One thing I meant but neglected to write about in my last post was more about my schedule. I outlined my classes but not necessarily how my week goes on a daily basis. Therefore...
Sunday: The only thing that happens every Sunday (besides procrastinated homework, of course) is pub quiz! This happens at Far from the Madding Crowd from 8:30-10:15pm, about a half block from Gloucester Green. It's official name is "Quiz and Curry" because you can get curry for £3...but the veggie curry I had last night wasn't very good. Anyway, pub quiz is essentially random trivia, played with teams of 5 (or 6, if you're a bunch of cheaters! coughLaurencough), and there are 10 round of 5 questions each. The rounds are things like Potluck, Sports, TV and Film, History, Science and Nature, etc. When we were given a tour of Oxford by the Assistant Junior Deans (RAs basically), they told us it was a CMRS tradition to go to pub quiz every Sunday, and so we must! They neglected to mention, however, that the CMRS teams never win. The pub quiz questions aren't necessarily hard, they're just really random. You can't really build a team around the categories because they're so broad; it's really just a crapshoot of random knowledge. Except of course, categories like TV and Film, Sports, or Music because those categories are generally slanted towards British TV, film, sports, and music. So if we had grown up in Britain these questions wouldn't be so grossly out of our reach, but we didn't. It's still a riot regardless, especially with team names like Suck It Lauren Ramsay or Don't Pee on The Bus. The winning team gets a free round of drinks, too!
Monday: Monday isn't terribly interesting either, outside of Colloquium/Integral lectures at 4:30; when I go to dinner at St. Peter's, it's usually right after these lectures (and at the same time on other days). I usually spend most of the day in the Bodleian, working on papers.
Tuesday: I have my first of two tutorial meetings (for Heresy and Authority, with Dr. Philpott) Tuesday mornings at 10:30, so that's usually my "sleep in" morning, if you can call if that. After my tutorial meeting I usually head back to the library (see a pattern emerging?), although if I spend a majority of the day there I usually grab a Moo Moos milkshake on the way back to St. Michael's.
Wednesday: On Wednesdays at 3:00 I have my seminar meetings (English Society and the Church, 1500-1620) which I reaaaaally like. I'm often in the library before (and sometimes after) these meetings too! Imagine that. Edit: The open market also happens on Wednesdays. It's set up at Gloucester Green from 7ish-4pm, and is a great place to get awesome and cheap produce. I got a basket of 5-6 oranges and 4 bunches of small bananas for £2. The CMRS group dinners are usually on Wednesdays because we use stuff bought there to cook them.
Thursday: My second tutorial meetings (The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1700) are Thursdays at 4pm, but they're at Keble College(!) instead of here at St. Michael's. I like that a lot because I'm not staying in the same building all the time, and Keble is built in the traditional "Oxford college" plan, with the square abbey-like building with the courtyard in the middle. My tutor also makes me tea at every meeting!
Friday: For the second semester since my first one in college, I have no Friday classes! Yet I still spend most of the day in the library, trying to free up the weekend.
Saturday: is pretty much a free day, work pending. I'm hoping to start getting in the habit of having full work days during the week to clear out the weekend and start traveling!
The academics here are, of course, a bit more intense than St. Mary's. It is Oxford after all. I initially balked at the workload (12-16 pages + presentation + readings per week, as opposed to...12 pages + reading per semester?), but I feel like I'm adjusting. My first Philpott paper was alright, as I mentioned previous but my first Family, Sex, and Marriage paper was great! My tutor thought so too :) And according to Ruth, the Junior Dean, I must be doing something right because feedback like that isn't too terribly common.
This system does have a sense of immediacy and personal responsibility that isn't present at St. Mary's, and I would guess at most American schools. I'm still adjusting to the part where you lead your class meetings, so if you didn't read or don't have anything to say, you just kind of sit there awkwardly while your tutor tries to coax something intelligent out of you. It's also extremely apparent when you're trying to bullshit your way through something. Yet, if you're into it, it's a system that's highly rewarding, because you get out what you put into it so much more so than at St. Mary's. You can just kind of coast through lectures at St. Mary's, and I'm sure you could pass off some semblence of a similar effort here.
It was also announced at the end of last week that the UK is officially in a recession, after which the GBP (Great Britain Pound, if you hadn't looked if up yet) dropped about $0.15, prompting me to run out and withdraw a bunch of cash while it was "cheap". The exchange rate has stayed at that since and unless something else drastic happens I don't think it'll change much in either direction. The euro also dropped a few cents and is now sub-$1.30. I know this has all sorts of horrid implications for the Brits, but I can't help but be a bit excited, since now my bank account isn't getting emptied at quite the same rate.
I don't have a witty conclusion ce soir since I'm putting off writing the conclusion to my paper that's due in the morning. Instead, I will leave you with a picture of the Radcliffe Camera, the part of the Bodleian that I lovingly spend so much of my time in.
My goal was to update at least once a week, and I'm already behind! I'll try and be better about that. I'm sure inquiring minds want to know...at least I would hope!
Before coming here, I had some misconceptions about Oxford. Originally, I thought Oxford was a tiny town, dwarfed by the university. Not only is Oxford a small city of about 150,000 people, there is no "university" in the same sense that there is at home. Oxford University is made up of several colleges in a loose association; Mark Philpott, the senior tutor at CMRS (Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, our program), told us this in one of our orientation lectures in hopes of helping us blend in a little (and I'm sure some people know this, but it was news to me). Oxford is a city, but it's not a big city and St. Michael's Hall (our residence, and where most of our classes are) is close to the center of the city, so everything is within walking distance. I also didn't that Oxford was on the River Thames and was just merely using this title as a (clever?) spinoff to my Facebook picture albums for St. Mary's, but it is on the Thames so now it is both witty and accurate. It is also neither as cold not wet as I expected. I had a quote from Snatch stuck in my head before coming here ("London. You know, bad food, worse weather, Mary fucking Poppins."), but it's been warmer than home and quite nice out most of the time.
Speaking of St. Michael's Hall, the building is quite odd. It used to be a shirt factory, which I guess explains the peculiar layout and dimensions of some of the rooms, but it also explains why there are gigantic windows all over the building, which I do like. There are also way too many doors, which all happen to be fire doors. The CMRS staff (and everyone in Oxford, really) seem to be obsessed with fire safety, but if one building caught fire they would all burn down, so I suppose it's warranted. However, because fire doors are meant to prevent the movement of heat and they do it quite well, certain parts of the building are considerably colder than others. There are other peculiarities about the building which I find a tad annoying, but the only one that really baffles me is this:
I can't think of a single reason to separate the cold and hot water into different taps, but literally every sink I've encountered in England is like this. You either get scalding or freezing water, so getting warm water to wash your face at night is a cautious dance. My room also seems to be the only one with a pillar in the middle and the only one without a sink, but I share my hallway with my roommate and one other guy so it could be worse. More pictures to follow.
As I'm sure I've explained while detailing how the CMRS program works, at least half of the 35 students here this semester are from St. Mary's. Yet that's not entirely a bad thing. I knew a couple people, had classes with some others, but some others I had only seen on campus--or not even that! Otherwise, there are a few from St. Olaf College in Minnesota, a few more from Elmhurt College outside of Chicago, and a few people from other various colleges (Catholic University, a college in Ohio, University of San Diego, etc.). I think it's both interesting and good that everyone has meshed pretty well and we all get along pretty swimmingly. There have been several large group dinners which have been a lot of fun.
In the first week I had some fleeting moment of wanting to be back at St. Mary's, but those have all disappeared. I guess I would say I've pretty much adjusted to "life" over here, but the schoolwork is a whole 'nother game. My classes consist of:
Integral Course: Renaissance to Enlightenment
Seminar: English Society and the Church, 1500-1620
Tutorials: (1) Heresy and Authority in the Middle Ages and (2) The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1700
The Integral class is made up of a one-hour lecture every other week for the first 9 weeks or so of term until the tutorials and the seminar end. Then, for the last 4 weeks or so of the semester, we have 2 lectures Mon/Tues/Thurs/Fri, with a 3.5 hour exam and a big paper to top it off. It's also divided in half (for now), so ~17 people are in each "section". If I'm not mistaken, we'll all be together for the last couple weeks.
The seminars are more specific classes in small groups, the smallest being 2 and the biggest being 10; mine has 4 including me. That meets once a week for an hour to an hour and a half. In my case, I have readings to discuss and a small presentation every other week, with a ~3,000 word paper at the end; the seminar runs for the first 9 weeks.
The tutorials are one-on-one classes with a professor (or tutors, as they call them here). These also meet at the same frequency and length of the seminar, but only for the first 8 weeks. There are readings and 6-8 page papers per tutorial, per week. At each meeting, you basically have to defend your paper and your argument, which I had my first experience with today. The Heresy and Authority tutorial is with Dr. Philpott, which is a little intimidating, him being the senior tutor and all. So this morning I read my paper aloud and then he pretty more tore it to shreds and really got me to flesh out exactly what I was trying to say and then examine what parts I need to work on. He then proceeded to say it wasn't an exceptionally great paper but it wasn't bad and showed potential, and to keep up the good work! So I left slightly elated and a little confused, and spent the rest of the day in the Bodleian Library (yes, the Harry Potter library).
The library system here is...different. All of the libraries, except CMRS' own little Feneley Library, are reference libraries, meaning you can't take the books out. This concept is so bizarre to me, because where I'm from that's the whole point of a library. At our induction ceremony to the Oxford University Library System (OULS), the librarian told us that back in the day Charles V requested to borrow a book during the War of the Roses, but was told it is not a lending library. She noted that he was beheaded not too long after that, and, while she was not implying any sort of causational relationship in that exchange, that meant we were certainly not allowed to borrow books. My Family, Sex, and Marriage tutor (who made me some splendid tea at our first meeting) warmly referred to the Bodleian as "the greatest impediment to scholarship in existance"; my experiences thus far haven't been too painful, but there's something to be said for being able to sit on your couch with a book, even if it can lead to unplanned naps.
Things are expensive of course, but not as much as I feared they would be. Most things costs less in GBP than they do in USD, and the exchange rate is just under $1.50 per £1, which isn't nearly as bad as the $1.90 it was about a year ago. The euro is also down to about $1.30 instead of the $1.60 it was over the summer. On one hand I feel like I should be really conservative with my spending, but on the other hand I saved all my $4,700 from last summer specifically to spend over here, so I usually end up somewhere in the middle of that road. But I do hate coins. Hate.
I meant to set this up and make an "about to go abroad post" before leaving the States, but clearly didn't get around to it. So! Here I am, sitting in the Junior Common Room, watching Eddie Izzard's Dressed to Kill. How appropriate. The months running up to my departure were a little odd; since I decided to go to St. Mary's I knew I would study abroad, it was just a matter of where. For a while I wanted to go to Heidelberg, but I'm one semester short of the language requirement for the program due to my deferred semester and the classes there weren't really geared to what I want to do...whatever that may be. Oxford/the CMRS program was the only other option in my mind. But regardless of program the idea of studying abroad has been in the back of my head for 2+ years, so now that it's finally here it's a bit surreal. It didn't really hit me until the last week of class, when on the path I was thinking about where I've already traveled and where I have yet to go. So since then I've had to continually pinch myself as a reminder that I'm finally here.
The flight over wasn't too bad. Since the last time I was on a plane in late 2006 the movies on international flights have been put on demand, so you can pick from several movies and TV shows and pause/stop/change whenever you like, although Apaloosa was rather...eh. Although one odd little tidbit: apparently if a child is flying somewhere alone, they are not allowed to sit next to a male, whether the child is male or female. I know this because Kellie and I had to switch seats to accommodate a seven year-old boy returning home to Belgium. The Daniel Craig-looking flight attendant assured me that it wasn't because of previous incidents. Right. We landed in London around 6:30am and eventually made our way via the London Underground (the Tube) to our hotel in central London and promptly took a 3 hour nap. After a shower and some soup, we met up with my friend Kate, who I met on the NSLC trip four years ago! She was in London on a study tour and it just so happened that I was in London on one of her two free days.
On Thursday we eventually made it to Oxford. Between asking different people for directions to the Oxford Tube, which is a bus, we were directed to Paddington Station where we ended up just taking the train to Oxford. From the train station it was a short walk that felt a lot longer dragging luggage that had been lugged up and down too many stairs. But at long last, we found St. Michael's Hall. Since then I've done a bunch of orientating, walking around, probably not enough sleeping, a little bit of pubbing, so forth and so on.
Enough boring details for the first post! More to come, with pictures! For now, my contact info:
Matt Foerster Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies St Michael's Hall Shoe Lane Oxford OX1 2DP England
Note: It is inadvisable to send parcels via Courier whenever possible use a priority postal service. Certain items mailed from the USA, particularly new clothing/books and other goods, must be clearly marked as ‘used’ and ‘of no commercial value’ otherwise they may be stopped at Customs and an import levy charged against them – often a large sum of money. CMRS will not accept mail with a payment due.
Those calling from the states must first dial 011-44-1865, then792108or791643 followed by x217orx218. Please note that once the caller has entered the extension number for your room they will hear nothing, however, the phone will be ringing in your room and they should hold for you to answer. I understand that's probably a bit confusing, but I haven't called myself from the States, so good luck!
