers and socials in high heels (the heels are necessary…the noise level requires that I be on a similar altitude to my British cohorts). And I think I’m handling it more gracefully than I did the first time around – or maybe it’s just Oxford. Anyway, we haven’t played any icebreaker games yet.

It’s probably a good thing I’ve got some experience at being a Fresher, because not only do I have the normal gamut of freshman newcomer anxieties, but I’ve also got a host of issues stemming from the fact that (no matter how familiar I think I am with British culture) I’m very definitely a foreigner. When I meet with the principal and my tutor for a one-on-one interview, it’s not just a matter of introducing myself to the people in charge…these people are the heads of a schooling system I know very little about. And when I stroll into town to tour the library or hunt down hallways for the dining hall, I not only have to remain un-lost, but I also have to keep in mind that this is England, where we drive and bike and walk on the opposite side of the road.

But what’s it all like? That’s the real question, I know. All of us newcomers are trying to figure that out. There are a lot of high expectations and preconceived notions, but Oxford has to be more than scholars in academic dress, bicycles, and punts…right? (Although there’s no denying those elements exist – today I saw a man walking briskly down the street while engrossed in an old, leathery book). I wish I could say more about the academics here, but it’s going to have to wait. The tutorial system is still a bit of a mystery to me, and I don’t even know which classes I’ll be taking yet.

I can give you an idea about the people, though. Almost everyone I’ve encountered has been friendly and helpful almost to the point of irritation – although they leave you alone when you’re in your room. I’ve left my door open for several hours and no one has stopped by. The students – the Freshers, at least – are both more similar and more diverse than I would have predicted. The students aren't entirely rich snobs, for instance. They come from all over, from the UK and the USA, from Korea and Turkey, from Sweden and South Africa. A lot of them have funny names: Jem, Rory, and Tobias for the guys, and Verity, Nora, Dascha, and Genevieve for the girls.

(I'm remembering names by, every time I come back to my room, taking out a large sheet of paper and writing down a list of everyone I've met. It appears to be working, but it also looks like I'm a stalker with a hit list.)

They dress differently, too, or at least men do: lots of slim pants, skinny ties, and cardigans, and at the fancy dress ball I saw a tartan kilt and a purple velvet waistcoat/gold cravat talking to each other. They’re all intelligent, driven, and intellectual, as expected: also at the fancy dress ball, I had a civilized argument (which I won) with two economists about economics in the States. Granted, they were both less than sober – one of them called himself my “bitch” – but you don’t get many political debates over alcohol at U of R. Or any. So that was cool.

I won’t deny it, despite having to relive the freshman experience, I’m pretty thrilled to be here. And even discounting all the rain we’ve been having, Oscar just can’t be wrong – I don’t see how a person could avoid blooming in such an environment. I’ll let you know when I see shadows in silver mirrors.

Book Two, Chapter One: Supposed Firsts

Hi. It’s been a while.

I’m going to Oxford.

Although I’ve been to – and lived in – England before, it has been a while, and so I thought I’d start this not-quite-first entry with some other pseudo-firsts.

[Incidentally, and skip this if you think I’m repeating what I said in Aix…I’d just like to point out that just as I don’t live in DC, or Harrisburg, or Richmond (well okay, I do occasionally live in Richmond…but it’s a lucky guess) I’m not in London – I’ll be attending school at Lady Margaret Hall, one of the colleges at the University of Oxford, in the city of Oxford, in Oxfordshire. It’s about an hour and a half to London by bus.]

When I first glimpsed the “dreaming spires” of Oxford, I was four or five years old…but I’m not sure that I remember that at all. This time around, Dad and I made our way to Oxford by bus from Heathrow airport. I suppose it looks much the same as it did ten years ago. Or a hundred years ago.

My college for the year, Lady Margaret Hall or LMH, was the first college at Oxford to accept women, and for this reason it’s located slightly to the north of town. It was also the first women’s college to accept men…I’m not living in a convent! Yes…following the river, one walks past the new science buildings and through the playing fields (watch out for footballers and rugby teams) and through a small park to get to the brick-walled school buildings. I spoke with the porter and arranged to move in on Monday or Tuesday. I also spoke with my first LMH student…he was nice, I think, but the only thing I really remember is that he was wearing a yellow zip-up cardigan and had slightly shaggy hair.

Anyway, the first conversation I had with a British person (or is it English? I haven’t really gotten this distinction down yet. I remember my father calling an old family friend a Brit, and his reply: no, Andy, I’m an Englishman) wasn’t actually in the UK. It was in the line – the queue – to get on the plane in New York, and it was about queuing. As I’ve heard from more than one source, the English are very concerned about forming and following orderly lines. I’ll have to add more to this later, once I’ve experienced it firsthand.

Another English standard I re-experienced for the first time since traversing the Atlantic is, of course, tea. I think I’m also going to have to elaborate on drinking rituals later, but let it be known that Andy Grant was apparently telling the truth (I know) when he said that the milk is poured first. I couldn’t personally tell if it made a difference, but then I was having my tea with a jacket potato, not a scone, so what do I know?

So far things here have been good. The town is beautiful and bustling, the people are friendly (as long as I get over my paranoia), Dad has been a hero, lifting huge heavy bags and going to six different electronics stores on his own to get me the perfect set of speakers (if you don’t understand how important music is to me, you are not my friend), and I’m happy, if anxious. The weather is rainy. My first English weather…not a downpour, more a gravity-driven mist. I actually find it invigorating, enjoyable. I guess it’s a sign that I could belong here?