Counting Down from Seven

With just one week left, Oxford seems sad to see me go, as it's been dumping buckets almost nonstop since I last posted. I've got four things left on my Oxford bucket list as of today, with plans to finish it up in the next few days. In addition to a wrap-up post once I land in the States (on which the pressure to say something profound and yet not oversimplifying will be massive), I'm hoping to whip up a little user's guide to Oxford for anyone curious about the best spots to go. But for now, trapped in the throes of my final essay crisis, I'm afraid this is just going to be the tickertape of the past two weeks, and all the ways in which my friends here have helped to send me off the Oxford way.

It's worth mentioning, perhaps, that while it has been truly amazing going through all these Oxford traditions, I am a little excited from an academic standpoint to be heading back to a place where I have the room to stretch my legs and be a bit more radical in my research. As an English major, I came to Oxford with an eye towards figuring out what Mastermind would call my "specialist subject," and after months and months of a neverending crash course on the early modern classics, I think I've finally found my niche in the fiction (particularly the science fiction) of the Modern and Postmodern era, i.e. about 1900 onwards. There's no indication that something should be your grad school specialization like being able, at the mere mention of your subject or a harmless inquiry about "how your research is going", to whip yourself up into a such a frenzy of academic excitement that you can animatedly talk on and on about the nuances of it and the essay about it you read for fun the other day long after your poor conversation partner's eyes have glazed over and they're regretting having brought it up. Science fiction does that for me, but of course, Oxford is not necessarily the place where cutting-edge science fiction criticism is being produced; indeed, most of the material studied expertly in the City of Dreaming Spires is from a time in which people were still calling Oxford "the City of Dreaming Spires" unironically.

Still, there's no skill more valuable than appreciating what you have while you still have it. So without further adieu, here's 5 more Oxford traditions and end-of-year festivities that my friends helped me to celebrate.

1. Punting on the river Isis

The gang, ready for launch.

The rain held off just long enough on the Sunday we had booked for us to get in on another Oxford tradition by going "punting" on the river Isis. Punting is not entirely unlike navigating a gondola through the canals of Venice, with the possible differences of that navigation being achieved through a pole/paddle combo versus an oar, the Isis being slightly wider than most Venetian canals, and that while "gondoliering" summons up images of a romantic moonlit paddle, "punting" has the unfortunate sound of a much ruder word than it is. Most Oxford colleges either own punts which are kept at their college boathouse, or subsidize their students renting them at public boathouses. Thus, it's a pretty classical Oxford scene in Trinity term to see students puttering up and down the river in the wide, nearly-impossible-to-flip-over boats, drinking Pimms (a very alcoholic lemonade-like drink), eating strawberries and cream, and possibly even reading out some mood poetry to one another. One punt we passed even had a gramophone in it, bleating out old tunes.

Arming ourselves with the tools of the trade.

Watching the world float by.
Or, more specifically, Uni Parks, which the Isis runs through.

Me in the paddler's seat, trying to keep us from rocketing madly into the bank
while also posing for a picture.

All of us being first-time punters, we eschewed these traditional accessories for fear we'd tip our boat and be forced to go bobbing for strawberries. It took us a good fifteen minutes to make it past the dock - it looks a lot easier than it is! The trick lies in proper coordination between the punter, the one using the pole to push off the bottom of the river and propel the boat, and the paddler, who sits in the front and corrects for the boat drifting one way or the other. Not having quite got the hang of this coordination, we had an early mishap in which we put ourselves straight into the thick of a low-hanging tree and our valiant first punter, RA, became a victim of our ineptitude when she was knocked clear off the punt and into the water.

It was not the only time we found ourselves in that situation.
At several points, everyone in the boat had to lay down flat (punter and paddler included)
to allow low-hanging branches to pass over us.

As we went on, we were much less violent and ambitious with our propulsion and steering, and thus managed to avoid anyone else going for a swim. All in all, the trip was a relative success considering our inexperience, and we celebrated our mastery of the learning curve with "Mr. Whippy," a kind of British analogue for soft serve which tastes far more like a mix of Cool Whip, marshmallow fluff, and the frosting on ice cream cakes than anything.

It's odd - a lot of ice cream in Europe is always vanilla,
and then just has toppings to flavor it, like chocolate sauce or,
as demonstrated, a Cadbury chocolate flake.

2. Going-Away Ice Cream Shindig (introduced by the Oxford Open Orchestra final concert)

The Friday of Fifth Week found me performing my swan song with the Oxford Open Orchestra (a truly lovely bunch of people, if anyone has any interest in playing an instrument in a low-stress, high-camaraderie environment). Luckily, the fact that that song was the same "Pirates of the Caribbean" medley I had played at my high school and middle school graduations lent a sense of genuine fun and nostalgia to bringing this part of my Oxford life to a close. I didn't get video of the performance (which included a lovely rendition of Pachabel's Canon by our string quartet!), but there's a brief rehearsal clip to be found in my last post, and if you're really keen on the full effect, here's the first movement of Romeo and Juliet, the Pirates medley, and Pachabel performed by other folks. I shamefully have no photo evidence of this event, as it was a bit rushed and shoved in between two back-to-back-tutorials and...

...my semi-celebratory going-away shindig, at which enormous amounts of ice cream and fix'ins were consumed. I actually had tremendous trouble finding the classic elements of American ice cream sundaes - chocolate chips and sprinkles came in tiny 3oz bags, Hershey's chocolate was only to be found in the American comfort food section, and maraschino cherries were conspicuously missing from the shelves entirely. As consolation, I cooked up some American-style box mix brownies and plied my guests with those and a strange assortment of British sweets. Perhaps most troubling was the whipped cream, which found very disturbingly marked instead as this.

Beyond that, we danced a bit, played a rousing game of Apples to Apples while adopting outlandish accents, and laughed a lot. I was having so much fun that the only photo evidence I have of this event is as follows:

3. Summer Eights

Just before this photo was taken, the crew had expertly navigated the boat out of the boathouse and into the water.
Just after this picture was taken, each member of the crew chugged a pint before pushing off the dock.
Such is the spirit of the Summer Eights.

The next morning, we were all up bright and early to grab brunch before booking it down to the river to catch some St. Anne's boats rowing in the Summer Eights. The Summer Eights are a series of "bumps" rowing races on the Isis held every Trinity term. The first, second, and third string rowing teams of each Oxford college are pitted against the others in a race whose object is to "bump" the boat in front of them. The definition of "bump" was rather excitingly explained to me as meaning an actual collision would take place between the boats. In reality, the boats all start out a certain distance from one another, and instead of trying to cross the finish line first, the object is to have the bow of your boat overtake the aft of the boat in front of you, the reward being that when the race is repeated the next day, your boat will start in front of the boat you "bumped."

Still, it's pretty thrilling stuff. I managed to catch two of my friends racing, one a rower on the Women's Thirds, and the other a coxswain (colloquially referred to as a "cox" to allow for the maximum amount of innuendo) of the Men's Seconds. Here's the Anne's Women's Thirds rowing their way clear of a bump.

Aside from the excitement of the actual races, the commentator was a dry wit who incorporated pop culture references into each announcement. All sorts were wandering up and down the bank - some students in their pajamas cheering on their friends and getting blasted on Pimms, and some posh older folk who may have had stakes in the race. Even the ducks seemed to know what day it was, and had vacated the river, lining up along its banks as if to watch while waiting for the hullabaloo to die down. A highlight was seeing the college boathouses all decked out colorful, encouraging banners.

...or, you know, mildly sacrilegious ones, in the case of Jesus College.

4. Improv Comedy by the Oxford Imps

My Brit friend K went to see these Oxford gems the week before and immediately sought me out to convince me to come along to the next one. I'm a big fan of the improv group at my home institution, and it sounded like a lovely Monday night out, so I chugged through my essay and headed down to the Wheatsheaf pub, where they perform every Monday night.

The show itself did not disappoint. For that night only, they had an improv group from a Dutch university guest-performing with them, and the results were magnificent. All the Dutch improvisers were fully bilingual, which added depth to some games - in one game where one member must act out a scene to get the other to guess a certain word, in which the mime is typically silent, the Dutch improvisers were allowed to talk while miming... but only in Dutch. The Imps also had a clear affinity for musical improv, as some of their most impressive sketches included a scene, prompted only by the suggestion that it take place in a cave, which at random intervals would be interrupted by a beatbox rhythm, at which point the scene would have to continue in flawless gangster rap. The grand finale of the evening was an entirely improvised five-act musical, which started from the prompt that be set in a pub and evolved into a complex show about feminism being about gender equality and not misandry. My other favorite part of the night was the sheer number of times the Imps solicited suggestions from the audience under the category of "literary genre." Only at Oxford would a crowd going to see an improv show on a Monday night be able to think of as many pretentious literary genres as we did.

5. The Oxford Shakespeare Festival's Trinity garden plays

Every year, when Spring comes around again and outside is slightly warmer and slightly greener than it is already in the so-called "winter", the weeklong Shakespeare Festival fills the college gardens of Oxford with aspiring student thespians giving renditions of the Bard's best stuff while surrounded by the most manicured flora their college's endowment can buy. It's also a great excuse to get a sneak peak at parts of certain colleges which may not be accessible during public tours, and that was half of my intention in selecting Worcester College's As You Like It and Christ Church's Othello as the ones out of the panoply I'd attend.

As You Like It is set mostly in the magical Forest of Arden, which harbors a Robin Hood-esque banished Duke and his merry men for the duration of the play. Thus it was strangely appropriate to have the play performed in a cleared-out thicket in the depths of the famously extensive and luxurious Worcester College gardens, which include an entire private lake for the students' amusement. It was an all-female production (a difficult choice for a play in which there is so much gender-bending), and the production worked hard to be as green as possible, with all the costumes and all the paper for the scripts, flyers, and programs being recycled. It was a fun rendition of a difficult, lesser-known play.

Worcester is pretty gorgeous right from the get-go.

It has the architectural dignity of a venerable college.

The path leading up to the clearing.

All the world's a stage, I suppose.
(Fun fact: As You Like It is where that line is from!)

Over at Christ Church, the show on tap was Othello, my favorite, and so I went in with a lot of expectations. The show, performed in the Christ Church cathedral garden, just off the main quad, was brilliant in its use and reuse of minimal sets - with only a table and chairs on one side, where primarily revelry would take place, and Desdemona's bedroom on the other side, the play was organized into a steady drift from the carefree happiness of scenes taking place at the table to the ominous and unsettling escalations which take place in the bedroom. There's some symbolism involved there, but I'm too tired to parse it out. Instead, here's a photo of what the Christ Church front quad looks like.

Now look at this and tell me that this is not what Peter Jackson based the Minas Tirith "Tree of Kings" courtyard on.

My favorite details of the play? The opening scene, in which Iago and Rodrigo call up to Desdemona's father, resulting in a third-story window opening in the college building which served as backdrop and an actor poking his head out to deliver his opening lines; the directorial decision to have Rodrigo sharpening his sword at key percussive moments as Desdemona sings her lullaby before bed; and the secondary characters in general, like Rodrigo, who emerged the unexpected shining stars of an already stellar production. My least favorite moment of the play? Someone's cell phone going off immediately after Othello asks Desdemona if she has prayed tonight, which anyone who's read or seen Othello will know is pretty much in the top three moments at which you hope no one's phone is going to go off.

The table and chairs portion of the set...

...aaand the bedroom.

Fun fact: if each of the 38 Oxford colleges did their part, the University could put on every Shakespeare play for which we have a script, every single year!

* * *

As I said, I'm planning on a "best of Oxford" post at some point next week, so to any Oxford students reading this: send me suggestions for cool places/activities/traditions to include! I am only mortal, and have only had my own experiences here. The greater the input, the better.

Do stay tuned - as The Bravery might say, "This is not the end!" I've still got some pretty radical stuff crammed into my schedule for this last week. There's not a moment to be wasted moping at this point, and as such, I am contenting myself with the happy delusions that I will see everyone here again soon, that I will be back in the UK (maybe even in Oxford) in no time, and that seven days is a lifetime. As Kurt Vonnegut begins his novel Cat's Cradle:

"Live by the foma* that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.

*Harmless untruths."