Friends, New and Old

It's funny (and honestly a bit sappy), but I think that moving overseas and being completely out of your element is actually very effective in making you realize just who the most important people are in your life. And somehow, I've been lucky enough to have an amazing group of family and friends on both sides of The Pond! This week has definitely shown me that, more than anything else.

After I wrote last Wednesday, my week devolved into doing an obnoxious amount of work. As every student knows, every semester has some hidden bottleneck, some  random week that looks innocent enough from afar, but then ends up sneaking up and being an absolute pain in the...erm, neck. The week leading up to today out to be the one that snuck up on me (hence the late blog): on top of the usual reading load, last Friday I had a group presentation on discourse analysis (a field about which I know little), we had to turn in a research plan for our semester project in our Methods course on Monday, there was a peer-evaluation seminar that required preparation on critiquing four other essays today, my thesis supervisor wants to meet to get an outline of my dissertation, and tomorrow is naturally the day that I signed up to teach my Core Class seminar on China's economy.

So I probably shouldn't have that many fun stories to tell, in all honesty. I most likely should've spent the majority of the last week in the library. Although it is true that a hearty chunk of my time was spent working, I also took some time out to relax and spend time with people...hence the title of this post. Because in all honesty, despite the fact that these two years will give me two masters' degrees and I'm amazingly appreciative of that, I think that my experience is much more about getting to know the wonderful group of people with whom I've been put here, and truly enjoying the myriad experiences that Oxford/The UK/Europe has to offer.

In that interest, I attended a guest dinner at St. John's College with Joe on Friday night. St. John's, besides having the largest contingent of Rhodies of any of the Oxford colleges, is also the richest college by far, and is therefore legendary for the quality of their food and wine. In fact, as the Oxford myth goes, it has the second largest wine cellar in the world (next to Her Majesty the Queen, of course), which is stored in catacombs all underneath the college and contains over 140,000 bottles. So when they have "guest dinners", which entails the chef who normally only cooks for the Fellows of the college deigning himself to make dinner for the rest of us, it is quite an affair. Luckily, Joe was able to snap up some tickets before they were all sold out, and so were a few of our friends. Here's a picture of the ladies at the champagne reception before dinner (with Joe as the photographer):

 The actual four-course meal ended up being delicious, although the vegetarian entree turned out to be a strange risotto stew that was so dense that I didn't eat much of it. The stuffed portabella and salad beforehand and the nice souffle afterwards more than made up for it, however!

Saturday was the day in which I did most of my locking myself in the library, with a brief respite to go to my first rowing practice that was fully British. That is to say, it was cold and rainy and gross outside, and we still had to go out on the river! I made it through, but since have been seriously questioning whether rowing is something I want to be doing next term, in the dark and crappy days of February and March.

That night, however, we'd gotten tickets to go to a Guy Fawkes celebration day, partially in honor of my flatmate Heather's birthday, and partially just to witness the weird tradition itself. For those of you whose British history is a tad rusty (or nonexistent, which is understandable), there was an event called the Gunpowder Plot in the early 17th century, 1605 to be exact (I think). Basically, a group of Catholic radicals wanted to usurp the Protestant King, and so rented a room underneath Parliament and filled it with insane amounts of gunpowder, which they planned to use to blow the whole building sky-high. Somehow, an anonymous tip got out, and they were caught and sentenced to all of the gory punishments that medieval England had to offer for treasonous folk. One of them, however, named Guy Fawkes, managed to jump from the scaffold and kill himself before the goriest of things were applied to him, and so the King ordered that a day be set aside to celebrate England surviving the plot and insult Guy Fawkes's memory. There are usually fireworks and carnival type games, but the biggest event is a massive bonfire with an effigy on top, which is nowadays supposed to be Fawkes. I've heard rumors that in earlier days the effigy was intended to be the Pope, but since that's much more political than I particularly like to be, let's just stick with the modern-day interpretation. So although Saturday was a cold night and I couldn't find my gloves, we did see some lovely fireworks, and manage to get one (very devilish looking) picture with the huge bonfire in the background.

 Sunday was wholly and decidedly non-academic. You see, a good friend of mine from Wofford, who is awesome and also happens to be named Rachel, is doing her master's degree at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. And my friend Viraj has a girlfriend named Annie who is doing a semester at University College of London. This past weekend, Viraj decided to come visit Annie, and since Rachel had the weekend off from basketball, she flew down to London as well. Since I'm only 90 minutes away from the city, I obviously had to go along as well, and complete the four of us so that we'd have approximately 1% of a normal Wofford graduating class!

We were blessed with an absolutely ridiculously beautiful day. Although it was cold, it was clear and sunnier than I've seen Oxford pretty much since I've been here. I arrived too late to tag along on Rachel's tour of the Tower of London, so I plopped myself down in a cafe and did actually get some reading done for about 90 minutes until she found her way out of that historic castle (interestingly, also the site of Guy Fawkes's torture) and came to meet me. We decided to walk the pathway along the Thames, and see as many of the London sights as we could before our fingers got too cold and we'd have to stop for lunch. First was the Tower Bridge (which is actually NOT the same thing as the London Bridge, despite the larger American misperception):

 Then we managed to snap a Rachels selfie with Parliament in the background:

 And we got a good view of the London Eye, although we found ourselves disinclined to invest the money and hearty chunk of time waiting in line to actually ride it:

 And we wound up by Westminster Abbey, which was closed for Remembrance Day (British Veteran's Day), but was beautiful nonetheless:

 ..And afforded us a wonderful view of Big Ben!

 After lunch, we headed into the National Gallery to look at some paintings, since we're both fond of Impressionists, especially Monet. Viraj and Annie then came to join us, and we walked over to Buckingham Palace, where more pictures were taken. My camera was being finicky, so most of them are on Annie's or Rachel's cameras, but I did get one awkward fake couple picture with Viraj, who has gotten used to funny and awkward pictures with me over the last four years:

To get the full British experience, we ended up having a pint of cider together in a pub before heading our separate ways. And although it did make my week significantly more hectic, I would go back and do it again and again! It was so nice to have a little bit of home for even a day, and to have the opportunity to catch up with people who have been so important to me for the last few years but are now so far away.

Since then, I have had to buckle down significantly, so besides a few nights out to dinner with friends and the weekly Turf Tuesday with the Rhodies, I don't have many other exciting things to report. But yesterday, I did attend a "Rhodes Conversation", which is a series of small discussions we have to talk about what it means to be Rhodes Scholars and what our expectations should be for ourselves and others. The topic was, "What are we doing at Oxford?" and I smiled as I heard everyone talk about the holistic importance of being here, of sometimes blowing off your studies to go learn from people outside of the classroom, because that is what I've been doing all along.