All's Well that Ends Well, Right?

Sometimes when the choice is exert effort to cook food or eat uncooked Ramen noodles... I choose the latter. But that's not what this post is about. I just thought I would share since I'm writing this during my "lunch break," and I'm eating raw Ramen noodles.

This post is actually about my adventure this weekend. I was going to write this yesterday, but then I decided to do nothing all day instead, and it was fabulous! That whole idea of Sunday being a day of rest is pretty solid. I wonder who came up with that one... (Jk, it was God.)

So, this weekend: I realized I hadn't planned a crazy adventure in a while because the end of last term was filled with lots of fun of the stay-at-home variety. I hadn't gone anywhere with bad plans and lots of potential danger since my Ireland trip. I don't know how I went that long without a trip! Maybe because it got uber cold at the end of last term. I mean, it's actually still uber cold, much colder than last term.





Slight, digression, this is the current view from my window. It's really pretty and snowy over here in Oxford.


















I mean it's only slightly magical, you know.






Ok, so it's cold and snowy and lovely over here. Now we're on the same page. Back to this weekend. I wasn't originally planning on doing anything exciting for quite some time. I have a cappella rehearsal every saturday which kinda keeps me from going away for very long, and I don't have any money which keeps me from going anywhere far. But last week, my lovely roommate, Jess, asked if we could do something on Friday. It was our first week back doing the Oxford thing and we just needed a day to celebrate being alive and being college students. We looked into going to a play but there was nothing on. We looked for a dance to go to here in Oxford, but all the dances in Oxford are on random irregular weeks which of course were not this week. We didn't want to just go to a pub, so I threw out what I saw as a great idea.

Last year when I was learning how much I love dancing, I was introduced to a lovely dance called Contra. It's more or less square dancing mixed with English dancing. Imagine whooping cowboys doing Pride and Prejudice-esque dancing. It's basically the greatest. But it's also pretty straight-up American so not super big here in England. There are, however, a handful of Contra dances here in England that I found while searching for ways to get my dance fix in while studying abroad. One of these Contra dances occurs in Cambridge every other week, and this past week happened to be a dance week! Cambridge is a little less than a 3 and half hour bus ride from Oxford, so a bit of a trip, but the bus tickets are usually under £10 so super doable for a day trip. This was the idea I presented my lovely roommate. We get up early (I didn't really think that one through. Mer.), get a bus to Cambridge, spend the day seeing the city, and then go to a Contra dance in the evening. Sounds like a great plan, right? But, you might be thinking to yourself, if this is such a great idea why haven't I done this already? Why haven't I already gone to see Cambridge and gone to one of my favorite kind of dances? Well.... there's a bit of a flaw in the plan.

See, public transportation is really fabulous, except when it's not. Specifically, when it stops running at a certain time of night. The bus between Cambridge and Oxford stops running at 7pm and the Contra dance didn't even start til 8. After I presented my great idea of going to Cambridge for this dance to Jess and got her super excited about it, I decided to let her in on that little detail. We would have to stay over night in Cambridge and catch a morning bus. For normal people, this wouldn't be a huge issue. They'd rent a hotel room or stay in a hostel for a night. But see, I'm just so profoundly against paying for a place to sleep that an overnight trip becomes a dilemma for me. Last term I bought a tent instead of paying for a hotel. But we couldn't camp out somewhere in Cambridge because of that whole it's "snowy and freezing right now" thing. So instead, my plan this time around was to show up at the dance, make friends with old ladies, and get one of them to invite us over their house for the night. Not my most foolproof plan, but our back-up plan was to stay overnight in the church where the dance was held. I even carried a blanket in my backpack just in case we had to. Jess wasn't a huge supporter of my plan of insanity at first (she's a lot smarter than I am...) but eventually I made the plan sound so exciting that she couldn't resist! We booked the bus tickets, and prepared for our trip.

Thankfully for me, Jess is brilliant and, realizing it was going to snow all day and be freezing, she looked up places for us to go in Cambridge that were inside. I had been looking at parks and things... Sometimes I forget to use my brain. So we planned our adventure and went to sleep anticipating great things.

We got to Cambridge around noon. It was freezing just like the bus had been (for some reason the air conditioning was on... even though a beautiful, older English woman in an elegant fur coat asked the driver to turn on the heat. I'm pretty sure she was the queen) and I was wearing flats that have no real sole (dumb much? For an Oxford student I sure forget to use my brain a lot :P) So needless to say, I was really cold and slightly skeptical about how the day was going to go. I was still pretty sure that my evening plans were gonna rock, but evening was long ways away.

But fear not, I didn't go to Cambridge on a freezing day with just anybody. I was with my amazing roommate Jess, and she's stellar. So the day was amazing. 

This is Jess. And a T-rex. Aren't they wonderful?

We started our adventure by using bathrooms in this super official "county help" building that definitely wasn't what we thought it was, and then heading down towards this awesome art museum that Jess had found out about. On the way, we passed this building with dinosaurs carved into the stone arches over the doorways and windows. It was so cool looking! And we discovered it was a dinosaur museum, which of course we had to stop in. I just love dinosaur museums. I think they're fabulous. I learned at this museum that Lord Alfred Tennyson, that dead poet that people tend to associate with red hair and "The Lady of Shallot," was a student at Cambridge and actually studied with a philosopher of science named William Whewell. He did quite a bit of study in the geology and biology departments. I find that super cool. But then, I guess I would.

After our dinosaur adventure, we headed out to find the art museum while eating one of the several cheese sandwiches we had prepared for the trip. Poor Jess didn't realize how intense I take my saving money on trips thing. I can happily eat cheese sandwiches and dried out carrots for days on end if it means saving money on food. Maybe I take things to the extreme a little too often...

So, the art museum was incredible. As I've previously mentioned several times, Jess is brilliant, and more than that, she's a brilliant historian. So literally I asked her "So Jess, what was up with art in the 17th century?" And she could give me an answer! She taught me about how painters, especially Dutch painters, were very focused on lighting and the source of light. It was all about being as realistic as possible. Some of the still life painters even put flies in front of flowers or a snail crawling on the table to make it look more real. It was so cool to have my own personal tour guide! At one point as we were going from room to room and Jess was teaching me about the different paintings and painters, I noticed this guy started very subtly standing closer and closer to us as Jess was explaining and then looking up close at all the paintings we finished looking at. I guess he wanted the tour, too! Have I mentioned how brilliant Jess is? It was so great!

So we had a great time at the museum. We went through all the exhibits and even browsed the gift shop for entertainment, but eventually we had seen all there was to see and it was time to be on our way. We walked around the city in the light snowfall laughing and loving life as the light in the sky slowly slipped away. It was rather picturesque. We stopped at a little cafe to get homemade ice cream because, hey, what goes better with a freezing day in Cambridge than some homemade ice cream? It was de-lish. But then as we continued our exploring around, I realized how dumb I was to wear such horrid shoes. My feet were soaked, super cold, and beginning to really hurt. Solution? I bought red sneaks.


Yah, it's true. I bought these stellar red sneaks (they look kinda old lady-ish in this pic, but they're definitely super hip in real life). If Jess hadn't been there I probably would've just sucked up the pain and continued to wear my flats, but she encouraged me to take care of myself. And these were actually super cheap and my perfect size. So, there we are.




After purchasing my shoes, we ventured off to find a pub. We ended up at the pub where James Watson and Francis Crick first announced that they had "discovered the secret of life” aka the structure of DNA. Again, I thought that was pretty cool. We had some cider, shared a bit of hot food (cheese sandwiches don't exactly warm your soul after you've been walking in the snow for hours) and had a grand ol' time. Before we knew it, it was time to prepare for the dance. We squeezed into the tiny one-person bathroom to change into our evening wear and headed off into the night towards our dance.

The dance was ineffably fabulous. The only thing cuter than old people Contra dancing is old English people Contra dancing! We made lots of cute friends and were loved by basically everyone there. We were especially popular with all the old guys :P This is Jess being awesome in one of the square dances that we did that night. This isn't actually Contra, but sometimes at Contras they do a square dance or two.

So fun, right? Yah, it was grand.

As the dance came to a close, we began recognizing our imminent dilemma. It was late, super cold, and all the people that were taking interest in us were men, not the old ladies that we hoped would take an interest in us. Or, at least take pity on us... People were beginning to leave, and we didn't have any where to go for the night. This would've been fine if we could've just slipped away into the sanctuary unnoticed and stayed the night there, but the dance hall we were in was next to the church but not connected to the church. And on top of that, a couple of the guys wouldn't leave us alone for 2 seconds so it would've been impossible to slip away unnoticed. Before we knew it, we were the last ones in the church with the guy running the dance and 2 other men. Not the situation we hoped for. Before we had time to regroup and re-strategize, one of the gents asked what our accommodation was for the evening. We sheepishly admitted to having no plans... And immediately the younger of the two men doting over us sprung into knight-in-shinning-armor mode and began making calls to find us a room to stay in. Thankfully, there was room in the youth hostel down the street. I was a little bummed at the prospect of having to pay for a room, but don't worry, my bad planning somehow always works out so much better than I think it will.

This guy who had been flirting unabashedly with both Jess and myself for the entire evening found us a room, offered us a ride to the hostel, and told us he'd pay for the room and take us out for drinks afterwards. Now in most situations, getting in a car with a guy you don't know is a really bad idea. I mean, basically always it's a bad idea. But Jess and I had a mini conference about it, and both of us felt confident that if the guy tried anything, we could take him out. He was kinda scrawny and I had my knife and Jess knows karate. So we decided to go for it. We made it to the hostel, he paid for the room, we told him we were a bit too tired for drinks, and he escaped out into the night without so much as telling us his name. We couldn't really decide if he was a slime ball trying to get something by treating us so kindly or just a nice guy who was lonely and a little flirty. After serious consideration, I'm going with the latter. Jess had more initial faith in him than I did, but I can't argue with her. She's brilliant.



Either way, we got this lovely room all to ourselves in a nice, safe hostel absolutely free of charge. I'd say that's a win for the bad planning team!

The next day, we woke up early to a lovely, snowy Cambridge outside our window.

After a good sleep in a warm bed, it was really just so nice. We headed off towards our bus stop, briefly frequenting a cafe on the way so Jess could get coffee. Oh, and the lady behind the counter called me sir... Awks.





We made it to the bus stop a bit early so decided to document our experience with some pictures of the beautiful snowy scenery. Here's Jess posing in front of Parker's Piece Park (interesting name, eh?).

Isn't she presh?

It was a beautiful time with my beautiful new roommate.

So there's the story for you, complete with poetic interludes, educational facts, and half decent pictures. Hope you were at least slightly entertained, and I hope those of you who are my Mother or mother-like to me are not too concerned about my sanity. I was safe...ish, and, I mean, all's well that ends well, right? ;)

"The End of All Our Exploring..."

So it's been a while. I didn't blog about it pre-Christmas because it was a surprise for a bunch of people, but I went home for Christmas! It was lovely, and I could write all about my crazy, amazing family (crazy is an adjective there, just in case you understand the difference of meaning based on whether it's an adjective or an adverb...) but if you're reading this blog it's probably because you ARE my crazy, amazing family or because I spent Christmas with you, so I'll skip the Christmas and New Years reruns. Let's get to the part where I'm back in Oxford, because, let's be honest, that's the only reason why most of you are currently reading this. I live in Oxford and do cool things here. Makes for good reading, right?

So, I'm back in Oxford. I've returned to the city of my dreams. The school of my life long ambition. The country of breathtaking countrysides and SHEEP (already saw a few on the way in from the airport. Why are sheep so cool?!)! I've returned to sleepless nights and endless reading. Long bike rides and incredibly helpful public transportation. I've returned to falling in love with every man who speaks with that unbelievably attractive British accent (though I'm starting to pick up on dialects now, and there are definitely some dialects that are more attractive than others). I'm back to conversing with some of the smartest people in the world and being considered worthy enough to give my opinion whilst in conversation with them. I'm back to living in a fairytale while still being tied down to real life by laundry and grocery shopping. I've done this before. I'm back to Oxford, and yet, I'm arriving where I started and knowing the place for the first time. I thought that T.S. Eliot quote was cool before, but then I returned to Oxford and experienced what it might actually mean and now I think it's even cooler.

                                 T.S. Eliot writes in The Four Quartets,
                                      “We shall not cease from exploration, 

                                               And the end of all our exploring

                                                    Will be to arrive where we started

                                                         And know the place for the first time.”

  

I've arrived where I started last term, but it feels as if I'm just knowing this place for the first time. I'm back to my city, but there is so much that is new and different, it feels like it must be a different city. I've returned, but I'm in a new house. I'm living this term in a mansion. Not like, gold ceilings, twirly staircases mansion, but like large house, lots of rooms and lots of people mansion. This 'mansion' is up a ginormous hill which I have the pleasure of biking up every day...  Ok, so it's not a pleasure, and every time I do it, I swear I'm going to die. But I don't! And I know eventually it will get easier. And eventually I won't mind doing it so much... or at least I won't curse my existence while doing it...

On top of my new residence, I also have two new tutorials. I have a new tutor which, in Oxford language, means an entirely knew learning experience. Every tutor is massively different. They all have their own styles and their own expectations. My work this term is going to look so much different than it did last time, but I'm excited for it. One of my tutorials is going to be especially new because I practically know nothing about the topic. Though for this first week I was just supposed to read dictionaries, so that ended up being awesome. Hopefully it will continue to be awesome. My tutor seems pretty cool, so I have high hopes.

One thing that's most different about this time 'round in Oxford is that I'm here with an entirely new group of people. The people that I grew to know and love as my family last term, excepting just a handful of returners, have gone back to their schools in the States. I'm here in the city that we made our home, but they're not here. It's like coming home only to find that your family's decided to take a vacation without you. Yikes, right? I live in a house with 30 people of whom I only really know 3 or 4.  My incredible, newly-found family, who's picture I see every time I open my computer desktop, are no longer here. And my heart misses them, terribly. I know saying good-bye is part of life, part of growing up and growing on, but even as I'm growing up and finding it easier and easier to accept, it's still just as hard as it ever was. My heart hurts, but I'm so blessed by the memories I have with them. Last term was Beautiful. Things need not last forever to be Beautiful.

Besides that, the news on the street is that my life is basically like that new movie Pitch Perfect (minus the puking and drugs that I heard are in the movie...). I've never actually seen the movie so maybe I shouldn't compare my life with it, but here are the similarities that I know exist: Pitch Perfect is about a collegiate a cappella group which is preparing for a really big voice competition that's a big deal for them. Well, turns out that this term, my a cappella group is also preparing for a huge deal voice competition that's coming up in March. It's kinda the coolest thing ever, and my group really wants to win. Who wouldn't?! On top of the theatrical drama of the whole situation, add into the equation that my group is the underdog of all the groups (I haven't been around long enough to understand why exactly, but I think it has something to do with the other groups winning big things a couple years ago, but they haven't done anything good since. Yet they're still the favorites, or something like that). This here is an Oxford a cappella blog that talks about all the groups in the competition, including my group, In the Pink. If you want, you can vote for us on the bottom, because, let's be real, like all good movies, my group is going to work the hardest and the underdogs are gonna win and it's gonna make for a great blog post.  (Even if we don't win, I'm really excited about this. It's going to be super fun!).

On top of winning the voice festival (hehe), my a cappella group is also going in August up to Edinburgh, Scotland to sing in The Edinburgh Fringe Festival, a HUGE amazing music and art festival that happens every year and it's a gigantic amazing opportunity. The only problem is, this happens in August and I unfortunately don't have the money for a plane ticket to come back for a month. I'm kinda super bummed and so is my group since a female beatboxer isn't the easiest to come by, but I'm still super excited for my group and I know they'll do amazing. We're currently looking for sponsors for the trip, which I've never done before and don't really know how to go about doing, but if you're reading this and you're part of a company or organization who would want to sponsor my group, let me know and I'll hook you up with the information. Even if you can't, no worries, I'll still keep you updated on my group. Sometimes things are just really cool, and this, at least to me, is one of those things.

So that's basically the update on my life here in Oxford. I mostly wrote this post to procrastinate from doing work on papers, so I should probably get back to that now. Oxford term is in full swing already so there's no time to mess around. I have 2 papers due this week, 1 due next week, 2 the next week, and so on and so forth for 8 weeks. No breaks. No mercy. Welcome back! Let the games begin....