Wait, I actually have to write papers?

Sorry to say that there isn't much interesting going on with me this week. Classes are in full swing and, as such, I've been rather busy. Last night for example, I had about 150 pages of reading, plus starting my paper that's due Friday at midnight. Fortunately, I only have one class early tomorrow morning and so will be able to finish any last minute adjustments in the afternoon. It's actually quite a lot of fun, perverse as that is to say. And I'm actually better off than some, since the workload for my common law class is considerably lighter than most of the English seminars people are taking.

In other news, the food has improved (either that or I've just gotten used to it) and we're beginning to meet some Keble students as they trickle back from summer vacation. I'll probably stay in the house this weekend since I want to get some breathing room on my assignments, plus I've some errands that need to be done. But as for right now, I need to get back to that paper.

Weekend Trip to London

*****For pictures, click here*****

So yesterday I went on the first of what may be many day trips to London. It's really not very far from Oxford (about 1.5 hours by bus) and is a place I could go every weekend and still not see more than a tiny fraction of what the city has to offer. But for the first time, this was a pretty successful trip. The main events were our visit to the British Museum and seeing Spamalot in the West End, but most of the day was (very pleasantly) spent walking around the city.

Most of the people in the house were planning on taking a trip somewhere this weekend. In addition to the people day tripping to London there was also an overnight group that left on Friday plus smaller groups going to Bath (mostly to attend the Jane Austin festival going on this weekend) and Shakespeare's birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon. Our group of four left the house a little after 10am and walked to the downtown bus station to procure transportation. A round trip ticket only costs students 13 pounds, provided you return the same day or the next. The bus ride was uneventful except for a detour to avoid a large demonstration in London. We never really figured out what it was for (something about protesting the culture of violence) but we saw traces of it all over town, including several people standing around advertising "free hugs". We arrived in London's Victoria Coach Station after 1 due to bad traffic. Having missed breakfast I was starving, but was blessed to enjoy a Kebab that was (and I saw this unhesitatingly) the most delicious thing I have ever eaten. Every time I'm in the city from now on, I am going back to this store. For the record it's the Kebab and Fried chicken place about half a block east of the station on St. George's drive. Go there. No seriously, go there.

The plan was to walk to Leicester Square via Buckingham Palace and Trafalger Square, buy the cheapest tickets to a show we could find, then continue on to the British Museum, look at old stuff, return to the theatre district, and finally walk back to the bus station after the play. And a good plan it was. I don't know why everybody keeps telling me that I should expect the weather to be unpleasant here, because yesterday was another sunny, warm day. Buckingham Palace was, as usual, crawling with sightseers like us, the vast majority of which seemed to be from the Continent. I think I heard more French than English. Jostling for a position at the fence to watch the guards stand really still is only entertaining for so long, so we proceeded down the Mall along St. James' Park toward Trafalger Square. Because of the sunlight the park was full of people enjoying the weather, presumably in an endeavour to get their annual supply of Vitamin D before the 9 months of cold and rain starts. The police were setting up barricades in advance of the march, which seemed planned to end in front of the Palace. We ducked under the Admiralty Arch to enter the crowds at Trafalgar Square.

The square is an impressive sight, with the National Gallery sitting on a hill behind it and, more notably, Nelson's Column rising 169 feet above the street. The column is a monument to Lord Nelson, the admiral who commanded the British fleet at the Battle of Trafalger, where he was also killed. I always think this sort of monument is amusing in a vaguely Freudian sense. What better way to memorialize a hero of the Empire than putting his likeness atop a giant phallus in the capital city? That being said, it is a very big column and he probably deserves it. I also like the giant lions guarding the base. Unlike the last time I visited the city, there were almost no pigeons around this time, depriving us of the inestimable pleasure of chasing flocks of small birds around a large, open space. Walking past the National Gallery, we continued on to Leiscester Square.

Leiscester comprises the heart of London's famous West End, the British answer to New York's Broadway. We had the choice of several dozen shows, some of which had been running since the last time I was in London in 2001. We decided on Spamalot, a musical adaptation of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a film which I can confidently claim to know every line of. I've heard it was funny, and it only cost 15 pounds, in contrast to the stage version of Billy Elliot, which was ambitiously priced at 60 pounds. Having secured entertainment for the evening, we continued to the British Museum.

Despite some minor navigational missteps, we arrived at the museum about 4pm. Let me say that I absolutely love the British Museum. It has an unbeatable, varied, and vast collect, plus it's absolutely free. This is what a museum should be. The inside was packed, not with just tourists but with people who at least seemed to be from the neighborhood. One of the things that I like about the museum is how you can wander around a corner and come face to face with an artifact that you've heard of, like the Rosetta Stone or the Elgin Marbles (this is especially impressive if, like me, the number of named archaeological objects you've heard of can be counted on one hand).

It is a little odd that these priceless artifacts from around the world ended up in London. I get the feeling that most of the collection was formed by Victorian gentlemen wandering the world, finding something cool, and saying "This is pretty sweet. Let's put it in a box and send it back to England!". It clearly never even crossed their minds that the statuary from the Parthenon should stay, oh say...on the Parthenon! As a helpful pamphlet explained, countries the world over are trying to get their stuff back from the museum in this more enlightened time, in response to which the museum is essentially flicking the bird and saying "No way". In a way, I think it's better that everything stays in the Museum. This way, it's all in the same place, as well as properly cared for. Finders keepers, I suppose.

We had dinner at what advertised itself as a pancake house, although it looked suspiciously upscale for an IHOP. We picked it because everyone in our group expressed a hearty desire to eat some pancakes, though curiously when we ordered nobody got any. Perhaps it's for the best; no matter how good they may have been Wafflehouse will always occupy a place in my heart as "Breakfast Food Distributor of Choice". Spamalot was just as funny as I'd hoped it would be, a bit of a surprise considering that I'd seen the movie umpteen million times. There was a fair amount of new jokes, plus the musical numbers complete with tap dancing. The thirty minute walk back to the bus station went fairly smoothly, but I will say that a few more streetlights along the Mall would not go amiss. It looked a little dodgy, even though it was probably the safest place in the city considering it was about 200 yards from the Queen's front door. Besides, several thousand people had just spent the day marching to the same spot in support of peace. Had we been the victims of knife-crime, the irony would have been astounding. (I am, of course, exaggerating. We were never in any kind of danger and didn't really feel unsafe. Just antsy in a deserted, dark part of an unfamiliar city) Returning to the bus station unpunctured, we caught the 11:30 bus back to Oxford.

It was an uneventful trip home, despite an attempted drive-by egging as we were walking back to the house. Apparently it's a bit of a local pastime to troll the streets at night in your Peugeot, lobbing unfertilized chicken fetuses at hapless pedestrians. This is especially weird since eggs here cost almost a pound per egg, making this an expensive hobby. Several of the people in the house got hit last week, but fortunately we were able to dodge the yolky ordinance. By dodge, I mean look perplexedly at the white objects splattering the sidewalk at our feet while thinking "Now what the....Oh, eggs! Crap!". I can only hope that the sirens we heard later that night was the local constabulary on its way to beat our assailants repeatedly with nightsticks. In addition to being pleased to avoid the eggs, I was also pumped about UGA football's victory over Arizona State, though we were unable to actually watch the game. Go Dawgs indeed.

Shoot All The Babies

Pretty uneventful day today. I got up pretty late and read most of the morning, then went to my British Common Law class (though our instructor tells us that it's really only English and Welsh common law as Scotland is under a different system more similar to continental Europe). Dr. McFarland, who insists that we can call him Ben, is a very young faculty member from Trinity College specializing in property law. I very much enjoyed class today, where we discussed what "The Rule of Law" means. We decided that rule of law is just one facet of the quality of a legal system not a force for explicitly "good" or "evil". To use the example we came up with in class, a legal system with the law "All blue-eyed babies will be shot on sight" can still be considered as having Rule of Law assuming the rules are clear, prospective,properly promulgated, and authorities are accountable for their compliance. As you may know, I am vehemently anti-baby, so this is a system of jurisprudence that I can really get behind. Plus, I also learned the difference between a barrister and a solicitor. All in all I'd call it a good day. Two seminars tomorrow, so bye!

Anglican Church Apologizes to Darwin

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/undergod/2008/09/church_of_england_apologizes_t.html

This is pretty sweet. At least they didn't have to apologize to Jesse Jackson.

First Day of Seminars

I'm relived to report that my first seminar today (History of Tudor Stuart England) was not nearly as intimidating as I imagined it would be. Dr. Ian Archer, who teaches the class, has been talked about as quite an imposing figure by those who have taken his classes before. While today he certainly wasn't shy about telling people when they were wrong, he was certainly likable enough. With luck that will hold for the rest of the semester. I was probably a little over-prepared as far as the amount of reading I'd done, but that certainly beats the alternative and as the semester goes on I suspect it will be increasingly hard to stay ahead of the game. Unlike most of the seminars we're taking these first four weeks, Dr. Archer holds his class in Keble college instead of the house. It occurs to me that I haven't talked much about the college system here, so this might be a good time.

The University of Oxford isn't a university in quite the same sense that UGA is. Nominally UGA is made up of several different colleges (Franklin, SPIA, Grady, Terry, Education, Forestry, etc.) but that doesn't really have much of an appreciable effect on everyday life with the exception of slightly different graduation requirements. Everyone still lives in the same housing freshman year and takes lots of the same core classes. Oxford, on the other hand, is a much looser entity. There are 39 constituent colleges, each of which has their own campus, dorms, and dining hall (well, most of them. Some colleges don't have undergrads, and some don't have any students at all). Students apply for admission to a specific college and spend most of their time there. Also, all the colleges have separate rowing teams that compete against each other, completely separate from the university at large's Oxford University Boat Club which rows against Cambridge (generally referred to here as "the other place". In fact the tour guide said "Cambridge" in the chapel and got chastised for swearing in church) in The Boat Race. The academic departments that students take classes in are independent of any one college, with the faculty spread around. Generally students only "read" (study) one subject the entire time they are here, which means graduation only takes 3 years. When they do graduate, they graduate from Oxford University and get one of a confusing array of degrees. This is all just what I've heard/read on wikipedia. If anyone knows better, please correct me. Anyway, the college all of the students on the UGA program are attached to is called Keble College.

Keble is one of the relatively young colleges (founded 1870), and also hosts one of the largest bodies of undergrads (about 435). The campus is a little over a mile south of the house and is mostly constructed of brick, unique since most other colleges are built from stone. The tricolor brick pattern is distinctive, to say the least. We eat our meals there, and today my seminar was there. There aren't any students around now, but that will change in a few weeks.

A Brief Tryst with Mr. Juicy

Not much to report for the last couple days. Seminars started this week, but I don't happen to have had any yesterday or today. So instead, I'm trying to get a lot of reading done in preparation for my classes tomorrow, Thursday, and Friday. My two seminars, Tutor and Stuart England and British Common Law, obviously require very different reading. Both have a required reading for each biweekly meeting as well as the ominously named "further reading". It's a subject of debate around the house how strongly suggested those readings are, but since they each include several entire books I at least hope that it means "further-as-in-this-will-enhance-your-understanding-but-is-not-absolutely-mandatory reading". Most likely the list is a place to start when looking for sources for the flurry of papers that looms on the horizon. Even so, I spent all day (7 hours, which pretty much means every waking moment not spent eating or walking) trying to put a dent in the suggested reading for Dr. Archer's history class. I felt very studious, and got to use the Bodleian for the first time. At the same time, I was pretty wiped out afterward and I can't imagine doing it every day. Still, that might just be the way things go.

It was easy to stay on task considering the libraries (I used Keble's as well as the Bod) are a solid 20 minute walk from the house. I would estimate that it's about the same distance as Stegeman Coliseum to the Arch. Some people are getting bikes to help them cover the distance faster. There's a narrow bike lane for most of the way, and it's straight and perfectly flat. Sounds like a good idea, but I skeptical about that whole other-side-of-the-road-thing as well as the cost. The cheapest (barely) ride-able bike I've been able to find costs 100l, with the shop guaranteed to buy it back for half that at the end of the term. 50l is about $100, plus the added cost for a (big honkin') lock and a helmet and the risk of theft, which I gather is a pretty big problem here. Right now I'm probably leaning toward no bike, but that may change. The walk isn't really that bad, except it has to be made at least three times a day for meals, which are also served at Keble.

This week the dining hall has been a little strange since Oxford isn't really in session right now. The Michealmas term covers the last eight weeks of my trip here, but the next 3 and a half weeks are essentially during summer vacation, summer in this case being a relative term since I would definitely describe the weather the last few days as pleasantly "crisp" i.e. a little chilly. In any case, Keble College makes some extra cash during the summer by hosting conferences of various sorts (the current one is a meeting of the European Muscular Association, a group which I assume is academics not enthusiasts since the attendees aren't huge hulking guys but nerdy looking science types) and we're kind of an afterthought to the feeding of the conference goers.

So far breakfast and lunch have been cafeteria style while dinner is fixed menu table service. As of yet we've only sat for informal meals, which means we aren't required to wear our academic gowns (I imagine that will be quite a post when the time comes). All are meals are "included" in the program cost, but it's more accurate to say the program gives us a allowance for food at the dining hall, which is much, much cheaper than eating out (a meal "costs" considerably less than a pint at a pub). So while we don't pay out of pocket for extras and I usually get a few, I can't go crazy just yet. Although I will say that I've become quite fond of "Mr. Juicy", the brand of boxed juice available in the mornings. Mr. Juicy and I are quite seriously involved.

Breakfast consists of a fried egg, a piece of ham, baked beans, sausage or mushrooms, and toast. Not quite the Full English, but in the same spirit. You can get cereal, fruit, yogurt and coffee for a very small extra fee. Lunch is a little less flexible; it seems to be a meat, a starch and vegetables. For instance today we had a pork chop, potatoes, and zucchini. Dinner is pretty much the same sort of thing with a dessert (today was fish pie, which amazingly managed to be both a meat and a starch, plus more zucchini. Edible but not a favorite). The portion sizes are a little small, meaning everyone is hungry before every meal. I realize this is the way normal people eat, but as a fat ignorant American, I'm spoiled by going to Snelling and eating until they have to roll me out. Coupled with the 40 minute round trip commute, we're all going to lose some weight. This also means that everyone is starting to get up for breakfast and have a snack before bed in an attempt to maximize caloric intake. The dining situation isn't perfect, but it is certainly more than adequate. It's not the Ritz Carlton, but it's not Stalag Luft 3 either.

First day of class tomorrow, so back to the books for me. Still having a great time.

Excursion to Salisbury, Sunday

***** For more pictures click here or on the Photos link at right*****

Okay, this will most likely be an even longer post than usual since I missed yesterday (with the exception of my Stonehenge photo essay) and I don't really have much to do today. I'll start with the excursion we went on yesterday. Even if it was "touristy", it was amazing. If nothing else, it provided further evidence that one can't walk down the street in this country without bumping into something historically significant and/or cool. We were gone for about 10 hours yesterday, of which a sizable chunk of which was spend on a bus, and we still managed to see at least four sites that are worth traveling to see. The English "interstate" system seems very much like the highways back home, except for the fact that everyone is driving on the left side of the road and the routes are named with a alphanumeric system that is considerably beyond my comprehension. Considering that England has a large population and limited land area, the landscape was very much rural once we got away from the city, interspersed with small villages and hamlets. We saw a huge nuclear power plant looming near the highway, as well as a long convoy of military trucks hauling armored personnel carriers northward. And lots of Bentleys. Eventually we crested a hill and found ourselves looking down on Salisbury.

Salisbury is a fairly small city of 45,000 about one and a half hours southeast of Oxford. The city is beautiful in it's own right, but the main attraction is the medieval cathedral that dominates the city skyline with a spire rising 404 feet into the air. Our first stop was the Church of St. Thomas Becket. While I forget exactly how old it is (I assume it's sometime after this in 1170) I can confidently say that if there was something that old in the states we'd have it roped off as a national monument of some kind. This church, however, was very clearly still in use. One corner was fenced off as a children's play area, with bright plastic chairs and toys. I found this somewhat strange, as there were very clearly dead people buried under every square inch of the floor. In the other corner, long folding tables held tubs of second hand books for sale. And on the other side of the church, there was a 30' tall fresco that is the oldest preserved doomsday painting in the country. It is almost disorienting to look at a centuries old painting then turn to see pensioners buying a used copy of Oliver Twist in the same room. I also found a stained glass window that I really liked dedicated to English war dead (Dr. Trivedi, a medievalist to the core, advised me "oh don't take a picture of that Victorian tat"). The best part was a frame depicting St. George slaying a dragon that bears more than a passing resemblance to Spyro. After checking out the church, we had lunch wandering through a big outdoor market and rendezvoused with the rest of the group outside the cathedral.

The Salisbury Cathedral is the most impressive building that I have ever seen. Even as far as cathedrals go, this one is pretty awesome. They're all very ornate, but I think Salisbury is especially impressive since it was built in only 40 years. I can't really do it justice with words, and my point and shoot camera doesn't quite cut it. One of the reasons I think I liked it so much was the huge windows that let in lots of light (at least in comparison to Notre Dame, the other cathedral I've been to). In addition, the cathedral houses one of the four remaining copies of Magna Carta. While it's not that visually impressive, it's still Magna Carta (those in the know tell me that its correct not to use an article when referring to the document, thus not the Magna Carta). The only bad thing about the entire visit was the gift shop at the end. It was terrible and tacky and commercial and I hated it. But I still bought two postcards.

The next place we visited was Old Sarum, the site of the original settlement of what would become Salisbury after the city moved because of lack of water and squabbling between the clergy and military. Old Sarum was a fortified settlement that William the Conqueror later built a castle at (I'll take a moment to point out that history gives old Willy a great nickname, probably second only to Vlad the Impaler). There's not much left of the castle besides the foundation, but the huge earthen berms constructed around the fort are still there. It's already on top of a hill and the defensive earthworks add some extra height, making it look like something I wouldn't particularly want to run up in chain mail with arrows coming at me, as well as making the view spectacular. Like the rest of England I've seen so far all the grass was vividly green, and the town lacks tall buildings, making the view of the cathedral very impressive. After taking in the scenery for a while, it was time to complete the pilgrimage to what I was sure would be the climax of our trip to England; I am of course referring to Stonehenge.

Stonehenge is a bunch of rocks arranged in a circle. The audio commentary some of us listened to assured us that they are arranged for a very specific reason, although it was coyly ambiguous as to what that reason might be. If you ask me, I think it's most likely that the stone age builders put it up just to confuse future generations of archeologists. The stones are roped off to keep riff-raff like me away from these ancient objects of mystery, and so visitors are compelled to walk the circular path around the site, all the better to contemplate it from every possible angle. Perhaps compelled is too strong a word, since most vistors seemed to approach the side nearest the entrance, snap a few photos, stand and gaze contemplatively at the stones for about 90 seconds, then turn back to the parking lot with a perturbed expression (presumably, they are trying to decide if the experience was worth the admission fee. "6 pounds fiftey? Hey that's like twelve dollars/nine euros/twelve hundred yen/five hundred dinars! Crap!"). Actually, in Stonehenge's defense, it is more impressive than I thought it would be. It actually is pretty big, and clearly required some ingenuity to build without power tools or, oh say...the wheel. The weather was nice that day, which meant the grey stones stood out between against the emerald grass and blue sky with puffy white clouds, looking like nothing so much as a Windows screensaver. But at the same time, the Egyptians were building the pyramids during roughly the same period as the stone part of Stonehenge was finished, and few would argue that Stonehenge is cooler than the pyramids. Except maybe people who claim to be druids.

According to Dr. Trivedi, if you get dressed up in a bed sheet and claim to be a druid, you get to go up to the stones inside the rope barrier and worship them as you wish, presumably as long as "worship" doesn't mean "carve your initials in". This is the one piece of information he gave me throughout the day that I remain skeptical about. Other than that, he seemed to be an authority on just about everything we saw, possibly as a consequence of taking the same excursion several times a year. He even knew quite a bit about when you can eat swans in England. All the swans in the country are technically owned by the Queen. I'm sure the penalty for poaching the Queen's swans involves a gristly, lengthy, very public death in the style of something out of Braveheart. However, some venerable institutions including Dr. Trivedi's college at Cambridge have traditional "swanning rights" to catch and eat them from time to time. As to the merits of swans, according to Trivedi they're like chicken "but gamier. Certainly inferior to goose. But the young ones are more tender...".

After getting our fill of Stonehenge we walked back to the bus (excuse me, "coach") through the crowd of people who were engaged in taking pictures of the rocks from outside the fence, avoiding the admission fee and still getting snapshots. Speaking of the steep fee, the money collected apparently goes to the continued preservation of the site, the plan for which I imagine is something along the lines of "leave them in the ground" (and, as Sarah suggests, "no additional carving or painting"). In reality, the trust that runs Stonehenge has a plan to build a giant underground tunnel through which to run the nearby highway, thus restoring the site to its proper pre-modern aesthetic. Good luck with that. The land around the henge is owned by the Ministry of Defense, but the only visible activity on the surrounding land appeared to be sheep grazing. The sheep were fun to watch. More so than a set of meticulously placed boulders, anyway.

All in all a good day, capped off by watching UGA beat Darth-Visor and the Gamecocks on TV.