What I'm Thankful For This Year

This is a couple pf days late, but it's never too late to be grateful for the talents we have, the opportunities we've been given, and the people who support us.

Some of the things I'm thankful for right now:

• My dad's health.  He's had a debilitating chronic cough for over a year and just recently started to get better. 
• My fellow students at St. Hilda's College. I couldn't have asked for a better group of people to adjust to living at Oxford with.  What an amazing group.  My experience here would be totally different without them. 
• Good cheese.  It's quite nice to have such affordable, delicious cheese options. 
• Rowing!  How challenging and rewarding at the same time.  Lots of exercise, shared experience, supportive captains, and the experience of being on a calm river at sunrise. I now have so much respect for rowers. 
• The amazing scenery of Oxford.  I've never ceased to be wowed by the grandeur of the old gothic buildings, and I get to bike past them every day.
• I'm thankful for the little spoken differences between the U.S. and the U.K. They're always a true delight to discover. Rubbish, press-ups, keen, pre-lash, fancy, so many more.... Cheers, U.K. 
• Skype.  Without it I'd feel so lost.  
• London. I went for the first time yesterday and felt completely rejuvenated.  So much life, so much culture, so close by.  Good for the soul.
• My faithful bike.  Despite being really old, transported on a plane, dropped a couple of times, and having hardly any breaks and several gears broken, it still keeps on going, and gets me all over every day.  I ride at least 5 miles a day these days across town. 
• My own health.  I've been able to play four different sports all term.  Nothing makes me more able to study than being able to run around for a break. 
• I'm thankful that I found a muffin tin to buy, because nothing de-stresses me like baking muffins. 
• Dryers! You don't know what you got til it's gone...
• Ultimate Frisbee, which gives me an automatic community of cool people no matter where I go, and gave me the opportunity to play in Nationals next weekend which is ridiculously cool.
• I'm thankful for my amazing, caring support system at home.  You know who you are. 
• The once-in-a-lifetime opportunity I've been given to study at Oxford.  I need to do a better job of not taking it for granted and using this opportunity for good.
• Beautiful fall weather that we've had since I got here.  

And so many other things.  Happy Thanksgiving to everyone around the world.  

Lisa 

Bill Clinton's Ghost and Regatta #1

Dear Bill Clinton, our ghost tour guide would like it if you would please become an Oxford ghost.  You have a connection to the area, and you don't even have to be dead according to him.  All you need is an energy disturbance, so just get angry or guilty or something and c'mon over, let some drunken students sight your specter, and join the haunting ranks of King Charles, Archbishop Cranmer (burned alive in the city center), the wife of the lover of Elizabeth, various Oxford professors and some Generals.  Cheers.

Oxford Ghost Tour last night! A two-hour extravagant look at the history of Oxford and the specters that haunt it, led by an real creepy member of the British Ghost Society who had been hunting ghosts for the last two years with his daughter.

What did we learn?

• Ghosts like to haunt libraries.  Merton College and Queen's College, watch out your libraries are quite haunted. Also the old Bodleian library is haunted by King Charles because he got his fortune told there and didn't like what it said.

• The most well-known ghost is William Spooner (famous for Spoonerisms), a quite friendly ghost who haunts the first floor of New College and mixes up the first letters of words. 
• Queen's Lane used to be used as a hospital because no one could hear the screams of agony.  It is now much creepier to walk down. 
• The King's Arms claims to be the first place where Hamlet was performed? How interesting!  Also the statue heads outside the Sheldonian are also inhabited:  they laugh at Jude the Obscure in the book.

Anyways, we also had our first regatta today! Check "Row a Regatta" off life to-do list!

It was a learning experience.  We learned a lot about how hard it is to row quickly and stay in time, and how much more practice we have to do before our next regatta in 2 weeks.  On the bright side, it was fun and nice to get first-regatta jitters out of the way.  Plus it was gorgeous outside, as you can see. 

This week marks the debut of the first ever St. Hilda's Ultimate Frisbee team, called the Hildabeasts, which we're putting together.  Also it will mark the start of me putting together my plan for my dissertation, which will be not as fun as captaining the Hildabeasts.  

In other news, I have now learned that converting Fahrenheit to Celsius is necessary when using the oven.  Those practical skills they don't teach you in University. Sigh. 

Cheerio!

Lisa 

Frisbee in Shakespeare Country / Burning Guy Fawkes

Hola!

Disclaimer: The first half of this post will be about Ultimate Frisbee.  If you don't like Ultimate (crazy) / think it's not a real sport (clearly haven't played) / confuse it with Disc Golf (just wrong), jump to the second half which is about burning a 50-foot tall wooden man in a park.

Just got back from my first Ultimate Frisbee tournament in Europe!  Oxford sent a 9-person team to Mixed Indoor Regionals; 5 guys, 4 girls, half of whom had never played together.

They play five to a side on a much smaller field than in the U.S. (about gym-sized), which makes for a totally different tactical game.  Lots of trick throws, hammers, and blades; really precise throws because the end zone is so short.  It favors players with quick acceleration and good defensive skills.  I had to adjust to cutting on such a small space also; it's easy to overlap cuts and deep cuts have to be timed really well to be successful since the end zone's so small.  Zone defense, clam defense and iso offensive strategies are seen a lot, but obviously set up differently with only five.  A common one was to send two people to the end zone and let them hang there while the other 3 worked the disc down the field.

There were 4 bids to D1 Nationals. We won 4 games straight on Saturday, finishing in a rousing win against arch-rivals Cambridge.  Sunday we lost the first game, which meant we had to win the next three to make it to D1. WHICH WE DID! Skilled but still fun-centered team; I had a blast. Plus we took the Spirit Award! Which apparently means I have a medal waiting for me.  I get to play in Nationals! Eee!

Other interesting Ultimate differences: They don't provide food but they do provide accommodation for tournaments (Church floors; why doesn't the U.S. do this?). Indoor games are only 23 minutes long but really fast-paced. They call Ninja, other games etc. "calls" and playing savage is playing "Iron Man." Both teams meet in a circle after each game and each captain gives a short speech about the game.  And they do disc races with straws?! Wimps, I know. Also I'd have to say, judging from my limited experience my U.S. Ultimate friends would definitely out-drink the U.K. ones. We'll see if that prevails throughout the year.

Okay, now onto things non-Ultimate players will find more interesting...

So, as you may or may not have realized, Saturday was the 5th of November.  Remember, remember the 5th of November? While everyone in the U.K. does, because....

It's like the 4th of July.  No joke. Commemorating the day that Guy Fawkes failed to blow up Parliament results in a fair-like celebration with fatty food stands, live music, seas of people, fireworks, aaaaaandddd... A HUGE BONFIRE.  HUGE.

We drove back from Regionals Sat night to go to the Oxford celebration of Guy Fawkes day. Walk into the park at 6 p.m. (it's dark out) and see hundreds of people in the dark, fatty food stands, music, a HUGE wooden man structure ~50 feet tall.  Apparently this used to represent Guy Fawkes but the Catholics protested and now it represents the Devil.



Terrifying, right? Look at those teeth! Now imagine them looming 50 feet above you. And then there's some fire dancing all voodoo-style, the Fireworks go off, and then they burn wicker man.  Just torch the entire thing along with a huge bonfire in the background.  It ends up looking something like this...



Topping my list of ridiculous traditions I've seen here in the U.K. HUGE. SO BIG. Biggest fire I've definitely ever seen. I will post better pictures of wicker man on fire once my friend uploads them.

This week: less work (thank goodness, I had 14 extra hours of class last week, ugh).  And a regatta (crew race) next Sunday?  Stay tuned!

LP

Then Life Got Crazy

Long time no write!

My bad. Turns out grad school is indeed quite a busy place to be, and I got really, really sick last week (flu).  But I haven't had any therapeutic writing spree in much too long, so here's a round up of last week's events:

1.  HallowQueen.  Dear Kalamazoo College: Imagine Crystal Ball, but with graduate students who have more money to spend on costumes.  HallowQueen was Oxford's graduate bop (translation: school-sponsored event with a house party feel) for the weekend, which involved everyone cross-dressing.  And man, did those male Master's and PhD students strut their stuff.  Heels, wigs, tights, dresses; elaborate makeup. Jaw-dropping. I even saw a dead ringer for Amy Winehouse.

I also have this theory that you give a man a dress and heels and he will protest and protect his manhood... until he takes a drink or two and then immediately reverts to their alter-ego personality which usually embodies a strutting, bitchy, lewd dancing woman. I've never seen so many sashaying male hips and booty shaking I wouldn't want my mom to see. Watching the dance floor was one of the most entertaining? disturbing? oddly engrossing? things I've seen in awhile.

Not what I was expecting from a fairly traditionalist university. Nice work Oxford males. My favorite image was the guy in makeup and short-shorts skateboarding away into the night through the ancient Gothic buildings of Oxford. Poetic.

2.  Internship! I started working at Nominet Trust last week.  Nominet manages all of the domain names in the U.K., and Nominet Trust gives huge grants to Internet-related projects that increase Internet access, safety, and engagement for at-risk youth (among other populations).  Bright side: wealth of information! Enthusiastic people! Downside: Not reaaally sure what I'm exactly doing yet.  Working on that.

3. Rowing:  We rowed all 8 people at once today!  At 6 a.m. in the morning.  Whooof that's early.  We have a regatta in 3 weeks already which is terrifying.  I have learned how to feather the blade (turn the blade flat when it's out of the water) but we're still rocking the boat all over when we row, which serves as good entertainment for the well-refined rowers who are out at the same time as us.  Luckily there are other similarly struggling novices.

sidenote I find that when I have to wake up that early in the morning, I start dreaming that I didn't wake up in time and then something awful happened... and then my alarm will go off and I'll be unsure whether dream or real world is true.  This morning I woke up in the middle of a dream that involved me missing rowing and then a zombie attack. Huh?  I had to spend a couple of minutes sorting my life out.

4.  Just so you know I do them schools:  We had an 8-hour essay on Sunday.  Got the writing prompt at 9, and then had to hand it in at 5. We had to critique a research paper in learning and technology. I hate to admit this, but although it was stressful and hectic I really enjoyed it.  It was a strange time frame to have to produce a polished work in, but it was good to practice quick critical thinking and outlining points, which I'm sure is applicable in the real world.

In other news, I think I will start attempting to say "keen" more often.  It's a big thing here.  I did catch myself using "mate" the other day.  Oh gosh.  My brother is going to mock the crap out of me.

Frisbee mixed regionals this weekend! The notion of this is keeping me alive through my crazy-hectic week (for some reason my program doubled the number of classes this week... who does that). Cheerio!

Lisa

P.S. Hermione sighting update (because, let's be serious, that's all anyone's interested in really):  My roommate saw her again at a lecture at the Oxford Union, but suspects she was with her boyfriend. Other sightings have been at restaurants and walking around. Lots of debate about whether she'd give out her phone number to a potential flirty male.