Post 10- Oxford Excursion

My excursion this past Thursday was to Oxford.

 

Before we go there, though, I should update you on a couple things that’s happened this past week.

Number 1 is: my host brother and I made a movie.. It’s called Bubbles. I thought you might like it..

 

 

Also, this past Tuesday, Feb 24^th, was Pancake Day. That’s right, you heard me correctly.. Pancake Day. On this day, everyone here eats pancakes. Pancakes here are a little different though from what we know as pancakes in America. They are thin here. (Russian people reading this, they are exactly like Blini.) Non-Russians: They are almost as thin as a crepe, but not quite, and not that light cream color like crepe, but a similar color to our pancakes. Anyway, they also do not have them with syrup, or fruit. The traditional pancake topping here is lemon juice and sugar. So that’s what I had along with everyone else here.

            If you’re wondering what the point of Pancake Day is, as I did, I will tell you. I looked this up on Wikipedia. (Oh! When I just wrote “pancake day” in the beginning of this paragraph, I put it in lower case, and Word capitalized it! Word knows about Pancake Day!!) So Wikipedia tells me Pancake Day is always the Tuesday before the first day of Lent. So it is supposed to be the last day you get to indulge yourself with Pancakes, as well as get rid of your sugar and stuff. Cool eh? I guess IHOP celebrates it in the US though, because someone told me IHOP was giving away free pancakes last Tuesday. I’ll have to remember that next year!

 

            Also, before I tell you about Oxford, I will show you two pictures I took this week. The first is down my street. I like the sky:

 

 

The second is an Ice Cream truck.. Don’t forget to watch your kids.. or as they would say here.. Mind that child!!

 

So, on to Oxford.

 

Everyone knows Oxford for the famous super prestigious Oxford University. But unlike what most think of University, as one big place, Oxford Uni is 39 colleges that are all over the city. And when you apply, I guess you apply to the specific college you want.

 

The first thing we did in Oxford was take a “tour” walk around the city. We didn’t have a tour guide for this, just Mari. Mari is our trip organizer, she put together our host families, got us here, and put together our Thursday excursions. She is not a tour guide, but I guess she decided to try that role today. So we walked around the city, following Mari, who was following her map. We didn’t really learn much from this tour other than walking around and looking around, me not really realizing when I am looking at something important or not.

 

These are my pictures from walking around.

  

 

Who likes my bright blue leg warmers?

 

That’s the Radcliffe Camera, one of the most photographed buildings in Oxford:

 

Then we had some free time for lunch. I had lunch, and bought an “Oxford University” sweatshirt.

 

After lunch, was our awesome tour. This time we did have a guide. This is Stuart:

 

If you could see the details of this nametag, you would see that he is the “head custodian.” I thought that was funny, when I read on our itinerary that we would be given a tour by a custodian, because in our English, custodian means janitor, right?.. but I guess not here. I looked up custodian in a dictionary, and it made sense because it said that it is someone who has the responsibility of looking after something. It comes from the word “custody”.

 

Anyway, this tour was of Christ Church College. Christ Church College is one of the 39 colleges within Oxford Uni. It is one of the more famous ones. There are 2 biggest things it is famous for today.. and we will get to that soon. This is the college:

 

 

Stuart started off by telling us that there is something strange about this college. There are NO classrooms. Sounds weird, right? A lot of the teaching is done 1 on 1. So the teachers (called tutors) might come to your room (I know, in the US, this would cause lawsuits left and right). If there is a lecture, it takes place outside. I thought that was really cool, except that maybe this would fit better in a place like Hawaii, where it’s warm outside? But anyway, it works for them.

 

Stuart took us to this one area with this crazy old tree. Notice anything weird about this tree?

 

 

Yes? No? How about that big vertical branch on the right side of the picture? Notice anything strange? The branch grew into another part of the tree. How weird is that!!?? I noticed it right away because it looks crazy, and Stuart also told us that this is very rare.

 

Here’s a pic of the tree I took that I really like:

 

 

Anyway. Ready to learn the 2 big things Christchurch is known for?

Actually there are some other things too. I’ll make you wait on the 2 big ones that I like.

Christ Church is the only college to have its own church in it. It was built in 1525, and if I understood correctly, the church itself is from the 1100’s.

 

Anyway, I know you’ve been waiting patiently. The 2 most important things, in my mind, are 1: the first 2 Harry Potter movies were filmed here. And 2 has to do with a little girl named Alice. We will get back to Alice.

 

Stuart was there when the movies were filmed. He met the crew and actors, and he watched the filming. This first picture, (blocked by people so its hard to see..) is of a scene with a lake in front of it. I don’t know what scene he was talking about it, but maybe you’ll recognize it.

 

 

I guess those archways are in the film, but over a lake, or behind a lake.

 

This next one I don’t remember either. (If you can tell, I am a fan of the books, haven’t seen the movies in a few years.) This pic shows one of the ending scenes in the first movie. Where Harry comes out of the hospital, and this is where he first sees his friends, he at the bottom, they on the balcony.

 

 

 

Now this last part I will tell you about Harry Potter is that this is NOT where the dining hall was filmed, but they loved this dining hall, and recreated a set to look like it. They wanted to film here, but the room is not big enough to fit 4 long tables, as you might notice, they only have 3 here. So this is the inspiration for the dining hall in the movie.

 

 

Cool eh?

 

Ok, so a little girl named Alice.. Alice in WONDERLAND!!

The real Alice lived in this college because her dad was the dean. Lewis Carroll, (author, for you slow ones), lived there too because he was a Math professor. I will even show you where he lived when he wrote the book.

 

This is a painting of him; it is in the dining hall. (His real name was Charles Dodgson, as you can see on the plaque; Lewis Carroll was his pen name)

 

 

And he lived in these dorms when he wrote the book.

 

 

            He lived in the dorm on the first floor, on the bottom right corner. (Corner of the building, not corner of the pic.. at the far point, before the building starts coming towards you.. does that make sense?..)

 

Anyway, I had known that Alice was a real girl, but I did not understand her importance until Stuart told us the parts of her life that affected the story. His imagination was pretty wild to write such a story, but he had a lot of inspiration from where he lived.

 

For example, this is the little doorway that he saw, and sparked the idea of the little doorway Alice has to unlock and go through.

 

 

Also, Alice really did have a cat that would get stuck in a tree all the time. The same tree. We saw that tree. The one behind the wall.  Home of the Cheshire cat.

 

 

            Another bit of information Stuart told us was something I’ve heard before. On our Bristol tour, Felicity had told us that Bristol was 11 minutes behind London time before the railways were made. When they were making the railroads, they decided that to have timetables for the trains, they need England to have one time zone. Stuart explained the same thing to us, except that Oxford was 5 minutes behind. The difference though between Oxford and all the other cities in England, is that when the proposition was made to unite all the times, Oxford would not conform and kept their time. They run 5 minutes later than London time. The big clock on campus is in the correct London time, but to keep their tradition, even today, the church bells ring at 5 minutes past the hour, dinner in the dining hall is served at 6:05, etc.

 

            Anyway, the white rabbit, in Alice in Wonderland, is Alice’s father, and do you understand now why he’s always running 5 minutes late!???

 

            It was very cool to see the origins of a story like that because it is a very different story from most. It is often associated with hallucinations and magic mushrooms. So it was very cool to see where the ideas came from, because they all came from something real, not just an insanely wild imagination.

 

            Unrelated to the book, but Stuart told us that when Alice grew up, Queen Victoria’s son attended Christ Church college. Due to his status, he hung out in the Dean’s lounge a lot, and so did Alice. They became good friends, then more. When Queen Victoria found out about it though, she ended it, because Alice did not have royal blood.

            Funny thing about Queen Victoria, though, when she read Alice in Wonderland, she LOVED it. She loved it so much, she wrote to Lewis Carroll and said that the next book he writes, she is to receive a copy as soon as it is published. She was not happy though when she got the next book, because it was an Algebra book. (Ha! Remember, I told you he was a math professor!)

 

This is Queen Victoria’s son’s name up on the wall of the college. (Fifth one down, Leopold)

 

 

Oh and random, but this is the gravesite of the guy Berkley is named after. (He is buried under the building under that pillar.)

 

And this is me asleep on the way home from Oxford.

 

 

J

Thanks for reading.

 

Post 9- Bristol Excursion

            Since our Bristol trip 2 weeks ago got canceled due to snow, it was rescheduled for this past Thursday, Feb 19.

            I woke up in the morning feeling sick. I really did not want to get out of bed, but decided there was no way I was going to miss Bristol. I got up, got ready, and took the bus into town to where we were meeting.

            We got on the coach, picked up our tour guide, Felicity (the same one that took us on our tour through Bath), and headed for Bristol. We had a 2-hour tour. First an hour coach tour, where we rode around the city in our bus, and then a walking tour.

 

Our tour of Bristol seemed to me as the most uneventful so far. I think most of what caused that was me being sick and almost falling asleep on our bus tour. I actually did fall asleep for a few minutes, and would have kept sleeping if Lauren had not woken me up.

            Felicity was great. She is so full of historical knowledge. I really wish I was in a mental state to retain the knowledge she was giving to us, but unfortunately, my sick head could not focus.

           

On the bus tour, we drove all around the city.

Bristol was a major port city

 

In the far back is the famous Clifton Suspension Bridge

 

We got closer to it and walked across.

 

This is the famous archway that Queen Elizabeth I rode into to visit Bristol through on her white horse in the 1550’s.

 

 

And me showing the dragon my angry face

 

 

            On our 4-hour free-time, a few of us went to see two cathedrals.

 

 

One of them had an art gallery from the local College and High School. The artwork was really good. I really enjoyed it and was shocked with some of it that it was done by such young talent.

            One that was really creative and comical was a poster that must have been done on Photoshop, or another program like it, because it looked like a real photograph. It was an advertisement for a cereal called “Credit Crunch”. It had the cereal box with the name Credit Crunch on it, a cereal bowl in front of it, filled with coins, and a slogan that said something along the lines of, “Have you had your Crunch today?” It’s quite the appropriate humor for today.

 

            After the cathedrals, we tried to go shopping, but we could not find the store we wanted, and lost some of our group in the process.

            I think I will make another Bristol trip in the future, next time having planned out the places I want to go.

 

            That’s all I have to say about Bristol.

            I found some videos from my professor’s blog from our Bath excursion, 3 weeks ago. I thought I should show you, so you can hear a little of what Felicity told us about Bath.

 

 

(The next one is NOT Felicity, it is the Mayor of Bath, and another lady who works at the Guildhall, (the City Hall))

 

 

 

 

Post 8- London BDAY weekend! PART 2

Now here comes the second half of last weekend.

Saturday the 14^th (Valentine’s day), Sunday the 15^th (My birthday) and a little of Monday the 16^th:

 

Sat:

Breakfast at the hotel was delicious again. Then the group left all our stuff in the lobby (we had to check out), and went to the Tower of London. Here are some pictures of the outside, before we entered:

 

  

 

Handstand in heels.. didn’t work so well

 

I am still not quite clear on what all the uses of this place were. I know one part of it was a prison, mostly for important people. “Locked up in the tower.” Elizabeth I spent time here when she was young. She also watched her mom (they would say mum here), Queen Anne, get her head chopped off there when she was six years old. (Man, they loved beheading people at that time.)

 

 

We also saw the tower where she watched from.

Some people were locked up in the tower for decades so a lot of graffiti is left there in the walls, graffiti meaning carvings in the walls.. no spray cans in the 1500’s. Some carvings were so detailed, I am sure they took years and years.

But this was also a royal palace. There is an exhibit of the royal crown jewels in here. There are crowns from past kings and queens as well as ones from today. These things don’t even have a value because they are so priceless.

I walked around the Tower with Bailee.

 

 

This is me walking up one the many spiral staircases up the towers

 

And with Mr. Guard

 

After tower of London, our official weekend tour was over. Some people went home to Bath. Me, there was no way I was going to waste being in London! Me, and the 15 other people I booked a hostel with went back to our hotel, got our stuff, and went to the hostel. After dropping off our stuff, many of us went to that Lebanese place that I wrote about last weekend, Ranoush Juice. 

They specialize in lamb and chicken, but this time, I decided to be brave and try something new. I went for “Spicy Sausage”. It tasted good, but I think it was med-rare.. which.. I don’t think is how sausages are supposed to be.. it scared me a little.. Next time I’m sticking with chicken. Way to be brave.. and get burned..

 

            After Ranoush Juice, many went shopping. Just like last weekend, I didn’t feel like it. And I finally figured out why. I wanted to shop, but I had no interest in walking around stores. What I really wanted was cheap, Berkley-style shopping: small stores, or.. no stores at all, but people outside.

            Not getting this, while everyone else got to shop how they wanted, put me in a bad mood for some reason. So when we went to the pub in Whole Foods, (that’s right, Whole Foods has a pub), I fell asleep, because I didn’t feel like talking. Then we went back to relax at the hostel for 2 hours. I was all grumpy for a while, but I decided to stretch at the hostel, and I felt way better after some splits J Now I was ready for my birthday.

 

            No one knew where we should go out, so I decided, why don’t we go to the bar by china town where Megan, Lindsey, my cousin Ales and I spent a couple hours last weekend. It is called the Crooked Surgeon. I thought it was fun because it was a bar atmosphere instead of a pub one. I wanted loud music and excitement on my Birthday Eve.

            The plan was to go there for a short while, just to start there, and find other places to go after. When we got there, we claimed a nice little corner, and turned it into a dance floor. People kept buying me drinks, so I had a lot without paying for a single one J (I mostly had cocktails, and they are crazy weak here, so don’t worry, I was barely drunk.) We all counted down until my birthday, and kept partying afterwards. It was a blast. That was my birthday night.

            We had a lot of people from our group too. There must have been like 15 of us.

 

 

After the Crooked Surgeon closed, probably about 1(?), we decided to find another place to go. We had to fight off a creeky guy who kept trying to get us to go to where he was going.. and started walking around the streets of London China Town. Angela, Megan and I got some Chinese food, (mostly because we had to pee and they wouldn’t let us use the toilet without ordering..) (Yes, they say toilet here, not bathroom or restroom) A group of 15, could not wait for us to eat, so they left. We met up 15 mins later.. and somehow, ended up at Burger King… at 2 am.  .. I guess it happens when everyone’s had some drinks. After taking a couple taxi’s to our hostel, I fell asleep like that *snap*

 

            Now Sunday. Woke up, breakfast, check out of hostel. We left our stuff in lockers at the hostel, and finally went to the place I’ve been waiting for all along: Camden Town. This a place many recommended to me before I left for England. It is Berkley-Style shopping. It was also very much like the shopping I had done in Peru, especially one area of it, which is probably why I loved it so much. It’s a bunch of tents, with people selling stuff. It is already cheap, but you can also bargain, much like Peru. I loved it. This is totally where I belong! The shopping through stores and malls, no way. This, totally my home J

 

            I forgot to take any pictures of it, but Angela took one. This picture has construction in the way, so you cant really see the shopping, but in the distance, you can see the crazy amount of people.

 

 

            After an hour or two, some people were hungry. They went to a sit down restaurant. I wasn’t hungry, nor was I don’t shopping, so Angela and I decided to see more. Until then, we were hanging out in this one area. We decided to see the shops further down the street. What we learned was that we were just skimming this place before!! There was sooo much more!! We didn’t even get to see it all. This new center we found had tons of take-away (to go) food, and there was a DJ playing music. I grabbed some delicious Chinese food, and Angela got Vietnamese. By this time the others were done eating and it was time to head back.

 

            I decided that I did NOT have my fill of this place. Half a day here is not nearly enough. Next weekend I spend in London, I am spending ALL day in Camden.

 

            Wanna know what I got?? I’ll warn you now… a lot of stuff..

            I got a “Camden, London” sweatshirt (which is way cool. It has this side zipper going up the sleeve instead of down the middle), a peacoat/jacket (black and white plaid), thermal leggings (so warm!), a super cute scarf, leggings, a little present for my gym at home, a present for my little bro-ho, and earrings. Woo! Love it!

 

            Then we got our stuff from the hostel, got on the train, and home to Bath. The plan was to go our separate ways to our houses for a bit, then go out for a drink or two for my birthday, but we didn’t get into Bath until 8, and after going home, everyone was way too tired to come back out again, which is OK, since we celebrated the night before.

            I spent the night on my computer, skyping with my parents, called the g-ma, chatted on AIM.

 

Woo, 23!

 

Lastly, I must talk about Monday a bit. In the morning, the doorbell rang, and I signed for a huge box.

 

 

What is it? What is it!?

 

 

Its flowers! From my fam! It had a cute little card in there.. written by one of my brothers, I’m sure .. don’t think my parents would write: “keep it real sista”. And I also speculate that Val wrote it because it ends with: “Eugene, Lyuda, Konstantin, and your favorite Valentin”.

 

 

            I stayed at home all day Monday doing homework, and at 630, my host family and I had dinner. What was really cute though, is that they made a big deal out of my birthday. Julie, my host-mom, remembered that I mentioned I love Chinese food, so she ordered take-away Chinese food for dinner. Her boyfriend, Chris, also came and brought his two daughters, who I hadn’t met before that. There was 7 of us eating. It was pretty fun too. Chris’ girls, and Julie’s boys get along really well. They were all laughing and having a great time. After the dinner, they pulled out a chocolate cake, lit candles, and all sang happy birthday. Then Tom (the 11-yr old), kept singing. Its kind of like the “and many more..” song, but it was completely different, something else that kids sing there after the birthday song. It ended with something along the lines of, “Don’t eat too much cake.”

 

            That’s all folks. That is my birthday weekend in a nutshell.