Escape from Oxford

My first term ended not with a bang, but a whimper. At least, until I departed grey, soggy England and got to experience fun, food, architecture, and good friends!

Then again, I’m probably getting ahead of myself. It would be better to first relate the (surprise, surprise) archaic, confusing, and generally stress-inducing procedures required to turn in my term paper. You see, all evaluated work at Oxford goes not through one’s department –that would be far too easy- but through the Exam Schools, a large and intimidating institution probably older than time. In order to turn in one paper, I had to print six different things, and have them categorized, stapled, enveloped, signed, and numbered in varying places. So stressed was I that I would somehow ruin it all and therefore fail my course (hey, I never said it was a legitimate stress) that I set myself a deadline of finishing the assignment a full three days before I was leaving Oxford, to allow for at least that many tries in actually getting the thing across the heavy wooden desk at the Exam Schools.

After a momentary panic that I was expected to turn my paper in wearing full subfusc, aka Harry Potter costume, I calmed my breathing and followed another blessedly plainclothed student up to the desk, filled out the requisite paperwork, and clutched the receipt proving I’d turned my assignment in with a death grip until I could get back to my room and take a photo to upload onto my computer in case something terrible happened. Then, telling myself I’d done more than my due diligence, I planned how to spend my last two days of my first term in Oxford with no academic obligations besides attendance in class.

After some rumination, I settled on spending the next day baking, both to enjoy leisurely cooking on my own schedule and to supply my friends with goodies to get them through their respective term papers, presentations, and exams. All Thursday after class, I listened to Christmas music and danced around the kitchen, making pecan pie, rice krispie treats, oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, and apple cobbler. I was rather tired by the end of it all, but it was totally worth it to see my friends dig in (Chris the Marine ate literally the entire pecan pie by himself and two Italians who’d never had Rice Krispie Treats tucked in like they were manna from heaven).

I regretted my post facto procrastination on Friday, however, when I was left running all of my end of term errands on the same day. On top of finishing packing, I had to go transfer money, exchange pounds for euro, Christmas shop, meet an undergrad for coffee, work on my consulting project, go to class and ASL, and have a meeting for Rhodes Ball planning. I did take some time out of the day to attend a very special service at Rhodes House, in memoriam of Nelson Mandela. The great South African leader lent his name to the Rhodes Trust in the early 2000’s, and a new scholarship program that sends students from South Africa to the United States for undergraduate education was started in his name. In addition, there are 9 South African Rhodes Scholars selected every year, so it was touching to hear those students and others talk about the impact Madiba has had on their lives and countries.

Somehow, I got everything finished in time, and was able to go enjoy the final Meet n Mingle of Michaelmas Term for a while. I specify only a while, because I had to get to bed early to try to get at least some sleep before getting up to catch a 3:45 am bus.

No, folks, that was not a typo. My friend Rachel Kolb and I had booked a ridiculously cheap flight to head to Faro, Portugal, to meet the other Rachel, Joe, and Kit for a weekend of Portuguese sun and relaxation. The funny thing about cheap flights, however, is that they tend to be cheap for a reason. In this case, the low price came from the fact the plane departed at 7 from London Luton, an airport on the other side of London from Oxford and a full two hour bus ride away. Therefore, I was dragging myself out of bed at 3 am and cursing budget airlines as I walked through the rain to the bus on Saturday morning. Luckily, both Rachels made it to the bus and got a little more sleep before we had to go through security and get breakfast at the airport.

Things were running smoothly until we got onto the aircraft, and then came to a screeching halt. In the space of a two-hour delay, I learned more about British air traffic control than I’d ever wished to know. You see, all of the London airports (Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, and Luton) are controlled by one central command. Because the control center uses such massive bandwidth to get flights in and out of all the airports during the day, it’s controlled by software that reduces frequencies at night to give the servers a break, and then revamps to full capacity in the mornings. Unfortunately, this particular morning was the one that some software glitch caused the revamping to fail and stay failed. In practice, this meant that the command center was struggling to get all of the flights out of all of the airports with only about 50% of their capacity available…in other words, every. Single. Flight. Was late!

Two girls starved for Vitamin D by British weather waited on bated breath for two hours, until we finally started to taxi out and could breathe again. I slept for most of the flight, and I woke up to stretches of teal and turquoise water and sun that made me blink with its brightness. When I got off the plane, the first thing I saw when my eyes adjusted was Rachel (who’s from New Mexico) doing a happy dance on the runway, arms wide and face upturned to the sun rays. When I stepped off the stairs, I had to join her for a brief moment before we abashedly looked at the disapproving Europeans and walked away with only big smiles to evidence our joy at the warmth and sunshine.

Despite our absolute lack of Portuguese language skills, we were easily able to get a taxi and find our way to the large church that served as the landmark for the house we’d rented. Then it only took minimal squinting at the map to navigate to the house, where I saw Joe sitting on the rooftop balcony and could easily flag him down to let us in. Rachel and I had originally intended to take a nap when we arrived, but the sun and excitement had rejuvenated us, so we walked around the city all afternoon instead, taking pictures, scoping out places for dinner, and stopping for coffee in outdoor cafes any time we felt our energy waning. When the sun finished setting over the marina, we headed back home to collect the studious members of our household and head to dinner.

We'd scouted out a tiny fish restaurant near the marina, which looked like it had delicious (and judging by the case out front, definitely fresh) fish dishes for reasonable prices, and everyone voted for enjoying some local seafood our first night in Portugal. And man, we weren't disappointed! I ordered the mackerel, and when it came, it looked like this:

and was just as delicious as the picture looks. All for only 10 Euros! The food was so good and the woman who owned the restaurant so nice that we decided to make our way back the next night. 

First, though, we needed to SLEEP. Rachel and I had been up for almost 18 straight hours by the time we finished eating, and we were more than happy to head straight home and crash. A fringe benefit of going to sleep at 10 pm was having a nice early wake up time naturally, which allowed me to cook a full breakfast and head out in search of coffee before everyone else had really started to move around. There was a moment of hilarity when I tried to ask for coffee "to go" at the cafes in town; apparently that is not something that normally happens in Portugal. Unsure of whether American or British English would be more useful, I walked in and out of three places asking, "To go? Taking away? Drink at home?!" before finally finding a woman who understood and gave me the coffees -in smoothie cups- with a smile. 

Rachel and I headed back into the city, charting another vector to the old Moorish quarter for our explorations. Faro is in the Algarve region of Portugal, and is pretty much the southernmost tip. It's a small city of less than 100,000 people, but has the distinction of being the historical seat of the Moorish empire in the area, which means there are beautiful old winding streets, walls, and gorgeous tile everywhere you look. We took many pictures over the course of our time there, and I can't include them all, but here are a few of the highlights: 

Around lunchtime, we headed back to the house to collect Joe and Rachel number three, who'd agreed to accompany us to the beach in order to have a little change of scenery for studying. Faro is bordered by a lot of small, sandy islands, and you can get a ferry out to spend a full or half day on the sand. Being a Carolina girl, I was ecstatic for the beach, and it did not disappoint. Although the 60 degree weather wasn't optimal for tanning, just looking for shells and basking in the sun made England feel millions of miles away. We stayed until the sun set, and took some more pictures, but I thought I'd include my favorite, of the three Rachels all together:

 Just to give you a full idea of the scenery, and how adorable my boyfriend Joe is, here are a few more:

With the sun setting came a 15 degree drop in temperature, so we hustled back to the relative safety of the last ferry leaving for the mainland. Back in Faro, we returned to our fish restaurant, where the woman greeted us enthusiastically and with just as much delicious food as the night before. Then we spent the night relaxing at home with the housemates, who were planning on leaving early the next morning to head back to Oxford and take the exam they'd been studying for all weekend.

Luckily, we had two Canadian friends, Laura and Joanne, who were coming into town that night to round out our little travel group. Although they'd originally intended to be in Faro the day before, the continuing problems from the air traffic control malfunction had canceled their flights, and we only heard that they'd arrived in Faro when we got back from dinner. They were exhausted after their frustrating travel experience, so we arranged to meet them at their hotel the next morning and encouraged them to rest up for a long day.

We'd already booked another apartment in Lisbon for the next night, so Rachel and I brainstormed which of Faro's highlights we wanted to see with them in their half day in Faro. Since the city had turned out to be so small and walkable, it wasn't too difficult to circumambulate, see all the highlights, and also go to the two main cathedrals in town, which we'd been saving to do with the girls. While we were there, we got to experience one of the weirdest/creepiest/most fascinating feature of some Portuguese churches: cathedrals of bones. Yes, bones. Like actually human skeletons! Apparently, Igreja de Carmo, the cathedral near our house, used to be the site of a monastery and had an extensive graveyard. During the 19th century, they'd been forced to demolish it, and rather than moving all of the graves, they exhumed the bones of past monks and incorporated skulls and large bones from over over 1,295 skeletons into a building in the gardens of the church. It is a chilling, solemn, and strangely beautiful place, reinforced by the inscription over the door, which reads "stop here and think of this fate that will befall you". I didn't take too many pictures, but here's one that gives you an idea of the place:

Once we'd left the Bone Chapel, we'd had our fill of Faro sightseeing, and time was creeping closer to our 3 pm train. So we found a cafe in an open plaza flooded with sunlight and ate lunch outside, enjoying the rays and chattering until we walked to the train station and relaxed for the three hour ride to Lisbon. At the train station, we managed to have a hilarious and slightly anachronistic adventure involving payphones, of all things.

You see, we'd rented an apartment using a website called VRBO, which is super useful for students traveling on a budget. You basically rent uninhabited apartments or houses instead of staying in hostels or hotels, and it's possible to find great deals and also enjoy amenities like kitchens and balconies in most cities in Europe. You work directly with the owners or property managers, which is normally great, except when they do things like require you to call them when you get off the train in a city where you have no access to a working phone. None of us could remember the last time we'd actually used a payphone, and of course the ones in the train station were all in Portuguese. We couldn't figure out why the earpiece kept beeping angrily at us and refusing to dial the number, until we realized that (for some inexplicable reason) including the Lisbon area code caused the call to fail. After about ten minutes of looking like monkeys trying to use typewriters in a very public place, we got through to the property manager, who obligingly met us at the building and let us in the third story walkup. The stairs were narrow and dark, but once we emerged into the three bedroom apartment, we were greeted with high ceilings, big windows, and cute, modern furnishings. We rejoiced, unpacked, and used the free wifi to confirm with all families and friends that we'd arrived safely before heading off in search of dinner.

We weren't too far from a posh district of Lisbon, and found a great tapas restaurant where we snacked on fried manchego cheese, Portuguese "tortillas", some version of hash browns, beans and rice, and a delicious flan for dessert. We walked around peering in the windows of shops for a while, and then decided it prudent to head back to our warm apartment and snuggle up for the night, so as to get an early start the next day. We'd decided to walk for most of day, and so justified our morning breakfast of multiple pastries with all of the calories we'd undoubtedly be burning later on. And walk we did! We found our way down to the waterfront area, and followed the coastal road to the huge main square that marks the beginning of the historic districts of Lisbon.

We had pizza for lunch sitting out in the sun, and then wound our way up hills and steep stairs to the cathedral:

And then went to Caselo San Jorge, which is the old Moorish castle sitting on the hill above the city. It offered history, cool architecture, archaeological sites from still earlier times, and most importantly, absolutely beautiful views of Lisbon:

By the time we'd exhausted the castle, we'd also succeeded in exhausting ourselves, and headed back for a siesta before dinner. We'd decided to eat hamburgers (or veggie burgers, in my case) and then snuggle up to watch a Christmas movie that night, but our plan was partially foiled when we lost wifi in our apartment, so we ended up just laughing, chatting, and going to bed early...which was pretty much the recurring motif of my end of term travel, as it should be!

The next morning was a comedy of errors. We woke up and walked to the super market to find ingredients to cook breakfast, but the market was closed. Then we tried to throw together a makeshift meal from bread and fruit we had, and blew a fuse in our apartment...apparently, old Lisbon buildings don't allow for running a toaster and a hair dryer at the same time, which is less than optimal with four girls. We finally gave up and bought pastries again, and then hopped on a bus that was supposed to take us directly to Belem, another historic and beautiful area of the city that we'd planned to walk around. Somehow, we ended up riding a few stops too far, and then had to navigate mapless back to where we'd actually intended to go...only to find out that the old watch tower, which looked so commanding in the guidebooks, was actually quite a bit less imposing in real life:

We did end up sharing a good laugh and then food at a good restaurant for lunch nearby, although a lack of language skills on both sides of the counter led to me getting a chorizo sandwich instead of an egg one and therefore eating soup and bread for lunch instead of a hearty sandwich. We also walked through yet another glorious cathedral, and mosied our way back along the waterfront until it was time to catch a bus back to our apartment to collect the Rachels' stuff and head to the airport. RKolb was headed back to Oxford to regroup and repack to head home to New Mexico, and I was off to Zurich for my flight back to the United States. It was definitely a great weekend with some good friends, though! Here's my favorite picture of the four of us:

It may sound strange that I had to fly to Switzerland to in turn fly back to the US, but I can explain. You see, the impetus of this whole Portugal trip was a failure of another vacation. Joe and I had originally planned to spend a week in Switzerland at the end of term, and he was convinced (although I was not) that he'd be able to teach me to ski. So we'd gone as far as to book our flights back to the US from Switzerland instead of the UK, until the cruel announcement of a surprise exam ruined that plan. Luckily, I can say that Portugal was more than worth it in retrospect, which is further proof that things always somehow work out for the best.

The only downside to my readjustment of plans was that it now necessitated a late night flight to Zurich, a quick nap and shower at an airport hotel, and then an even quicker turnaround back to the international terminal for a 10 am flight to Atlanta and then to Washington DC. Every year there is a black tie dinner, or "dining out" in DC for all of the military Rhodes scholars and their dates, and I was going with Joe and taking the opportunity to visit friends in the city where I spent such a great summer. I was super excited, so the ten hour flight seemed to stretch out before me, only to be filled with movie watching, since I'd finished reading my book. We did land eventually, however, as planes tend to do. When I finally got through customs and the second round of security, I did what any good Southern girl returning from abroad would do....made a beeline for Chick Fil A. And man, did that chicken sandwich taste like freedom!

This post is long winded, even for me, so suffice it to say that my weekend in DC was a great one, with plenty of brunching, visiting friends, and schmoozing with older Rhodies. We even took the time to get a great picture of Joe, me, Kiley, and her boyfriend, Justin:

And at the end of it all, I caught a flight back to GSP and made it to my own bed by 11 pm last night. Now I'm off to enjoy my time back Stateside, and hopefully see some of you before I escape back to Oxford! I won't be taking time out of enjoying home to blog until I get back, so expect a synopsis in the New Year. Until then, Merry Christmas....or I guess now that I've lived in England, "Happy Christmas!"