Cheerio!

July 24-29: Oxford Week 1

Sorry for the lack of posting, adjusting to a routine everyday has been quite the change! This week has been incredible, to say the least. I’ve settled into my own routine, which consists of class, reading, meals, and more reading. It’s the most relaxed I’ve been in a long time, and I am enjoying every second!

A typical day for me, at least for this past week, involved me waking up around 6:30 or so to read before breakfast. Our Jane Austen class has us reading a book a week, so I usually have 2-3 hours of reading a day to complete. I’m definitely not complaining though; I had every intention of reading all the time here so this just guarantees that I will. I go to breakfast around 8:30 with Lauren (my neighbor) and eat a huge breakfast of hash browns, eggs, sautéed mushrooms, baked beans (weird.), sausage. I have found that I eat a big enough breakfast I can eat a really small lunch, which saves me a lot of money. After breakfast its back up to my room to shower and get ready for the day. Then more reading and I’m off to my ethics class at 11:30. I am absolutely loving this class, it’s a structured debate class on all sorts of biomedical issues, and for the past week we’ve been talking about procreative rights and genetic engineering, hot topics for sure.

I have a two hour break between ethics and Jane Austen, which is usually filled with more reading. On the days when I’m able to finish my reading beforehand Gwen I and go out into the town to explore or buy groceries or window shop. Its really neat to have such cool places so close to campus; it’s a great way to spend an extra hour or so.

Jane Austen is a lot of reading, but once we get to class it’s a roundtable discussion on the book, lead by our incredible professor. We are comparing different movie adaptations of the book in movie form, and eventually we will recreate our own movie scene. Our professor, who we call Karen because she is Quaker and doesn’t like having any sort of title to her name, is a very loud, outspoken person who always has something interesting, and sometimes shocking, to say. Our 90 minute class always flies by.

After class we have an hour or so to ourselves before dinner, which I usually spend skyping or reading or doing work. I really enjoy having a room so central to everything on campus; its become a staging ground for everyone to leave stuff during the day, so I always have visitors! I’m so glad that I will have my own room in the fall, it would definitely be difficult to go back to having a roommate to live with. I have adjusted very easily to being able to wake up on my own schedule and play music whenever I want!

Dinner is always phenomenal, we have a three course meal every single night. Its always served family-style, so it really feels like home. After dinner there is always something going on. One night we visited “The Eagle and Child,” the pub that C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien use to hang out at, which was so cool. I tried to touch everything that I could so that I might get a little CS Lewis dust on me! We also went running in the town one night, and got out of the tourist district into more of the residential scene. It was like we were running straight through the set of Love Actually! There is also a pub on campus, so all week people have been watching EuroCup games there. None of us have TVs in our rooms, so anything we want to watch we have watch in either the pub or the computer room…a community builder for sure!

This weekend we visited the town of Bath, recommended to us by our Jane Austen professor. We took 2 hour bus ride there, and saw the sights and had tea. There were lots of shops to visit as well. It was definitely a stereotypical English town, all the buildings looked very “proper” and well kept.

Today we went to church, which was such a refreshing experience. It had been almost 6 weeks since I’d been to any church service, and I was so hungry for worship! As we walked towards the church, we ran into a man who lead us in the right direction and was incredibly welcoming. He introduced us the student minister, who thought our American accents were so cool! The service itself was way different than what I was expecting, it was very contemporary and a lot like Midtown is (my home church). It was such a cool experience to see that people across the globe worship the same way I do. One of my favorite parts of the service was when the international minister got up and prayed for Afghanistan. It was so interesting to see a different country’s perspective on the war on terrorism. They didn’t say anything about America or their opinion of the war, they focused completely on praying for the Afghan people and the Taliban. I just can’t get over how powerful it was to see people in a totally different continent praying for the same things that we do in America. It was also neat to be in such an old cathedral, but one that was still alive and full of the Spirit. So many of the churches that I have visited on this trip seem like museums…no one seems to be reverent in them and it feels like their original purpose has been forgotten. In this church, you could see the same old architectural elements, but there were also modern additions: speakers and seating and television equipment. It was neat to think that this church has been in existence for hundreds of years, constantly changing to meet the needs of its people. It was such a living, loving, welcoming body of believers.

After lunch we headed out to lunch, and then did a little shopping. I spent the rest of the afternoon reading out on the lawn in the sunshine in the company of some ducks from the lake. It was almost too perfect to be real.