Snow?

So it's gotten a little colder here this week. Then yesterday, it started snowing. It was weird because I'd totally forgotten about it being winter at home. It's been nice not having to deal with boots and slush and all that. It didn't accumulate, and it stopped pretty quick, but so far I think we've been pretty lucky with the weather here. Hopefully I'll be able to avoid a real "winter" for the first time ever.

Bop

Last Saturday was our MCR's bop (in normal English that mean's our college graduate society's party). It was a Valentine's Day party, which was actually good because it meant there was no set costume, which is annoyingly standard at these parties. Of course our new social secretary decided to go all out as cupid, which meant a diaper and not much else (I'll resist posting a picture). It was fun, but Shahz and I had volunteered to help work the door/coat check, which ended up turning into two+ hours of madness as drunk people tried to get in without paying, and drink people tried to get out without knowing what their coats looked like. Imagine 100 or so coats, and everyone going "I don't know, it's kinda black." Here's a picture of me looking dissheveled by the end of it all, and the wonderfully organised coat sorting system behind me.

The good part was that we got to wear new clothes from our shopping excursion to Bicester Village. It's an outlet about a 1/2 hour outside of Oxford with a ton of designer shops at a big discount. Normally everything here is ridiculously expensive (food, electronics, beer, etc.), but these were some of the best deals I've seen on some designers like Ted Baker, whose store I'd walked by every day in NY last summer.

My new bike

So after five weeks, I finally caved and got a bike. It seems that this is the preferred way of getting around Oxford - everybody has one, and you even see old men riding around on them, and walking to school was taking a lot of time. There's a couple problems I had with this which prevented me from getting a bike. First is that I haven't ridden in about 12 years. Second, Oxford is a city. A city with a lot of buses. And on the way to school, there's this one tree next to a bike path that always has a bouquet of flowers taped to it. So it seems like it's not unheard of to get yourself hurt on these things. But I feel lucky... and England has socialised health care.

York trip

Last weekend we took a trip to York. York is a city in the north, half way between London and Edinburgh. York is a walled city - both the Romans and the medieval saxons built a huge stone wall around the entire city, with these huge gates. You can walk around on top of the wall in most places.






There was a Viking convention in York (we didn't actually see any people with horned helmets or anything - I was expecting it to be like a Capital One commercial), but it did make it hard to find a Bed and Breakfast. We stayed in "The Royal Dragon Hotel." Only it turned out the dragon wasn't the St. George, British type, but more the "Our bed and breakfast is above a Chinese restaurant."




On Saturday we toured York Minster which is a huge cathedral - it's bigger than St. Peter's in Rome, and inside it has a lot of really nice carvings and stained glass.






Then at night we went on a ghost walk, where they tell you about all the people who died in York due to the plague and other wonderful diseases, and how they still haunt the old houses.







York also had really great tea rooms, so we all had a lot of tea and scones with cream and jam.

The next day, we went on a walking tour, and had a really great lunch at the Blue Bicycle, a restaurant which used to be an old brothel. Then we headed back, and we had to stop in London at King's Cross station. This was the highlight of the trip for several people, as they got to pretend they were Harry Potter going to Hogworts.

Exchange Dinner

Last night we went to St. John's College for dinner. The people from St. John's had come to St. Catherine's last week, so they returned the favour with an invite. St. John's is the richest college at Oxford, unlike St. Catz, which as our Romanian roommate bluntly put it is "quite poor." St. John's has the most land in Oxford, and I read somewhere that you can walk all the way to Cambridge (which I assume is a ways away) on the property owned by the college. I forgot to take pictures, but the drawing should give an idea - it's big, old and really nice. The placemats at the formal dinner said something like 1555-2005 - Celebrating 450 years. Recent graduates include Tony Blair. That being said, the people weren't stuffy at all, unlike the Christ Church wankers who walk around with their Christ Church skarves and the "I go to the Harry Potter college attitude." This wasn't at St. John's possibly because there were no British people - everyone there was Canadian... seriously, it's like they stuck them all at one college. So far I've met people from 6 provinces, so that pretty much covers most of the country (there's even a Newfie here). I'm starting to wonder if there are any Europeans that go here anymore.

Daytrip to Bath

Yesterday we took a daytrip to Bath. Bath is a town about an hour and a half away, and has these natural hot springs. Because of this, the Romans decided to make this a spa town, and build these Baths out of the hot springs. Then the English settled here and built a giant abbey.

We went on a 2 hour walking tour when we first arrived. This included seeing a lot of the way Bath developed - first as the Romans built in, then by monks in the middle ages, then as a nice retreat for the rich during the Victorian ages. Here's a video I took of a circus of houses we saw. The tour guide was very detailed and candid about everything, including the lack of plumbing and what they did about it, but I'll spare the details.

The Roman baths were (as I remembered when I was here 14 years ago) really dirty. But the rest of the city was a lot nicer (and cleaner) than the first time I was here. There was a lot of shopping, and it seemed like there were a lot of tourists.

Bath also has a river running through it, and they set up some nice pathways and overlooks along it. There is also a bridge with shops built into it, like the Ponte Vecchio in Florence.









The food was also good - we all had fish and chips for lunch (in the picture). Then at night we ate at Sally Lunn's House, which has the famous "Lunn Bun" - a bun or trencher which the meat is served on top of, which used to act as the plate. This is the oldest house in Bath, dating from the 17th century. But the oven was apparently used by monks in the middle ages. They claim that King John ate bread cooked in their oven.