A Weekend in London

Last weekend I went to visit London!  I have some friends from AU studying abroad in there, so I went to see them.  I was only there for a weekend, but it was good to catch up with my friends and see some familiar faces!

Trafalgar Square.  The column in the center is "Nelson's Column," in honor of Lord Nelson who defeated Napoleon.  Ironically, if you got to Paris, they have a huge tomb honoring Napoleon!

My friend Chris and I at the foot of Nelson's Column.

The view from Trafalgar Square.

Big Ben and Westminster Abbey.  We couldn't go in, but at least we got to see them from the outside.  And, when we were checking them out we saw...

... Prime Minister Gordon Brown (right) and French President Nicholas Sarkozy!

Me at Big Ben!

The London Eye.

On Saturday we went to St. Paul's Cathedral to enjoy the view.  St. Paul's is over 1400 years old, but the building was severely damaged in the Great Fire of London in 1666, so this cathedral is not the original one. 

The weekend I was in town, we had beautiful weather!

A view from the top of St. Paul's.  We climbed 583 steps up to the top, that's a total of 85 meters!

Then, we walked across the Millennium Bridge to visit the Globe Theatre! For those of you who don't know, I'm a big Shakespeare fan.  When I was younger, I used to perform in adaptations of Shakespeare plays in a local theater group so this was great for me to see!

This Globe Theater is not the original, because like St. Paul's, it was burnt down.  This recreation version was completed in 1997 and is authentic as historically possible.

  Note the flag pole at the top - in Elizabethan England, they would fly a flag to let Londoners know a play would be performed that day.  That's the only way the publicized a play - no posters or advertisements were used because so few people were literate!

The stage.  They still perform plays here. My friends and I talked about going to see one later this season!

The audience's seats.  This is where the "middle class" of the day would sit.  The poorest Londoners would stand on the ground to watch.

On Sunday, we went to Buckingham Palace!

Outside Buckingham Palace!

I also took the London Underground some places.  It's so much more extensive than the DC Metro!

As you can tell, I had a great weekend in London with my friends.  London's a great city and it was a much needed break from studying.  Oxford is great, but after a while you get cabin fever and need to get away from the libraries! I'll definitely be going back to London in the future!

Cambridge

Last Saturday, some friends and I decided to visit our 'rival' university, Cambridge.  Cambridge was founded in 1200s after a riot broke out in Oxford between the "townies" and the "gownies."  Fed up with the situation, some Oxford scholars left and founded a new university in the town of Cambridge.  Since then, Oxford and Cambridge have had a historic college rivalry, comparable only to the Harvard-Yale rivalry in the U.S.

After a 3 and a half hour-long bus ride we were all hungry, so we decided to start with lunch!

Our first stop was a visit to Corpus Christi College.  One of my friends from Oxford, Pavel, who is a visiting student from UMichigan, had some friends studying at Corpus Christi.  They were able to give us a tour around the rest of the town and get us in to some places that aren't supposed to be open to visitors!

Walking through Cambridge.  My friends Pavel (right) and Zhana (left) are also visiting students at Oxford.

"Hey! Don't take that picture!" (Honestly, I have no idea why I was making that face!)

The glare makes it hard to see, but on top of the big wheel is a giant bug.  This is a clock in the middle of Cambridge and the bug on top of it is supposed to symbolize wasting time.  The wheel moves clockwise, so it looks like the bug is eating time as you stare at it!

King's College, one of Cambridge's most famous colleges.  No one, by the way, is permitted to walk on the grass.  That's the rule at Oxford, too!

Some of our group at King's College.

 Me, on the other side of King's College quad.

The guys

(You can faintly see King's College in the background through the fog.)

The girls

St. John's College, another one of Cambridge's famous colleges.

Punting - an activity unique to Cambridge and Oxford.  Apparently, it's somewhat like a rowboat but much more difficult!  The bridge above is called the Bridge of Sighs.

The gang!

Every day is a Weekend and Other Midterm Reflections...

While you folks on the East Coast are snowed in and getting snow day upon snow day, life goes on here  on this side of the Atlantic.  It's week four of Hilary term, meaning that I'm halfway through my first term at Oxford University.  So, in honor of that, I thought I'd share some of reflections on my time here so far.

• Every day is a weekend here.  Since lectures are optional (and sometimes irrelevant to your tutorial), the distinction between class days and days off is blurred, so weekends don't have the same sanctity that they do back in the U.S.  Maybe that's what it's like to be retired...
• You can get £10 credit on your laundry card by putting a £5 note in the card machine.  This is obviously an error with the laundry card machine, but no student is going to complain!
• When I accidentally bump into some one on the street, I say "sorry" in an English accent.  My American friends and I decided that this was the best option, because this way we're not automatically labelled as the obnoxious American tourists.
• Because of the tutorial style education, the workload here is more consistent.  Instead of the semester building to a crescendo that culminates in lots of assignments at the end of the term, there's a steady amount of work all along. I haven't decided which I prefer yet.  This, in some ways, is more logical, though.
• My history tutorials typically require that I familiarize myself with 4-6 books per week.  Never again will I think reading one book a week for a course is a lot of work. 
• The Farmville craze is apparently not isolated to the U.S.  The other day I saw someone playing it here.  My opinion of Britain declined because of it.
• You can do a lot of sight-seeing by just going to pubs.   I've been to the Turf where Bill Clinton "smoked but did not inhale" weed while at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, to the Eagle and Child where C.S. Lewis and J.R.R Tolkein met to discuss the books they were writing, and to the Eagle (in Cambridge) where scientists Watson and Crick announced their discovery of DNA.
• They use A4 paper here, not 8.5"x11" paper.  A4 sheets are about an inch longer, but since essays here are defined by word limit and not page limits, it matters little.  Still, my papers stick out a little bit above the tops of my folders, which is a little weird.
• No one buys books here, or only on rare occasions.  Oxford University has about 100 libraries, so chances are there's multiple copies of the books you need and one is bound to be available for the week you need it for a tutorial.
• Oxford may be a college town, but very little stays open late and almost nothing is open 24 hours, not even the libraries!  Most stores close by 6pm, and even pubs close by midnight on Friday and Saturday nights.

Magdalen (pronounced "mawhdlin") Tower, one of my favorite buildings in Oxford.

An Education: Oxford Style

As many of you know, the reason I applied to be a visiting student at Oxford University was the rigor of their academic programs and their unique style of study.  What I don't think many of you are aware of, however, is what makes Oxford-style education such a contrast to a college education in the U.S.  Consider this post a description of what I'll be going through for the next few months.  After reading, you decide whether I'm a glutton for punishment or not.

Here at Oxford, the centerpiece of the education is the tutorial, not the classroom period.  Courses are organized under broad themes (i.e. British History, 1500-1700) and within that field, students are free to study and explore whatever topics they choose under the guidance of their tutors.  Students meet with their tutors once a week for their primary tutorial and every other week for their secondary tutorial. Each session runs about an hour long and is typically one-on-one.  In that way, it's somewhat like an independent study at an American institution.

That's where the similarities end, however.  In that tutorial, the student reads aloud to the tutor an essay (approximately 2000-2500 words, or 6-8 pages, in length) that the student has written in advance.  The essay is argumentative, seeking to answer a specific question that the tutor poses and is based upon the assigned reading list for that week.  Reading lists for history students can be about 5-10 books per week and from what I can tell so far, seem to focus on the historiography of a field.  (For all those who aren't historians reading this, that refers to the range of historical interpretations of a particular event or time period.)  No one reads everything on the list, just what's relevant to answering the essay question.  That's still a lot of reading, but it's great prep for graduate school!

Since the tutorial is so important here, lectures are secondary.  They are entirely optional; no attendance is taken.  Tutors don't necessarily recommend students attend unless the topics pertain to the tutorial topic for the week, either.  Unless specifically stated, though, lectures are open to anyone in the Oxford University community.  So, even though students only take two courses per term, you could attend nearly any lecture in any discipline if the topic appeals to you.  They only last 50 minutes, though, so not too much information can be covered in them.

So, the structure of an Oxford education is quite different from college in the states.  It's too early to say which I prefer, but the change of style should be a good challenge!

Oxford Photos

My student ID - I'm a real Oxford student!

Where I live. It's called the Isis Guest House. During the academic year (October-June), it houses St Edmund Hall students and in the summer, serves as a hotel.

My room. It's a single room with its own bathroom. AU folks, think of a Centennial suite with no roommates.

A roundabout street in town, somewhat like traffic circles in DC.

High Street, one of the main streets in Oxford.

The main quad at St. Edmund Hall.

The Bodleian Library, one of the world's greatest libraries. By law, it is required to hold every book ever copyrighted in the UK. It also has a very large collection of US and European books as well. It's basically the UK's Library of Congress.

The Radcliffe Camera, Oxford's first library building, and a popular place among history students to study.

Me!

Some things never change.