Thanksgiving and B-day: Double Whammy

I know I haven't posted in awhile; I've been swamped in work. Today is my birthday (21! Yay!) and so I have given myself the day off and am therefore free to blog. Here are a few of the things I have been up to this week:
-I went to mass at St. Paul's Cathedral...it is a beautiful cathedral, and they had a choir made up of men and boys; they wore choir robes with stiff lace collars-very cool
-I got carded for buying a liter of generic red bull- apparently you have to be at least 18 to buy so much red bull at a time. "It's cool, I'm 20," I said importantly, flashing my id. "I can handle my energy drinks."
-I wrote a five page paper about the symbolism behind some of the architecture of ancient Babylon, and a ten page paper about whether or not culture in humans and culture in chimpanzees is different in kind or degree (glad THAT paper is over)...
-My choir is working on Brahm's requiem, and we have our performance next week. It's pretty difficult to sight sing in German...
-On Monday, one of my boy roommates announced that he was going to shave his head, so he went into the bathroom and did it. Then he got two of my girl roommates to pierce his ears (with a needle and an ice cube!), and he put in a pair of diamond studs. The whole ear piercing affair, which took place in the kitchen, was rather grisly, and I eventually had to excuse myself from watching. Not to mention that my roommate now looks like some kind of thug (boys really are silly)...

Thanksgiving was Thursday (I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving, by the way) and it was a little strange to wake up and go to class. All I really wanted to do was sit in my PJ's and watch the Macy's Thanksgiving parade, but instead I went to my Ancient Egypt class and my Roman Britain class. In my Roman Britain class we went on another field trip, investigating the remains of the Roman wharves and the Roman forum and basilica. The sole remaining piece of the Roman basilica in London was the brick base of a column, and it was down in the basement of a posh hair salon. My class of ten traipsed down there, irritating the hair stylists and the customers, but it was worth it. All of the ancient Roman remains that we have looked at have been in basements, either the basements of art galleries, car parks, or in this case, hair salons. People just build right over them.

At one point in the class one of my classmates pulled out a brownie and was munching on it while our professor was lecturing. He looked at the brownie and said: "Oooh! I want some of that! Look at me, I'm American! It's Thanksgiving and I want some pumpkin pie!"
"Hey!" I said, smiling a little but also somewhat irritated. Was he making fun of Thanksgiving? Maybe he was just jealous because he doesn't have a holiday that promotes unashamed, extreme food consumption. In either case, I felt a pang of homesickness. I wanted to be home watching football with my brothers, and I also wanted some pumpkin pie. For real.

My study abroad program sponsored a Thanksgiving buffet downtown at a nice hotel, so my roommates and I made the trip down. The dinner was quite good, and I had turkey and potatoes and some other nice, hot food. It was kind of interesting, all these displaced American kids coming together and making our own little Thanksgiving. While it wasn't the same as being home, it was nice to be with my friends and with other Americans on the holiday.

So now it's my 21st, which doesn't quite have the same significance over here as it does back in the states (after all, the drinking age is 18), but I'm prepared to go out and celebrate it anyway. My girl roommates and I are going to go out dancing, so I'm pretty excited. In the meantime I'm going to hit up a museum or two. I hope you all have an excellent Thanksgiving break, and until next time...

A Visit From Dad

I apologize for the scarcity of posts in the past week; not only has my Internet been down, but I've been up to my eyeballs in work. Seems I had to eventually buckle down and become a student after all (sigh).

My dad came to visit me this weekend, and boy, did we have some adventures. I met him at Heathrow on Friday, and took him into central London. I showed him my flat, and then took him on a tour of UCL, making sure to stop by the main library, the body of Jeremy Bentham, the main quad, and the Institute of Archaeology. From there we went to the British Museum and wandered around there for hours (I was a very good tour guide and took him to the coolest artifacts). When night rolled around, we went out to a crowded little pub and had some Guinness (in typical Wray family fashion). We then went to Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus, because those are pretty cool to wander around at night. After that we went to another pub and had more beer. I'm not kidding. Dad eventually had to pass out around 10:00 pm from a combination of jet lag, beer, and endless hours or girl talk on the behalf of yours truly.

Saturday we woke up early, ready to hit the sites of London and also to meet up with Jeannie, dad's British nanny from when he was a kid. We went to the Tower of London first, and then met up with Jeannie, her daughter Jo, and Jo's husband Pete at Victoria Station. From there the five of us went to Covent Garden (an outdoor market), crossed the Thames, re-crossed the Thames, and went to Westminster Abbey, Parliament, and Buckingham Palace. We then went to another pub (surprise!) and had drinks and pub food for the next couple of hours (we all had beer; Jeannie sipped SoCo on the rocks). It was really nice to see Jeannie again (I hadn't seen her in years), and her and Dad reminisced on all their crazy adventures they had back in the sixties and seventies. Jo and Pete were very charming too; it was great to have finally met them.

One of the main sights my Dad wanted to see while he was over here was Stonehenge. Going out to Stonehenge was proving to be a difficult excursion to plan; the trains and buses to Salisbury, the nearest town to Stonehenge, all seemed to take too long (over three hours, while the site was only 80 miles outside London).
"Let's just rent a car," my dad said on Sunday. "I'll drive, and you can navigate."
"But they drive on the wrong side of the street," I pointed out.
"I can handle it," my dad replied (Mr. Navy Admiral), but I remained wary. My concern grew when I saw the car, which was a stick shift. The stick was on my dad's left hand side (he was sitting on the right side of the car). I just didn't like the looks of this. Not to mention driving out of London was going to be difficult.
Dad stalled a few times in busy traffic in London, but I kept my mouth wrenched shut, determined not to seem like a wuss.
Miracle of miracles, we made it to Stonehenge later that day, on behalf of Dad's superb driving (he got the hang of it) and my navigational skills. Stonehenge is truly a wonderful site; I had been there before, but I still found it amazing. The weather was raw when we got there, but at one point the sun broke through the clouds and shone on the wet stones, and I was taken aback by the sense of timelessness of the place. If you ever get an opportunity to look at it, you must go.

When we made it back into London, we stopped by the Natural History Museum for a little bit before going back to my flat and to the pub across the street. We went out with my girl roommates and Dad bought a round of drinks and pudding; they fell in love with him instantly.
"Your Dad is so cool!" they squealed to me. Hey, free drinks and dessert means alot to a college kid.

Overall, I had a busy, exhausting, but awesome weekend with my dad. We managed to see alot of stuff over here, and we managed to drink alot of alcohol. It was also nice to have someone from home actually see what I've been up to over here. I was sad to see him leave Monday morning, but I'll be home in a month (can you believe it?).

Now I have to get back to my paper- it's about the layout of the ancient city of Babylon (mmm...yummy).

Oxford, Day Two

I spent the entire day Saturday exploring the city of Oxford with Anna as my guide. First we went to the Ashmolean museum, which is the oldest museum in all of Britain, having been founded in the 1600s. The Ashmolean has a collection of art as well as antiquities, including some very impressive Egyptian artifacts. Besides the Egyptian collections, here are some of the other things I thought were cool at the Ashmolean:
-an original Stradivarius violin
-Chief Powhatan's Mantle (Pocahontas's Dad...and mantle=cloak)
-original Da Vinci sketches (Anna and I got to view in a special room, under supervision)
-The Parian Marble, which is the oldest Greek chronological table known (kind of like the oldest Greek calendar ever found; it is inscribed on marble)

After the Ashmolean we had coffee at the posh five-star Randolph hotel. I don't really drink coffee, but Anna loves it and insisted that we try it at the hotel. I'll admit it was pretty cool; we were served coffee and biscuits on silver place settings by white-jacketed waiters. Probably as elegant as two broke college kids can get. I heaped a ton of cream and sugar unto my coffee and it ended up tasting just fine.


After coffee and lunch, we explored the city in earnest, walking for miles on end. Whenever we walked past a college, we would go inside and gaze at the central courtyard, as well as the architecture. They are all lovely, and at a few of them we even went inside to look at their libraries or chapels. Some of the colleges were charging admission, but since I look like a student I could slip in unnoticed (bwahahahaha).

The city was bustling on a Saturday, crowded with tourists as well as locals. I was taken aback at the sheer size of it; it was a thriving, small city. I had expected Oxford to be a sleepy college town, but I was quickly proved otherwise.

At the end of the day, Anna and I returned to her flat, utterly exhausted. We had been walking for miles. There was talk of going out to a pub, but we had done that Friday night and it was full of round-faced 18 years olds barely past puberty. The pub scene in Oxford was not the place to meet sophisticated guys.

Saturday night Anna and I talked for hours, drank more coffee, and spent a good 45 minutes analyzing a giant Dali print tacked up to her wall (The Hallucinogenic Toreador- worth a look). Nothing like late night intellectual discussion. I went gratefully to bed that night, quite tired and overstimulated from my full day in Oxford.

Oxford, Day One

This weekend I went to visit my friend Anna in Oxford. Anna is a first year PhD student in classical archaeology at Oxford University; I had met her this summer during the epic excavation in New Jersey. I have always wanted to see Oxford, and now I had the perfect reason to go.

Anna and I had talked online about my arrival on Friday; we had it set for about two o'clock. I caught a bus from Marble Arch in central London and headed out of the city at around one on Friday. Once on the bus, I tried calling her, but something was going on with her phone; she wouldn't pick up. Oh well, I told myself as the bus trundled into Oxford, I can just find her in her dorm or something.

As the bus rolled further into town, to my right I saw some beautiful architecture: ornately carved sandstone complete with turrets, gargoyles, and cathedral spires. This must be it, I thought, and I got off the bus. The plan was to go into the University, find an administrative building, and look up Anna's dorm number. In retrospect, I was severely underestimating the sheer size of Oxford University.

It turns out the building complex I had been dropped off at was a college of Oxford University; one of the 39 colleges at Oxford. Each college is set up like an American college; each one has its own set of dorms, its own quads, its own library, chapel, and dining hall. Oxford had 39 of these colleges. The town is not a town at all; it is more of a small city, completely focused around academia. I realized my odds for finding a central administrative building, let alone Anna, were not promising. I told myself I would look for the next few hours, until the sun went down, and then if I couldn't find her, I would go back to London. Keep in mind that we were having cellphone problems.

After about an hour (and many asking of directions) I made it to Anna's college, Lincoln. Thank god I at least remembered what college she was in. Once there, they informed me that she lived in an apartment complex away from the college, and they gave me a complicated set of directions on how to get there. My situation was looking bleaker by the second.

I kept my chin up and tried to follow their directions as best as I could, and I set off, my suitcase rattling noisily behind me on the cobblestones. I wanted to stop and look at the incredible architecture, but I had to concentrate on where I was going. After walking for several minutes, I looked up and spotted someone down the road from me that looked suspiciously like Anna from behind (Anna has flaming red, curly hair). I couldn't be sure, but I decided to screech out her name anyway. If it wasn't her, I would look like a lunatic, but at this point I didn't really care; I had been wandering around for quite a while.

It was her. Once I realized this, I felt I had experienced a moment of divine intervention. What are the odds of seeing one person you're looking for in a small city (and Oxford alone has 18,000 students)? It was remarkable, and I sent up a silent thank-you to the cosmos.

Anna took me to her apartment, I dumped off my stuff, and she said she was going to take me to formal dinner at her college. At formal dinner you sit at long tables in the dining hall and are served a 3-course meal. Free food- sounded excellent to me.
"Did you bring anything nice to wear?" Anna asked. "You have to dress well for formal dinner. No jeans."
Umm, I hadn't brought anything but jeans. Oops.
"You can wear my roommate's robes, then," Anna said. "I'm sure she'll let you borrow them."
Wait a second...robes?
"We all wear black robes to formal dinner," Anna explained. "You can wear one over your clothes, and you'll fit right in."
So we pulled on black robes over our clothes (bizarre but cool), and headed off to Lincoln college for formal dinner. The dining hall was built in the 1400's, and consisted of long wooden tables with long wooden benches. Portraits of famous Lincoln scholars hung on the walls. The vaulted ceiling arched high above our heads; Anna said it was still the original ceiling built centuries ago. Everything was illuminated by candlelight. All of the students trickled in, wearing long black robes. The entire experience felt like a scene right out of Harry Potter.

The coolest part was when one black-tied server banged a wooden plate on the table, and everyone got to their feet. Three professors walked silently down the aisle and took their places at the high table at the end of the hall. A prayer (grace) was said in Latin, and after it was over everyone sat down and conversation resumed. It was a moment laden with tradition, and I thought it was fabulous.

The food served was very British: soup, pork, and for dessert, cake with hot custard poured all over it. I made sure to try some of everything (even though I don't really eat pork). When in Rome....

Overall, it was a very cool dining experience. Stay tuned, for next post I will detail my further adventures in Oxford...