Thank you, I really enjoyed the...Guinea Fowl? - July 9, 2009

Another exciting day in Oxford, of course :)



This morning I was just too tired to get up, so I slept in pretty late, then got up and got ready and headed to class. What fun. Really though, I like my classes, and they are probably less like sit down and do stuff work (but more go out and do stuff work) than they would be in the states. Dr. Halli is cool as all get out (and def. has game - haha.)



After English, we climbed up to the top of St. Mary's tower for my Arts of Oxford class. See facebook for awesome pictures - beautiful views of the city of spires. It was quite the hike, up a very narrow stone staircase...and I was freaking out for my knees the whole time because if one person had fallen on that staircase it would have been super super bad. But it's cool, because we all made it :) and it was definitely worth it!



After the climb, I headed to Cornmarket to grab a Cornish Pasty for lunch, because I was starving. Basically, it was meat, gravy, carrots, onions, and mashed potatoes all mixed together and baked into a pastry. Haha, yum. I headed back to the room to do a bit of homework and take a nap during the afternoon. I had to finish up a paper for English, among other things.

Tonight was our first Formal Hall, which was pretty cool. Everyone got dressed up, and at 6:30 we had a group lecture - a professor from Princeton studying the significance of meter in English history spoke on her research, which sounds crazy, and it was tough to understand at first, but it was really cool. Basically, in the past, English people have written the country's history in poem form to help school children understand it and she is trying to understand how/if there is a correlation between the social climate of the country at the time and the meter the poem is written in. Afterward we headed to the hall for a very formal dinner, which felt both very official and serious, and also a little like we were in a Harry Potter movie.

For dinner we had...course 1) grilled cod served over different types of peas with bacon; course 2) guinea fowl with...something on top...and veg. and potatoes; then fruit tart for dessert. Mmm....I had no idea what guinea fowl was..and still don't. But it tasted like chicken. And it was really good.

After dinner, the staff requested we stand up and sing the Alabama fight song. That was embarrassing. Candice and I joked that we should have started having like a ho down and playing banjo music, just to really live up to those stereotypes. Woo....

Dinner took a while, and we still had homework to finish up, so tonight wasn't a very exciting night. We just worked and hung out in the college bar for a little while.

Still, an amazing day in Oxford.