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.
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