Oxford: A Town of Scholars and Pubs, Week 1

Saturday Morning I left Biarritz and flew back into London Stanstead on RyanAir. The Paul’s offered up their flat in London for me to stay at that night before I headed up to Oxford.  Once I dropped off my bags in their flat, I explored the area around Victoria Station, and watched the Wimbledon Women’s Finals.  Later on that afternoon I meet up with some friends from UVA and we all went out to dinner at Nando’s.  I would recommend this restaurant to anyone looking for a nice chain chicken restaurant.  After dinner we all went to see the London’s Broadway performance of Wicked. Although I have seen it before, it is so amazingly well done and is by far my favorite of all the shows I have ever seen, that it was worth going to see again.  I then went back to the flat, did laundry, ironed clothes, and packed for the next morning’s departure to Oxford.

Saturday evening I had a hard time sleeping over my excitement about arriving at Oxford the following morning; I was like a little kid waiting to open presents on Christmas.  I met Reed, one of the guys I had went to Wicked with the previous evening, at the bus station just outside Victoria the following morning.  We were recommended to take the Oxford Tube from London into Oxford. It is a comfortable charter bus that runs every ten or twelve minutes and provides free wifi while on board and for only 11 pounds one way and 13 pounds round trip.  The wonderful thing too was that the stop was at Queen’s Lane, which is right in front of University College where we are staying.

Oxford is a beautiful town whose High Street is filled with many delicious cafes, sandwich shops, and upscale clothing and suit stores.  The University’s buildings are also truly gorgeous.  Their stone is a much lighter color than most other cold cobblestone buildings from other universities.  All of the buildings have beautiful window boxes and extremely well manicured lawns that make up each of the many quads within each of the colleges.

The University of Oxford is comprised of thirty-eight different colleges.  When a student applies to Oxford they apply into the perspective College where they want to study at. There are then undergrad and graduate students that study together in each of these thirty-eight Colleges.  The College functions at not only the sleeping hall for each of the students, but has its own chapel, library, dining hall, and classroom space.  Every college is basically the main social network for each of the students within that prospective college, an idea very different from most modern American universities.

We are staying at University College nicknamed Univ by those who study there.  It is the second oldest Colleges within the Oxford network and was founded in 1248.  The buildings that make up Univ now were built somewhere around the mid 1400s and have been updated and added onto since then.   As the pictures show it is a beautiful place to study.

After putting our bags in our rooms and getting settled in, the forty of us that are studying for the first of the two, three-week sessions all met up for a tour of Oxford.  Most of the students had flown in early that morning from the States and were suffering horribly from jet lag.  As Professor Thomas, the UVA professor in charge of organizing the event, lead us on a lengthy yet informative tour of the College and the Town of Oxford, some students actually fell asleep as they walked.

We returned for a much-needed dinner, went over notes for the following morning, and then headed downstairs to the beer cellar.  The beer cellar was this great little bar/lounge that is part of Univ College and offered drinks much cheaper than those in the local pubs.  It was great way to start to get to know everyone on a casual basis.  Soon however, everyone became exhausted and called it a night to rest up and get ready for the start of classes in the morning.

One of the tough things to realize when my alarm went off at 7:30 am that following morning was that the whole reason I came over to Europe for the summer was to take a class.  Traveling before lulled me into a false idea of what my summer was going to be; I had somehow convinced myself that Oxford was just three weeks of an already paid hotel.  I soon shook that idea off and embraced the class. I signed up to take the International Economics and Commerce class, and it ended up being fantastic and very informative.  We had class Monday thru Thurday from 8:30 til 10:30 in the morning and then we breaked for tea and cookies from 10:30 till 11.  The rest of the day was then ours.  How I managed to get three credit hours from Oxford based off a schedule like that, I could not tell you…

So after class on Monday we broke up into groups for two planned activities.  Jeff, Reed, Teddy and I headed out to the canals that ran through the town and went punting.  It was a little difficult to get used to at first, but once I got the hang of it, it was great fun.  The canal follows around the park and is crossed by beautiful bridges, lined with nice flowers, and filled with exciting animals.

We next had to go back to do a Univ scavenger hunt, much to our dismay.  This ended up being very informative as we got to learn a lot about the history of Univ and discover were things were all located.  Afterwards everyone went back to their rooms to clean up for our first formal dinner.  We had champagne in the Fellows Garden and mingled for a while.  We then went to the formal dining room and were served a delicious dinner.

The next day after classes ended we had a trip planned to visit Blenheim Palace.  It a two thousand acre plus estate given to the first Duke of Malborough from a grateful Great Britain after his military triumph against the French.  It was the birthplace of Sir Winston Churchill and has a lot of information about him, which was really interesting and a good addition to the War Rooms in London.  The sculpted formal gardens, rivers, and rose gardens were all really beautiful.

By the time Wednesday rolled around I was itching to go back to London (I missed it already.)  I managed to get a small group to go with me into the city.  We hoped on the Oxford Tube and went to Tate Britain.  Tate Britain had a really fascinating mix of modern and historical British art. It was free except for a few gallery rooms that you had to pay a few pounds for.  It was a great exhibit.

The four of us then walked around the streets of London and ate at an Italian restaurant for dinner.  We headed to see the musical Avenue Q, which is mixture of human and muppets.  It is really entertaining and funny but it was not my favorite of all the musicals I have seen.  It was a little too edgy in its jokes and one-liners and I wasn’t as fond of singing muppets as I have been of human actors.   We then left London around 10:30 and got back into Oxford just after midnight.  We had one more day left of class for the week then it was off to explore Edinburgh, Scotland for the weekend.