Second Week Superlatives

When I was little, my own misguided adventure often got me into a variety of scrapes; my mother was usually alerted to my distress when, immediately following a loud crashing sound in some distant corner of the house, she would hear me calling down to her, "I'm all right, I am ALL right!" Well, after a glorious, action-packed, nearly two week hiatus, I am back to reassure you that I'm all right, I am ALL right. Although Fresher's Flu hit me hard, and I had an absolutely impossible first academic week, I have emerged from it all with a number of new immunities and sympathies.

However, there are still a few things kicking around that my stubborn American brain just can't wrap itself around. Plus, in Second Week, all those boring inductions gave way to a number of quirky and fun Oxford and St. Anne's traditions that really helped hammer home that not only am I here, but I'm a real part of the university, and the year has only just begun. So without further ado, let's see if I can give you guys some superlatives to put the best parts of Second Week into perspective...


1. British Thing I Am Least Capable of Remembering To Do Properly: Cross the road

My friends and I have all of us experienced the terror of stepping into the road with our head turned one way, glancing around to the other side and having to throw ourselves backwards onto the very tiny sidewalk to avoid getting hit by a tour bus. In our defense, the difference goes far beyond the mere detail that the Brits drive on the other side of the road. In Oxford at least, pedestrians do not have the right of way. Ever. Adding to the anxiety is the fact that, while there are some electronic, light-operated crossings towards the middle of town where all the tourists are, a lot of the roads around the outlying college campuses (like St. A's) just have little recessed areas in the sidewalk and islands in the center of the road which you are expected to navigate without the help of a light to stop even one lane of oncoming traffic. Oh, and watch out for bicycles - they have right of way over you as well!

2. American Food I Miss the Most: Pizza

There's a great bit in Douglas Adams' The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul where fictional ex-pat Kate Schecter has an existential crisis over how they do pizza over here:

She enjoyed the notion that New York was home, and that she missed it, but in fact the only thing she really missed was pizza. And not just any old pizza, but the sort of pizza they brought to your door if you phoned them up and asked them to. That was the only real pizza. Pizza that you had to go out and sit at a table staring at red paper napkins for wasn't real pizza however much extra pepperoni and anchovy they put on it. London was the place she liked living in most, apart, of course, from the pizza problem, which drove her crazy. Why would no one deliver pizza? Why did no one understand that it was fundamental to the whole nature of pizza that it amved at your front door in a hot cardboard box? That you slithered it out of greaseproof paper and ate it in folded slices in front of the TV? What was the fundamental flaw in the stupid, stuck-up, sluggardly English that they couldn't grasp this simple principle?

Luckily, I'm here to tell you that this is no longer the case - Adams' Utopian vision of Britain has been realized, and it is now possible to order a pizza to be delivered to your place of stubbornly sedentary residence. However, this is only possible through Domino's, which I think we can all agree is not real pizza in its own right. So my access to pizza remains sadly limited - in all the time I've been here, I've had it once - specifically, at my college family dinner, where I ate it ineptly with knife and fork after consuming the first piece in a New York fold and attracting some odd looks.

For anyone who guessed I would miss hamburgers the most, I can only say: ha! I have subverted expectations! But I must also admit that one of the times I had it was during "American"-themed food day at the college cafeteria, during which the menu read "American hamburger, served with chips." Awwwww, St. Anne's kitchen, you're so cute. You tried.

3. St. Anne's Tradition of the Week: the College Family

Though I haven't managed to get a complete answer out of anyone about how and when the college family system started, I have managed to pick up a few salient details about the practice. The basic gist is that when the first years arrive on campus, they are each assigned a set of college "parents" to help them get acclimated to university and answer any student life variety questions they might have (Where's the laundry room? When is breakfast again? Help me, I just regained consciousness in the fourth floor shower dressed in an adult onesie from Primark and I don't know how I got here!, etc.). At least one of the parents is studying the same subject as their child, so you can also hit them up for info about how to use the subject-specific faculty library, which lecturers are awesome and which are just massively impressive, and so on and so forth.

At some point during first year, students are expected to locate and propose to another first year student and get "college married" to carry on the tradition the following year. There is an art to this selection, since there is no such thing as college divorce, and it is a requirement that your attraction to your college spouse is purely platonic (for the sake of the children, of course!) - you do not college marry someone you romantically fancy. There are some generally accepted conventions as well - things like it being taboo "subject incest" for two students within the same subject to college marry, and that generally, you try to marry someone of the opposite sex. That being said, one of my visiting student friends has a set of three college parents, all of whom are girls and two of whom study English, so those are more guidelines than actual rules.

My parents (especially my mum, T) are kind of legendary on campus, it seems - T in particular for being weird and wonderful. I have one British college sister in English and one Lithuanian college brother in Economics, of all things. Dinner was therefore a pretty merry affair where we all chatted about differences in the school systems where we were from. I wowed everyone with the numbers attached to an American college education, particularly awe-inspiring to my British counterparts because there were recently strikes and student protests over the government raising the limit on school fees from 3000 pounds to 9000 per year, which is still (at the current conversion rate) only around $15,000. Plus, British degrees generally run for only three years. Think about it - that means an entire British university degree is easily cheaper than a single semester of American college! Considering that over here they're already talking about how education at that price is becoming an elitist institution deepening class divides, why on Earth we aren't a little more upset over in the States is beyond me.

4. Funniest Moment of the Week: the Fresher's Photo

Most of the visiting students showed up to the Fresher's Photo session grumpy. Why? Because after weeks of being told otherwise multiple times, we had essentially found out at 10 o'clock that morning that we had to be in the picture. Not only that, but we had to be wearing proper sub fusc, the official academic dress of Oxford, which consists of black trousers, black socks, black shoes, a white collared top, the official academic gown, a mortarboard, and a tie/ribbon for the ladies. I saw these sets advertised for anything between £40 to £120 at all the varsity shops around town and kind of decided that, while it would be cool to be in the picture, it wasn't worth that much to me to get all this fancy gear for one photo. [Normally, proper Oxford students also are required to wear full sub fusc when doing other things like attending formal halls and taking exams, so it's worth it for them.]

Me in all my sub fusc-clad glory.

So basically all the visiting students were running around campus begging second-year students (especially their college parents) to borrow their sub fusc for the afternoon. After a four-hour scramble, I finally managed to assemble mine (expect my ribbon, which I can be seen in the group photo not wearing - ooops!). Getting perched on the top row of the bleachers in high heels was not helping my mood either. Then, it happened. All of the sudden, from one of the balconies in my building (directly opposite where we were arranged for our photo), a boom box started playing the Lion King theme, and about fifty second years in jungle animal onesies from Primark (and one spirited if puzzling participant in a neon banana suit) threw back the curtains on all the balconies and started dancing along. After the photo was actually taken, the music started up again, finally hitting the chorus, and Rafiki was there thrusting Simba up into the sunlight, with an adoring crowd of costumed second years bowing down to the new king all over the quad. It was hilarious, and it wasn't even a tradition - just something the second years decided to do to welcome us into the fold. And it kind of made my day.

As far as I know, this is the only publicly available photo evidence of the event. But it was glorious, I promise.

5. Biggest Challenge of the Week: Getting through the dreaded reading list

I won't go on too much about how much work I had to do this last week - it would be thoroughly un-British of me, and you guys don't want to read about it. But just to put it into perspective with some numbers, I had 6 days to read upwards of 4000 pages of material (both primary texts, including the likes of Vilette, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Bleak House, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and Hard Times, and related criticism on all of them) and then write a 7 page essay on the Victorian lit and 7 page piece for my creative writing minor. It was a lot to do, especially in First Week when we were all still attempting to make friends and getting lost between St. Anne's and the English Faculty. But we all did it, and we did it looking forward immensely to the following weeks, where we'll have an average of 10-14 days to do our essay readings. I get to face the music and find out if any of it was any good when I have my first real tutorials tomorrow.

6. Oxford Discovery of the Week: the Covered Market

After I finished my essays and passed them in, I decided to celebrate my achievement with a celebratory wander around town to find something cool and de-stressing to occupy my free afternoon. A mixture of vaguely remembered suggestions from other students to go, along with a degree of chance, led me to Oxford's covered market, a place very much frozen in time in the coolest way possible.

And when I say frozen in time, I mean there were rabbits and pheasants hanging in the butcher's window.

Running up and down each side of the miniature streets were tiny shops with wide glass windows, giving passerby a peek into processes like wedding cakes being decorated, and butchers chopping up their wares for sale.

Welcome to the Covered Market! Standing room only.

I went a little crazy with the pictures when I found the cake shop.

I mean, this is a cake.

So is this. All of it.

One of the most delightful things I discovered in the covered market was an ancient pie shop, where I got myself a little single serving British pie stuffed with lamb, potatoes, and rosemary. It was one of the most delicious things I've ever eaten. Truly. Next on my list to try? The classic pork pie.

I fully intended to take a picture showing the contents.
But the truth is as soon as I took a bite to open it up, I just sort of blinked and the whole thing was gone.
Next time, maybe, if I can restrain myself long enough.

If it weren't for how ridiculously bad they are for you (pie dough is generally not kind to the figure), I would be eating these things 24/7.

Of course, the British have a specific philosophy on the subject which would urge me to reconsider.

7. Place I Most Want to Return to When I Have More Time: Blackwell's Bookshop

There are many, many more books behind you in this picture. This is maybe 2/3 of the room.

I ended up peeking in at this world-famous purveyor of the written word on the way back from the Sports Center one night, and I only had about ten minutes to poke around before I had to get on the road again. But I did get to visit the famous Norrington Room, and underground bunker housing over 160,000 books and more than 3 miles of shelving to hold them all. They are world-famous, extensive, decently priced (after student discount), and as an English major, I get shivers up my spine being in the presence of so much written scholarship at once.

Plus, they love students (especially Oxford students).
It's kind of nice not to be in a constant fight with the campus bookstore for a change.

8. Coolest Club "Taster" Meeting: Oxford Aikido Soc

Aikido is a Japanese martial art which focuses on using your attacker's force and weight against them without having to add any of your own. For that reason, it's often recommended for women as a practical form of self-defense, since it does not require you to be bigger or more muscular than your opponent (it almost works better if you're not), and also because it focuses on getting yourself into a position of escape than physically challenging your opponent and seeking to incapacitate them by force. Instead of kicks, punches, and blocks, it consists of highly stylized moves (mini routines, really) you use to respond to specific kinds of attacks. I didn't bring my camera into the dojo out of respect, but if you're curious what it looks like, go ahead and poke around on Youtube - there's plenty of really awesome demonstration videos there. We only did very basic moves for the first session - learning the basic stance, trying out some knee-walking (incredibly painful!), and attempting a very simple exercise where you free yourself from a wrist grab. Even so, by the end of the session, I was sweating profusely and my legs and shoulders were on fire - the precision required in the movements is a good a workout as any!

Honorable mention for this category goes to the Oxford Company of Archers, the ranks of which I will be joining (for this term at least!) More on that later.

9. Most Looking Foward To: The Great London Rendezvous and Super Junior at Wembley

This category is definitely a tie, since I've been lucky enough to get a bunch of great news in the last few days. The short of it is that I'm going to be London-bound two weekends in a row in the coming weeks for equally amazing reasons.

First, I have a friend from home, S, who is studying abroad in Paris this semester. As chance would have it, he and his friends are going to be in London the same weekend I'm going to be there doing a tour of Parliament with IFSA. After some Facebooking back and forth and comparing dates and times, it seems like we're going to be able to meet up in London that afternoon and catch up! Two adventurers swapping stories over tea - I absolutely cannot wait.

Second, I found a wayward soul to come to see Super Junior with me, so it's officially settled - I will be taking the bus into London and crowding into Wembley stadium with close to 50,000 other E.L.F.s (members of Super Junior's fan club) to see the guys perform. It's going to be the logistical challenge to end all logistical challenges, but it's going to be an absolutely surreal night, I can already tell.

Kyuhyun, here I come!

* * *

Well, that's about all I have time for at the moment - that next round of primary texts for Victorian lit aren't going to read themselves. If you have a suggestion of someplace I should visit or some amazingly British experience I ought to have, go ahead and shoot me a message - I'm already compiling (and crossing things off of) my Oxford bucket list!