London 2, Oxford 1

How do you like your orange juice? Smooth, with "juicy bits" or with "extra juicy bits?"

Pulp aside, getting acclimated to England has been extremely exciting. Over my remaining time in London (through this past Saturday), we had the chance to see so much. Museums... the Churchill War Rooms... Greenwich... Buckingham... Picadilly Circus... They were all amazing testaments to the age and style of British culture. I have to say, my favorite stops were the British Library and the Queen's Theatre for Les Miserables. We had a wonderful time in the beautiful, record-setting heat as we saw the sights and soaked up the city.

But alas, all good vacations must come to an end. On Sunday, I parted ways with my parents, heading up to Oxford to set up and settle in. After some brief organization in my room, I meandered from my remote housing building over to the main college. The college is surrounded by the brick walls of the exterior buildings, so one cannot comprehend the amazement of the college's interior without entering through the main gate. The gate itself is a large, dense wooden door, resembling the front of a castle. Upon stepping inside, I was in a dark, arched entryway, again similar to a medieval gate. On the left is the Porter's Lodge, where everyone's "pidgeon holes" are located and from where the porter manages the comings and goings of visitors, faculty, and students. Proceeding ahead, the dark entryway opens up into a quad with a sunken, square, perfectly manicured lawn, bordered on all four sides by a tall, continuous neo-gothic brick building. The building's brick facades are mainly red with many ornate white and black brick patterns. Looking around, my eyes land on the quad's focal point: a brick chapel (cathedral) twice as high as the surrounding building, also elaborately decorated in brick patterns. Upon seeing such a sight on a bright and sunny day, I was completely blown away... and I remain so.

Within the college, I belong to the MCR, or "Middle Common Room," which refers to both a physical room and the entire body of graduate students. Thus, in future posts I may refer to "spending time in the MCR," referring to the room itself, or "attending events hosted by the MCR," referring to the group of people. The physical MCR room is a lounge on an adjoining quad within the college. The central part of the lounge consists of a wooden paneled, wood floored room with mahogany vinyl sofas and a bay window. The room also adjoins with two side rooms which act as game rooms/kitchen. My first event was a Tea and Cakes social which takes place every Sunday at 16:00. Many other freshers were there, so I had the chance to meet many of my Keble compatriots.

I quickly feel that I am going to fit in quite well in this college. The other freshers are very kind and sociable, coming from all over the UK (~60-70%) and the world. Among international students, the most are from Canada and the United States (5-8 freshers each... even one from NC State!), with others coming from Austrailia, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Armenia, Slovakia, and elsewhere. Many are in MPLS - Maths, Physics, & Life Sciences - but there are also a lot of people in economics, languages, literature, and other humanities. I should also note here that the MCR consists of a balance of both masters and doctoral students. It's a really a unique and engaging atmosphere to live around.

After Tea & Cakes and a short break, the MCR reconvened for Prosecco before dinner. At any rate, we all enjoyed a glass of Prosecco and headed upstairs to dinner in the Hall. The Hall is a fantastically wonderful dining room. Entering the long room at one end, one is immediately struck by the formality of the room itself. Three long wooden tables with wooden benches stretch the length of the hall. On either side, large oil portraits of grey-haired academics look down from their massive golden frames. Then, one notices that the walls of the Hall are quite tall, stretching perhaps 30 feet high, evolving into an arched ceiling. Even here, the tile ceiling is elaborately decorated, this time with two (or three?) toned floral pattern. Returning one's gaze to eye level, the portraits extend all the way to the end of the Hall, where on the opposite wall, the distinguished portraits have individual lamps illuminating their foreheads. These distinguished figures look down over the head table, apparently reserved for the academic dons who will join us for formal dinner each night beginning next week.

Since that first afternoon, my daily schedule has been somewhat routine. Wake up around 9:00, spend the morning wandering around city center failing to purchase a mobile phone, procure some odds and ends at Boswell's department store, return to Acland (my residence - a remote building for almost all the grad students), pretend to work on organizing my room, and then proceed with dinner time activities. On Monday was MCR port & cheese hour followed by "The Legendary Keble MCR Quiz," in which we divided into teams of six and attempted to answer 61 questions. My claim to fame was correctly counting that only two letters in Scrabble have point values of two - D and G. One question was "In which conflict was the German Luftwaffe first involved following WWII?" A True/False round included the statement, "13 men have landed on the moon," which I believed to be false, but was actually true. It was a fun night of trivia as we continued to meet and interact with each other.

CULTURE CORNER
In this section of the blog, I will provide some extra juicy bits (or should I say extra pulp?) of information that I have discovered about British culture and provide a British vocabulary word-of-the-day.

-Mobile phones. In the UK, phone plans are rather confusing. There are 3 main types: Pay as you go, SIM only, and contract. Pay as you go plans mean you buy a phone and a set package of minutes/text messages/data. If you run out of those before 30 days, you "top up" for usually 10 Pounds (henceforth GBP). In a SIM only plan, you buy a phone and receive a SIM card with a nominal monthly allotment of minutes/texts/data. In a contract plan, you pay a monthly fee and receive a free phone (depending on the phone you want) and a monthly allotment of minutes/texts/data, but you are required to keep the contract for 18 months or 2 years (whereas a SIM only plan is month by month).

In the long run, a contract is cheapest, but evidently you cannot sign a phone contract unless you have British credit history... therefore, I have to make greater than 5 transactions on my spiffy new UK bank account before my first quarterly statement to get a contract plan. Until then, I am debating whether I should obtain a SIM only plan or just hold out with my room's landline phone.

Word of the Day: tariff. n. a contract or payment plan, esp. for a mobile phone. Ex. "My tariff includes 100 minutes, 3,000 text messages, and 250 MB data each month for only 15.50 GBP."

-Weather. While my parents were here, it was sunny and in the 70s-80s F almost every day. The day they left, a breeze came in. Since then, each day has been mostly cloudy and breezy with temps in the 50s. I hear that the overnight lows at the end of the week will be in the mid-high 30s. Hello real British weather.