Oxford: the City

My jaw is nearly broken from yawning, and yet, I write. Inside, all is silence. The stairways stop creaking. The shower timidly stops the waterflow through the pipes, and throws its doors open wide to allow a soothingly theraputic humidity out into the hall. The roomate lies still as a curled-up statue buried and swathed in muffling bedclothes.

Outside, there is life. The great clock tolls at the quarter-hour, every quarter-hour. Street musicians drone their soulful songs in tones of piercingly complicated rhythms. Small parties of pub-and-club-goers [read: college students] dance [read: stagger] through the alleys - dark and deserted - to join their fellow merrymakers [read: more college students] for a friendly pint [read:one too many to count]. Amusing entertainment for the curious observer!

As a whole, Oxford city is quite beautiful. The architecture is AMAZING, lots and lots of old Romanesque and Gothic buildings, all in stone, scattered about with tiny, twisting, cobblestone lanes scurrying in between them. [ I am taking pictures, but somehow we're experiencing a bit of operator failure with posting pix, sooo ... the management excuses itself with a thousand apologies, and hopes to remedy the situation in the near future. ] There is a covered market down the road, where you will find not only fresh fruits and vegetables, but also a butcher's shop (with fresh meat hanging from the ceiling!), a fish shop (smelly), a CHEESE shop (soooo tempting, but very expensive), a milkshake shop, a hat shop, a cake shop (where it looks like they specialize in fondant figures, which is super cool!), and a cobbler's shop, as well as accessory shops, eateries, and a crepe stand. Savory AND sweet. Yum. :D

There really are street musicians; I don't know how qualified the majority of them are, but they will open their guitar cases and set out a donation cup and start singing! Some are better than others; some set up on prominent corners with microphones and such, others just sit down on the ledge of some building and start strumming away. It's lots of fun when you are walking down the road, among throngs of really-well-dressed people with amazing accents, and all of a sudden, from out of the blue you hear a song you know and love and can sing to :) - not that I speak from experience, of course!

And they really do have red call boxes scattered throughout the city. And their adorable red mailboxes. And the crazy red double-decker buses, though most of them are actually single-decker and a lot are green. And everyone bikes all around, and the bikers are very aggressive drivers, so it's almost more dangerous to step out into the road in front of a bike than a bus ... again, not that I speak from experience or anything!

And a friend and I were walking around and we stepped into a Barbour shop, which is a very famous British company that sells a lot of winter/fall/cold/farming clothing and gear, such as warm scarves and gloves and big plastic-coated jackets and such, often associated with Hunter wellies. And the really cool thing, which I had not realized before, was that the Barbour company has recieved three separate recognitions or awards from members of the Royal family, including the Queen, the Duke of ... I think the saleslady said York ... ? and the Duke of Wales! She even showed us one of the jackets that the Queen herself wears! Which was super, super cool; and I was very much surprised, because it didn't seem like a queenly sort of jacket to wear (though it was expensive enough!) but hypothetically speaking, I could just go and buy the exact same coat that the Queen of England has, tucked into her mud-room closet somewhere! Can you imagine?

Tonight, a few of us girls went out to an Irish pub (ironically enough!) for dinner, and I had my first legally-bought-though-under-age drink, which wasa really cool feeling. :D A lot of the girls were having smirnoffs or rum-and-coke, but I bought a glass of merlot, and it was really really good. And no, I didn't start singing The Wild Colonial Boy or dancing on the table or anything like that; I'm saving that for end-of-semester ;)

Anyway, ought to toddle off to bed ... tomorrow, we have our first field trip, to Gloucester and Berkeley. PHOTOS!

Missing all of you! Hope everything is going well; don't forget to email!

~ C :)