We are the Champions

So sorry again for the late update here. This past week and a half has been a completely hectic whirlwind, but in the best way possible. As such, I'll just hit some of the high points, but believe me, that should be enough for both of us.

Last Friday, two older Rhodies were back in town to defend their DPhil theses. Lucas (Economics) and Sarah (International Relations) were four years older than us and had both been on our panel at the Bon Voyage Weekend in DC, and Joe and I had really hit it off with them. So when we heard that they'd be back in Oxford and would be finishing up their respective PhDs, we offered to throw them a party at Joe's apartment to celebrate. It was pretty casual, and we had about 40 people standing around drinking wine and eating snacks, so imagine our surprise when the doorbell rang at about 11 pm and I opened the door to find two bobbies! That is, British cops.

After I lowered my heart rate, I found Joe in the crowd and sent him out to talk to the officers. They were more sheepish than anything; apparently, they'd gotten a call with a noise complaint and showed up expecting a rowdy undergraduate party with bumping speakers and underage drinking, and weren't at all prepared for a room full of 20something nerds. They even apologized to us in the end! After some investigation the next morning, we learned that it was a French girl who lived downstairs that called the cops on our rowdy wine and cheese gathering. Joe seems to get along with pretty much everyone except for the entire country of France, so I couldn't help laughing when he told me the story of going downstairs to knock on her door and having to talk to her through it (she apparently wouldn't open it because she thought he was "too physically imposing" and even threatened to call the cops again!). According to the disgruntled Frenchie, people walking around in Joe's apartment sound like "elephants", and any group of people in the kitchen just leads to unbearable noise in her bedroom. Angst over this indignity had apparently been building up for some time, and had come to a breaking point on Friday night. After promising to ask everyone to remove their shoes and evenly disperse through other parts of the apartment, Joe exacted a promise from la francaise that next time she thought we were being loud upstairs, she would knock on the door like an adult, and not waste the poor cops' time. On a side note, Lucas and Sarah felt super impressive, and kept spinning longer and longer yarns about the time they'd had a DPhil party so rowdy that the cops had to be called :) 

People ended up staying past midnight, so I was already tired when I had to get up the next morning early to head down to the Isis (the Oxford branch of the Thames) in order to take part in my first rowing regatta. Rowing is a huge deal at Oxford, and although I'd been planning on avoiding all athletic activity while here, I ended up deciding that I'd at least try out rowing for the novice fall term, when no experienced rowers are allowed to compete. I was actually a bit nervous for the Nephthys regatta on Saturday, because the girl who rowed "stroke" (that is, the seat in the boat closest the coxswain, who sets the rhythm for the rest of the rowers) in our Novice A boat had gotten hurt earlier in the week, and I'd been promoted to stroke with only one practice under my belt before the competition. Because Nephythys is an all-novice regatta, they don't do the traditional "bumps" racing where boats actually try to crash into one another. Rather, it's a side-by-side knockout bracket, where two teams race head-to-head and the fastest team advances to the next round until the finals. Our first race was somewhat of a disaster, with everyone out of time and "catching crabs" - go to the 12 second mark of this video for a visual representation of what that means http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_AqOPdgj3c - in words, basically the angle of your oar/"blade" in the water is incorrect, and the momentum of the boat wrenches it out of your hands. Somehow, we still won, and by the time our next race came around, we were much more relaxed and confident. We raced Wolfson, which is an all-graduate college that normally has a good squad, but we won a close race to move on to the semi-finals. In that race, we rowed against the top boat from New College, with my friend Nina on board. We had probably the worst start in history; I missed a stroke and we were all off-rhythym, so one girl caught a crab so badly that the rower behind her had to stop rowing, reach around, and help her free her oar from the water. As a result, we were left rowing with 6 people and the added resistance of a blade stuck in the water for almost 10 strokes, and we were an entire boatlength behind after 200 meters of a 750 meter race. Somehow, though, we started gaining on the other boat, and as we realized we were catching up, we started rowing faster. By the end, we won by a few feet, and our coach admitted that it was possibly the best comeback he'd ever seen. Now, I'm normally one of the most competitive people around, but I haven't been super invested in rowing here...still, MAN, did it feel good to come back and win that race! Almost directly afterwards we had to hop back in the boat for the final against Lincoln College, which has been Brasenose's rival in pretty much everything for centuries. But coming off the euphoria of such a great win, they really had no chance of winning, and we ended up taking the final by more than half a boatlength. Here are some pictures of the whole shebang, for those of you who (like me until last week) have never seen a regatta:

I had planned to do work on Saturday afternoon, but was so tired and cold after a day out on the river that I ended up just curling up in bed with some Netflix. Then I headed to Joe's apartment, where we hosted the cooking club in making some delicious Indian food for dinner (and apple cobbler, which is not Indian but is still delicious). Sunday was devoted to doing work all day, because I knew that the upcoming week would be a crazy one, for two reasons: American Thanksgiving and Christ Church Regatta.

You see, it's a tradition at the Rhodes House for American Rhodies to host a Thanksgiving dinner for everyone, and this tradition has grown and grown over the years. Nowadays, it ends up being an extravaganza, with almost 150 people showing up to eat and drink together. Somehow, I managed to get myself put in charge of food, along with my friend Annie. Now, I love to cook, and I've cooked for rather large groups before, but that was in the range of 30-50. The sheer level of mathematics required to scale all of the recipes for 150 people and then determine what ingredients we would need was mind boggling! Luckily, Annie and I had some serious help. Joe orchestrated a grocery run to Croughton, a military base nearby that has a commissary that is basically a Costco without taxes, so we were able to get the ridiculous amounts (read: 96 lbs of turkey, 70 lbs of potatoes, 30 baking trays) of the things we needed for very low prices. We also coordinated an attack on the farmer's market in Oxford, which allowed us to procure the large amounts of fresh produce we needed by Wednesday.

Over the course of the same week was Christ Church Regatta, which is the main event of novice rowing. Nephythys is really just a warmup, so although we had gained some respect by winning it, pretty much every other crew was now gunning to knock us out of the next competition. Our first race was on Wednesday, and I was pretty nervous, only because I knew that we absolutely had to win. "Why, in a double elimination competition, would one race be so important?" you may ask... Answer: if we'd lost on Wednesday, we would've had to row on Thursday, and I knew that under no circumstances would I have time to take off from cooking on Thursday to make it down to the river to race.

As a result of the confluence of Christ Church and Thanksgiving, my day looked something like this: two hours of Chinese class in the morning in North Oxford, a quick sandwich grabbed on my way to the boathouse on the south side of the city, a race that we won by multiple boatlengths (hallelujah!), and then running by the farmers' market to grab even more produce before locking myself in the Rhodes House kitchen all afternoon to do the "make ahead" dishes like cranberry sauce, quinoa, and salad, with Annie and a few volunteers. Then a meeting and dinner...I was supposed to go meet friends at a pub, but I ended up bailing at the last minute to go to bed at the ripe hour of 10 pm.

I gave thanks for my early bedtime the next morning, when I got up early to head to the Rhodes House. Remember when I mentioned earlier those 70 lbs of potatoes? Well, those look something like this:

and allllllllll of them had to be peeled for mashed potatoes, candied yams, and sweet potato casserole. Since we only had three potato peelers, Annie, Rhiana (the kindhearted Rhodie who'd donated her potato recipes and sanity to the cause), and I had decided to just show up at 8 am and get to work. We blared Christmas music and went to town, and somehow when the first volunteers arrived for the cooking shift at 11 am, all but about 5 pounds were complete. We were more than happy to pass off the peelers to new folks, and we set about orchestrating the preparation of all of the dishes.

Over the course of the next few hours, it was amazing to see everything come together. We'd put together an insanely organized schedule, which listed what needed to be done hour by hour, and somehow we ended up ahead on pretty much everything. Since I'm the louder of the two kitchen leaders and I tend to be much bossier than Annie, I became in charge of crowd control, and directed the volunteers to help with different things. We got the turkeys in the ovens on time, and were moving forward at breakneck speed with the different sides, when we hit a snag. You see, the Rhodes House has a full catering kitchen, with top of the line appliances that just happen to be gas-powered. As such, British law requires that there be an emergency gas shutoff button somewhere in the kitchen. Unfortunately, it was located right near the spot we'd stacked all of our ingredients, so no less than three times, someone hit it accidentally....which then turned everything off, requiring us to wait ten minutes before turning everything back on and warming the ovens back up. When you're trying to cook 96 pounds of turkey in a timely manner, this is much less than ideal. At 1:45, when I had to leave for class, I instructed everyone to just keep assembling all of the side dishes that needed to be put in the oven, in the hopes that the turkey would eventually be finished and we could knock everything out in successive shifts.

Unfortunately, when I came back at 3:15, it still looked as if the turkeys would take much longer than we'd intended. Still, we forged ahead assembling the oven dishes and making as many stovetop things as we could, watching the clock warily as it ticked closer and closer to 7, when everything was supposed to be served.

The turkey wasn't finally finished until 5:45, so we contracted out some of the side dishes to people with apartments (and therefore ovens) near the Rhodes House, and then just tried to get everything as hot as possible in as short a time as possible. We also had access to some catering dish warmers, so we ended up throwing the mashed potatoes and other things we'd made on the stovetop in there to keep them hot rather than using up precious oven space. Somehow, though, we were able to bring everything out at 7, even if some of the rolls were a bit less than crispy and the onions on the greenbean casserole weren't perfectly crunchy. We had quite a spread: salad, quinoa salad, turkey, cranberry sauce, two types of stuffing, mac n cheese, wilted spinach, sweet potato casserole, mashed potatoes, candied yams, a lentil-cashew vegetarian dish, and rolls. And although I was holding my breath until everyone had gone through the line, we even had leftovers! Once all of the guests were finally sitting down and eating, I could finally relax and enjoy myself. Some photos from the festivities:

 Annie and I, with our pride and joy, the prettiest turkey there ever was!

Joe the cleanup director with the kitchen chair

Since Joe was in charge of the cleanup and I was under strict orders not to lift a finger the rest of the night, once dinner service had gone through, I was able to just relax and enjoy my dinner with everyone. This year was my first Thanksgiving away from my family, but I'm so lucky to have a great group of friends here to spend it with, and I couldn't be happier about it. I also couldn't have been more tired after a crazy day of cooking...I fell asleep sitting on the couch in the middle of a conversation that night!

We even had enough leftovers for dinner again, so the next night,  we invited all of the main volunteers to Joe's house for Thanksgiving round two, and followed it up with a trip to see the new Hunger Games movie in the theater around the corner. Cultural note: in the UK, the schedule may say that a movie starts at 9:30 pm, but it will be preceded by so many commercials and previews that the actual film won't start until literally 40 minutes after that time!

Saturday was the final day of the regatta, and after we absolutely crushed a B team boat from St. Anne's College on Friday, we were through to the 4th round on Saturday morning. We started the day off with a fairly easy win, and then met a strong boat from St. Anne's in the quarterfinal, which we barely squeaked by. Green Templeton College, which was the squad we'd beaten on Wednesday, had fought their way back through the losers' bracket to face us again in the semis, but we held them off again, and then it was back to another final against Lincoln College, who'd proven themselves to be the best other novice boat in Oxford by far.

I honestly still don't quite know what to say about the final. We rowed a great race, and it was so close and so difficult at the end that no one can really say who won. The marshalls ended up deciding in Lincoln's favor, but I was so proud of how well we'd rowed (and was so tired that I knew I couldn't have done anything more) that I wasn't even upset.

After all, it may have been the end of my rowing career, but after a week when I'd already won a regatta and had pulled off helping to organize a Thanksgiving dinner for 150 people, I was confident that I was already a champion.