just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?

ouestlesinge:

Institut Catholique de Paris

next up!

(Source: ggrint)

filming of a new episode of lewis outside the gates of trinity college, 8/19/11

i’m home safely, and currently dealing with weird jet-lag—coming back meant i went backward in time, so i didn’t lose any sleep, it just got pushed back a whole lot.

anyway, i’m a few days behind on my posts but i’m taking a break from the computer for a few days, so you’ll have to wait! (i’m on my phone for this post—iphone internet, oh how i missed you!)

it’s good to be back, but i already miss oxford too much. ah, well— i’ll just have to visit when i study in france in the spring!

on monday i wandered down high street with joslyn in the afternoon—we were going to do some souvenir shopping but that got derailed pretty quickly, at least on my end, when i found i couldn’t return what i wanted to. so, instead, i just browsed, which is much less stressful. we stopped in a tea shop, where they had a tasting of a yummy cinnamon-y, apple-y tea. next we stopped in mr. simm’s candy store, which, as joslyn put it, was like honeydukes—they had floor-to-ceiling candy. candy, candy, candy. we didn’t get anything—that’s a dangerous road to go down! but we did do a lot of excited browsing.

next we stopped in an antique shop across the street. it had so many rooms! and so many awesome things! admittedly, it was an antique store. but there was also a back room full of really old books—first editions of things, musty, moldy, awesome. they had books which were over six hundred pounds. that, my friend, is something like 1200 dollars. and they were just hanging out amongst all the other books selling for forty pounds and five pounds. it was astonishing. joslyn and i spent a lot of time looking through them—i found a book on the history of trinity college but it was way more expensive than i was willing to pay for it. in the end we didn’t buy anything, but it was really fun to look around!

we also stopped in a joke / magic / game shop which had a whole bunch of little carved chess sets. awesome!

after that i had to hurry back to trinity because i had balcony dinner. balcony dinner is a weekday dinner which used to be held on the balcony overlooking the dining hall—but it’s no longer held there. the official story we were told to explain its relocation to a room off of the fellows’ garden is that the balcony is no longer safe to go up onto, but rumor is that people used to throw food down at the folks eating normal dinner. so that’s always never fun. anyway, we eat with our six-week class and tutor, and since our class is so tiny (just the three of us!) we doubled up with international law. i sat next to my professor and had a nice conversation with him about my experience here, and it was much less formal than being at high table for dinner. i may have made a slight fool of myself a few times, but what of it? i didn’t spill anything on myself so i count that dinner as a win.

unfortunately, he did have some bad news—our second class this week was going to be on wednesday, not thursday—which meant two classes in a row, and twenty-four hours to write a seven page paper. the professor for the international law class was taking most of the people in our group on a pub crawl, but i stayed home and wrote half my essay after dinner. being boring and productive for the win!

yesterday was similarly boring, as i was wrestling with the repercussions of not having much to say for my essay. i did take a break at 5:30 to go to evensong at christ church cathedral with elizabeth. i’ve been to christ church a few times on this trip but i wanted to go to a service because they supposedly brought in wonderful choirs. this time around they had a choir from sydney, composed primarily of people over the age of sixty. it was awesome. it was very beautiful, and i enjoyed myself immensely. plus, since we went in through the old tom tower, i got to walk across tom quad which you’re not allowed to do as a tourist. yes! on the way back we got sandwiches at tescos (surprise, surprise) and ate them on the lawn at trinity while having a really interesting discussion about religion.  aaaaaaaaaaaaaaand then back to my essay. i got it done at eleven and pretty much went straight to bed. what? i was tired!

this morning i had my last class at trinity. so sad! i got up super early and went to breakfast, took a shower, printed my paper, and got to corpus christi with plenty of time to spare. the cloisters are directly across from my professor’s office, so i sat in one of the niches and re-read my essay. then i had tutorial, which went better than i was expecting and made me pretty hopeful for my overall grade (don’t hold me to that, parents! i’m just saying!). i don’t know if i’ve described tutorials before, so i might as well do that now, since it was my last one. we meet individually with our professor and read our essays out loud to him. then he talks about them. it’s pretty intimidating, because i’ve never had to read an essay out loud before, and also because one-on-one with professors is always nerve-wracking. but it’s also a really interesting, really amazing experience. i feel so lucky to have been able to take such small—and difficult—classes with oxford professors.

anyway, back to the real world. when i was done i stopped at primark to get something to wear to high table dinner tonight. mom, that’s what i spent your gift money on, so thanks! when i got back to trinity i made lunch plans with caitlin, michelle, and joslyn. we went to the covered market and got lunches to take back to the lawn—i got a sausage and egg baguette from a place i’d gone to near the beginning of the trip. since everything’s winding down, i’m going back to some of the original places i liked when i first got here. we ran into brittany while we were eating our lunches, and she wanted to get something to eat. since i was done with classes, i went with her (plus thamy!) back to the covered market. we went to primark—noticing a trend?—to get some odds and ends for high table tonight, and then we came back and did some blog-writing and journal-entrying until it was time for the closing meeting.

which was pretty much exactly what you would expect a closing meeting to follow as—instructions for checking out, that sort of thing. at the end, a group of people sang a song for brittany and ethan, our junior deans, to the tune of sinatra’s “come fly with me,” which was suitably amazing.

and now we’re just waiting around for the festivities to start! we’re having pimm’s (on the lawn? in the danson room? nobody’s sure, because it’s really really gross out) and then dinner, and then who knows!

hugs and kisses!

today we went into london to see doctor faustus at shakespeare’s globe theatre!

it went like this: i went to breakfast, where i accidentally drank from a flower vase, and then we got to the train station just in time, and i snoozed my way into london, where joslyn and i took the bakerloo line to waterloo for the london eye! yessssssss!

there were lots of line situations, and confusion, and i accidentally went into the wrong area and wound up with 3D glasses—but eventually we both managed to get onto the eye in the same sky box or whatever those things are called. it was pretty awesome. the eye looks pretty big from the ground, but it looks a whole heck of a lot bigger when you’re actually on it. i took lots of pretty pictures!

afterward we had half an hour to get to the globe theatre. that was fun, actually—we sort of took it at a half-run, half-power walk, and there was lots to look at. directly next to the eye there were several people dressed up like characters: mickey mouse, an entirely gold wizard, a cowboy who tried to shoot joslyn, an all-blue man playing an all-blue guitar. we powered through a tiny carnival next to a bridge, and little ‘seaside’ shacks with weird paintings on them, and the biggest sandbox ever, and the tate modern, and lots of other fun things. we got to the globe ten minutes ahead of schedule, which was great, because it gave us time to get ourselves calmed down. 

we had yard ‘seats’ which basically meant we stood in the crowded yard and tried to crane to see the actual stage behind all the tallest people in the world. it was hot and sunny. about ten minutes in, i got really nauseous, and when it wasn’t because of my diabetes, and then when i suddenly broke out in sweat and everything started to spin, i realized something was wrong— so i went outside of the theatre. there are about a million nice old ladies who work as ushers at the globe, and the one at the door i exited was all, oh my goodness are you okay? and she helped me outside and a guy with a wheelchair came over and rolled me to the first aid room. where there was already another girl who had almost fainted. and then three minutes later someone else came in. anyway, there were tons of people coming and going and attempting not to pass out. which made me feel less absurd for almost fainting.

it all ended okay, because i drank a lot of water and went to buy a sandwich. fun fact! the sticker that holds the sandwich wrapper closed said ‘OM NOM NOM’ which sort of made up for the fact that it was pretty expensive.

i felt better after that, so i went back into the theatre for the second half of the show. man, i’m bummed i missed the first half. admittedly i paid £5 for the ticket. but still. i’d never read doctor faustus, but michelle had and she’d given me a little background information (namely: he sells his soul to the devil) so i caught up pretty quickly. and it was really great! i love when theatre is inventive and artistic, and this one really was well done—and there was a lot of interaction with the audience. plus, joslyn and i had kind of pushed our way to the front, so we were within reaching distance of all the actors. it also meant i couldn’t surreptitiously take any pictures, but whatever—when they were doing the scene where the friars are trying to rid themselves of the invisible faustus, the ‘holy water’ got all over me. 

ALSO, there was an actor who looked like dustin hoffman, and an actor who looked like rory williams from doctor who, BUT WHO THEN TURNED OUT TO ACTUALLY BE RORY WILLIAMS FROM DOCTOR WHO. woah there my life, what are you doing, how are you a real life. anyway, he played mephistopheles and he was so great! which is not to say that everyone else wasn’t phenomenal—i think my favorite part of the whole thing was glancing back to see the angel and the wise man actually crying while faustus proclaims his villainy. i wasn’t expecting it and it was very powerful.

anyway, all in all an amazing—if a little uncomfortable—experience. 

afterward we pretty much went home, since none of us really wanted to stick around to see if the riots were going to pick up again. admittedly we were in a totally different part of london. and it was during the day. 

so we came home, and now i’m trying to get some work done! it’s the last week, and i don’t really want to have to miss out on last-minute fun things in order to write my essay. 

later!

the queen’s college, oxford.

trinity college, oxford.

corpus christi college, oxford.

exeter college, oxford.