Oxford — Thursday 29 December

I went to Oxford! Home of one of the oldest universities, around which the town was built (hence the massive number of pubs in the town), a bunch of museums, and the original Inklings club.

The first thing in the morning was me planning out my trip, which I had supposed would be solo, since Josie (former flatmate) and James (her boyfriend) would be busy seeing James' aunt and cousins, and possibly an uncle. However, James' dad got sick and called off lunch, so I had the privilege of overhearing a conversation I would never hear in America: 

"James, would you like to go to Oxford today?"

"Sure, why not?"

I'd looked up bus fares (there's one from bedford every half hour; it's £11.40 for a return and £10 for a single), so James' dad was nice and drove us to the bus station. It was pretty crowded, but I had a bit of a "we're going to oxford, we're going to oxford, we're going to OXFORD!" mantra running through my head.

First thing off the bus. You know the old school that is constantly referred to in popular culture?

I found it.

We drifted around the corner, and I was instantly drawn in to a fleamarket thing, which had at least three booths with cheap books. One had paperbacks for £1, but they were lame. Another had paperbacks for £2 or 3 for £5. 

I got four of those. £7 is kind of cheap for books at the bookstores; I got four for the price of one! And what books... 

Seeing as I was looking for The Eagle and Child pub, home of the first Inklings, the very place where Tolkien submitted portions of The Lord of the Rings to his companions, including CS Lewis (author of one of my favourite book series to this day), I was hoping to find a cheap standalone Lewis. I found Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Horse and His Boy, which are both great, and Voyage of the Dawn Treader is possibly my favourite of the Narnia series, but I already have that one. Unfortunately, no other Lewis books could be found, and the only Tolkiens were individual LOTR books, which I also already have. I thought about taking a Thomas Hardy (author of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, which is an extremely well-written book that I hate and haven't finished; he also frequented The Eagle and Child, although I don't think he was with Inklings), but since I don't like the one book of his that I have read part of, I decided against it. 

In the end, I had picked up Wide Sargasso Sea, a sort of prequel to Emily Brontë's Jane Eyre, which is one of my favourite books; I also love Wide Sargasso Sea in its own right, and a Sherlock Holmes compilation with a story I've not seen (A Study in Scarlet with The Sign of the Four, the latter of which I already have, but this was £2! And I haven't seen A Study in Scarlet anywhere else. Don't judge me for my Sherlock Holmes obsession; besides, I only have one more of the full-length stories to find.). Having two books, I wanted a third (only £1! I've missed second hand books... Oh, how I've missed them) and was contemplating some other fancy, dead authors' works when I rounded the corner of the stall and found Terry Pratchett books. 

You know, the ones with the weird covers? The british editions of the celebrated (knighted for services to literature, actually) british author? Yeah... I was helpless against their siren song of awesomeness. I would have got all of them if I had unlimited money and a greater weight limit on the plane back; as it was, I went with The Colour of Magic (the very first discworld novel, which I already have, but not with the u!) and Wyrd Sisters (which I hadn't read). I did turn down Guards! Guards!, Reaper Man (quite possibly my favourite; it came to Sunderland with me and has been read twice), and a whole slew of early ones, all of which I have. Wyrd Sisters it was. So far, it's pretty good, and I would have finished it on the bus if I hadn't gotten quite carsick and had to shove my head between the seat in front of me and the window.

Anyway, the rest of Oxford, in pictures!

There was some lovely architecture.

Big old buildings with plants and latin everywhere.

And spires. If you could put a point on it, people did.

I believe that this is a monument for some anti-Catholic martyrs from the Reformation. The inscription on the ground wasn't helpful, and the writing on the monument was hard to read and had too many roman numerals (what's D, anyway? I was good up until the D. M, CCC, X, L, and I were fine, but D? Bah.) for me to tell when this all went down, but a bunch of people, probably at least three, were burned on that spot (holy cow, that very spot, shivers) a long time ago because of the corruption of Rome and something about the holy, true, and possibly great and good Church of England.

 Then, I saw it. It was across several lanes of traffic, but we made it without dying.
The Eagle and Child. My personal mecca. And it wasn't just for me; I have about a million ties to Inklings. My group of friends in high school, with whom I am still close (actually, my closest friends and one of my favourite and most influential teachers), had an Inklings club that sort of emulated C.S. Lewis and JRR Tolkien in that we met in coffee houses, annoyed the staff, and talked books, others or our own. We also named ourselves after them. Then I have two fairly good friends at Whitworth who named their theme house Inklings after Lewis and Tolkien's club. I had to go. I would never have forgiven myself if I hadn't.

GAH! So much excitement!

This picture actually took quite a while to take; these two guys kept standing right in front of me, and walked around me when I turned around to have the picture taken from the other side.

THERE IT IS I'M RIGHT THERE GRIAUDNGEUDWGLFL

Pretty sure this is an actual page of notes or manuscript; it wasn't labeled and the pub was super busy, so I was trying to get my pictures and get out of the way. Also, was standing WHERE THEY STOOD right then...

There you go. 

WHERE. THEY. STOOD.

We were planning on eating there, but it was so busy and Josie was so hungry (I was, too, but I was so excited that I kind of forgot that I was hungry, and I suspect that James was pretty hungry as well, but Josie was the most vocal and had been hungry since half an hour into the two-hour bus ride) that we started hunting for food. We ended up at a little cafe that showed promise, although we were sorely disappointed. 

ANYWAY, I'm working on not dwelling on negatives in life, and it didn't really ruin the day, so we'll talk about something else.

Like this sign that I saw on the way to the Museum of the History of Science.

So, Oxford has these beautiful grounds, and I figured out how. Who wants to be a student at a uni where you're not allowed to flop about on the lawn?

I believe that some of Harry Potter was filmed at Oxford, and I believe it. It would give a proper sense of age, grandeur, and scholasticism to a place like Hogwarts.

James and Josie and a really, really old vine that covered at least twenty feet of building horizontally.

Gorgeous grounds; do not touch.

Museum of the History of Science. The fencepost columns all had rather startled-looking busts, presumably of scientists. I forgot that I had taken some pictures in Sunderland, so I couldn't take pictures of these guys. Sorry.

I wish I read Latin. I can pick out a few words, and the Vs tend to stand in for Us, but I really have no idea what they're going on about.

Disclaimer: most of the museum was actually quadrants and astrolabes. I wasn't too enraptured. However, I'm a scientist, or close to it, so I dragged my lovely friends through it. Lucky for them, I'm not that big on museums, and this was the only one I wanted to see.

Einstein Blackboard!

Explains the blackboard, or at least the point of the equations. Basically, Einstein derived, I think in that basement or at least in the building, or at least in the city, the equations that show the universe's expansion.

I love old periodic table things.

The basement of the museum had the chemistry and physics stuff; the two were quite closely related for a long time. When you get down to atoms, they're still related.

Latin, again. I'm guessing that the sign is almost as old as the room.

After this, we ambled around, contemplated walking tours, all of which were full or expensive, and tasted some fudge (all the fudge here is toffee and/or vanilla. I've only seen chocolate fudge of any kind in the fancy store we found the samples at, and they didn't have chocolate out for sampling. Jerks.).
We went through a covered market; the first stall had, quite literally, pounds and pounds of Stilton. I don't mind the smell so much as I used to, but it was really, really strong here. We also found the restaurant that Josie had really wanted to visit, but she was somehow completely full. Which is too bad; I was looking forward to it. Ah, well.

We got back without incident, other than me getting carsick on the way, but I kind of brought that upon myself by reading without having first medicated myself. Then we spent the evening rather nicely, just chilling with the cats and tea and Man v. Food, which was a vegetarian's nightmare.
Oh, and the Sparks (James' last name is Sparks, by the way) have TWO cats that like having attention paid to them! They don't like being picked up or cuddled, but they're so cute... Tinky (full name Tinky Winky, named by the then-5-year-old neighbour kid whose cat gave birth to the litter of five; Dipsy and Lala were renamed by their respective families) is black and Socks (the kid ran out of Teletubbies) is a grey tabby with white front toes, back feet, and chest.
Not gonna lie, I was really excited when I saw a grey tabby. He's stripier than Pete, with fewer spots; he's also much less chill and doesn't like having his tummy rubbed. Also, he's much skinnier and has a much longer tail with no kinks in it.
Still.

Conor's coming down from his family's in Oxford tomorrow afternoon (we didn't see him today because they live a ways out of the city centre and we're seeing him tomorrow and over new years), but I probably won't post until I'm back in Sunderland, so probably after 2 January. 

Happy New Year, everyone! This is the year the world ends, so live it up!

A Quick Update

I'm in Beford! And I'll have a day in oxford and half a day in London by 2012.
...And that's pretty much it for today.

The Christmas Post

On Friday, I slept in more than I had expected. Still, I found candy canes, magical elves, and a chocolate orange after a long hunt through every store I could think of before drifting out of the rain into a bookstore. Also, I found turkish delight in a pound store.

For the win!

I actually grabbed all different colours from two different containers without looking.

A magical elf.

At last, the hard-won candy canes!

It's real!

Of course, it was pretty gross. "Rose" isn't a very strong flavour, so I mostly got "sugar" for that one, and lemon actually tasted exactly the same.

I had read Hogfather the day before, so I watched the movie, a made-for-tv affair. It was okay, and nowhere near as bad as it could have been. Almost all the actors were british, and they followed most of the plot pretty well. Death was a little weird; I always figured him as pretty impassive, but this one had an angry skull. The voice wasn't too bad, though. Susan was played by, as Jessi pointed out, "the girl from Downton Abbey," which sounded more vague than it was, and she did okay. Mustrum Ridcully was played by Joss Ackland with a beard, which disguised him pretty well, since he was bald and beardless as the Russian ambassador in The Hunt for Red October (and also as the villain in Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey).

Saturday, I slept in again It is vacation... Or, as they say here, holidays. Jessi had already left to meet her parents, probably at the airport. Over the course of the afternoon, I decided not to go with chinese takeaway because it just doesn't sound appealing. Also, the restaurant that's closest to Clanny is pretty pricey for just one dish, and I felt that I'd already spent a lot of money on food.
In the interests of exploration, I tried blue cheese for the first time in about 17 years. It started as "For SCIENCE!" and ended as "I know too much science to eat that." The non-blue parts aren't too bad, but thinking about putting large quantities of concentrated, highly visible bacteria into my mouth freaks me out (I added those qualifiers because, you know, we put a ton of bacteria into our mouths on a regular basis, we just can't see it). I killed some in the oven, and it didn't taste too bad, but... shudder. It's that horrible feeling that you get when you touch something gross... Just... ugh.
It wasn't just for exploration and science, it was that lots of people I know like blue cheese (also the food blogs, but I really do know people, real people, in real life that like the stuff), and I thought, maybe I've got this all wrong and I'm letting a barely-remembered incident and my parent's opinion colour my perception of this rather famous, generally accepted cheese.
Now, it's my opinion. If you got rid of all the mould, it wouldn't be too bad.

To distract you from blue cheese, here's some pictures of fairly delicious candy!

Hawick Balls (mint, if you can believe it).

Rhubarb and Custard thingies

Dandelion and Burdock bottles

I think these are either rhubarb or strawberry 

Silver things. They turned out to be kind of minty, but I mostly got them because they were shiny.

Sounds exciting...

Nothing too magical.

Barley sugar, I believe. I always wondered what it was, and I still wonder why it's called that.

Treacle Toffees: Purchased out of curiosity. Such things exist?

Clove somethings

Around the plate of candy, which includes the above plus some chocolates not mentioned, we have a mince pie, a chocolate orange, cookies, a slice of fruitcake, and oranges. Also Hogfather between the cookies and the cake.

Repast. And yeah, I was kind of into taking pictures of my food that night.

Pure Heaven white grape and peach non-alcoholic sparkling beverage.

...Which had a fancy cork! 

Luckily, Adam had left his leatherman in the kitchen, so I set about opening the first cork I'd ever encountered.

After a long and arduous battle, I won.

Someone left a wine glass. I took advantage of it.

I roasted chestnuts. From left: uncooked, cooked, opened and half eaten.
They weren't very good, actually. A little to sweet and spongy for me.

I had a santa hat, and I wore it all day. This is my facebook profile now...

In addition to stuffing myself with cheese, I watched a lot of movies. I forget all of them, but I watched Polar Express and Nativity Story on Christmas Eve for sure, and I also watched, during the course of the weekend, Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Miracle on 34th Street, A Charlie Brown Christmas, Home Alone, Die Hard, Die Hard 2, Gremlins (those last four are all set on Christmas and/or Christmas Eve), and all three of The Santa Clause series.

Sunday, I was planning on going to St. Gabriel's for their Christmas Day service, to be in church when I couldn't be with family and friends, and to see what an anglican church is like. I'm curious, after learning quite a bit about their formation in Core 150 and English Social History 1500-1750. We don't really see many of those in the US; probably something about being the whole reason that the religious establishment in the states was what it was.
Unfortunately, I woke up ten minutes before the service was to start, due to my really annoying habit of turning my alarm off in my sleep. I ended up getting up around 11, again.
In the afternoon, happily after I was up and had made my bed and stuff, Jessi and her parents came by. Fortunately, they spoke enough english to make things not-awkward, and Jessi translated when their english failed them. My german never came into play, although I did pick up on some of what they said. They were pretty nice.
After they left, I got started on dinner, and it resulted in this rather suspicious-looking concoction.

Soup. More of a stew, actually. I slaved over this.

It was delicious, and ended up feeding me for three days.

I skyped with my parents in the GMT afternoon and the rest of my dad's side of the family in the PST afternoon, which was nice. I've been talking to people back home more and more, and I'm getting pretty excited to get to the house in spokane, and to be back at whitworth, and to see my family in person. I haven't actually had a major W-curve depression moment, although I'm pretty disillusioned with the University in general. That sort of depressed mood hits me at whitworth, too, like when I get a particularly bad mark, or I'm having a hard time with an assignment, or a professor isn't being helpful. It happens a lot less at whitworth, and the professors are a lot less unhelpful than here, and I also have a great advisor at whitworth who has proved her worth by helping me get here and by not judging me for having a breakdown in her office over physics. I think she probably sees a lot of that from science major freshmen, you know, the ones who were pretty darn smart in high school, were at the tops of their classes without trying, who never had to study (oh, how I miss those days)... 

Overall, Christmas was a success. It was helped more when my flatmate that moved away (causing the sad puppy whimpers from me) invited me to visit her at her boyfriend's house in Beford for a few days and maybe spend new years eve with them and another flatmate who's been traveling. I didn't start any big traditions (I was hoping for Chinese on Christmas Eve, like crepe tuesdays. In retrospect, I didn't have any family or friends around to make it a worthwhile tradition, so I just continued in the family habit of eating cheese and crackers for Christmas Eve), but I didn't have an emotional breakdown and I don't think my family did, either. 

Oh, and I intend to call christmas lights "fairy lights" for the rest of my life. It just sounds so much cooler.

Raeann Explores — Thursday 22 December

I went back to the bridge, where I wished I'd had my camera on monday. I was slightly smarter this time, though, and took the bus. Also, it wasn't raining.

From the parking lot behind the bus/metro station across the river.

Cool little paths... And I took the one that went down because I was trying to get to the river.

Bridge, river, branches. I'm curious about how deep the River Wear is at the mouth, because it's pretty silty.

A pretty shot of the other bank, with the vines growing over the walls.

The little path with a wall!

This is why I went. I couldn't really believe that this place was in Sunderland.

Wall!

Me and the wall, looking happier than the last time I took a picture of myself. I think my nose looks much bigger, though. 

The sky kept being really pretty, but I never really captured it with my camera.

The train bridge is the grey one with the cool circular support thing.

Also, the train bridge has these huge columns underneath.

It looks too green. It's winter! Officially!

See, these trees know what's what. The grass kind of ruins it, though.

Not sure what this little covered walkway was for...

It was taller than it looked. 

One thing I've noticed here: I don't know how it is in non-washington-or-oregon cities, but I feel like the british may have a monopoly on building right up the edge of a river, and then building walls for the river. 

Walls. Also, leaf gunk or possibly seaweed.

Not that that's ever stopped me.

This was under the train bridge... I don't know what it is.

Tall columns.

I was intrigued by the flowers left around a metal box with some sharpie on it... I wonder what happened there.

Wall! This was under the car bridge.

St. Peter's campus from a distance. Not the cranes, though.

I'm curious as to what this Venus thing is for. Seems like some kind of run...

These things were everywhere.

Having seen all I had space for on my camera on the St. Peter's side of the river, I decided to climb back up and cross the bridge.
Up was very up.

It looks less imposing from the top, but it was a rather steep climb.

If it wasn't for all the mossy stuff on the tree trunks, it would look like it's autumn...

On both sides of both ends of the bridge.

Looking down the river. If you're not too close, it's kind of pretty...

That's where I was headed.

The sky, with the North Sea meeting it, was prettier in real life. I tried anyway.

The bridge. I really like the train bridge.

This is the city crest or arms or something, and Nil Desperandum Auspice Deo is on everything here. Any latin-readers know what it means?

It just sounds so polite! I'm planning on doing a "signs" post sometime, but we'll see.

Walls! I love walls. They've got pink granite-y stuff mixed with sandstone and what appears to be cement. 

I hate cobbles. That picture of the brick sloping down the hillside? This is that. It felt this steep, and it was slick.

You can tell where the river was.

I was surprised when this picture turned out okay.

They had these bushes every fifty meters or so with weird little pathways leading to them. I don't know why... 

It turns out that this side of the river is part of the Monkwearmoth trail, or something. It's a 15-mile loop that I didn't pay much attention to, since I have neither the time nor the band of adventurers required to make that loop. This part reminded me of northern Oregon, on the gorge, somehow.

Also, for the first time in quite a while, I found myself in a place that I had no idea of where it was in relation to the rest of Sunderland. It was weird.
Also also, I am now the proud owner of a potato masher. It works pretty well. And yes, I did make potatoes as soon as I got home.
Oh, and also also also (if that's not a bit excessive), no more tomatoes in the wok. I think they ate the finish, and my white sauce was a little grey tonight.