My room is in full-swing tenement mode right now. For one thing, I've let my life descend into abject squalor... I won't even describe the horror I'm looking at right now in this tiny dorm room. I'll just say it's worse than you're imagining. Also, I did laundry today, and now clothes are hanging from every surface in my room, slums-of-Naples style. To top it all off, my glasses are broken and hanging crookedly from my nose. I really do feel like some poverty case. Well, except for the whole extravagant-life-in-Europe thing. But you know.

The eager reader may have noticed that I haven't posted in a while. Things have been a little stressful here. Not the fault of Paris; I've just had some real work to accomplish, and I've also been facing the mounting frustration of my summer job search. Yes, you heard me, search; I still don't have a summer job. Oh, but I have a lovely collection of rejections. Fuck the working world, I swear. So yeah, things have been a little less than idyllic here.

Of course, I'm leaving something important out that has nothing to do with any of this. I spent this past weekend on the road again, and have the chronicles of traveling to share with you! This weekend it was off to that soft and crumbling land drifting off the coast of Europe, the attic of the Anglophone world, the home of English... England! I finally made the pilgrimage to that country that gave us our language, and our country itself, in a way, not to mention my sometimes-hated, sometimes-liked major.

Anyhow. England. Where to begin? So I was staying with Francie in Oxford, of course, at the Stanford center. Wow -- what a different life those kids lead compared to us. The Stanford in Oxford program really seems like normal Stanford, just filtered through a different country. They all live in a dorm, they all have intense academic work to do, they live an hour away from a thriving metropolis but obligations keep them at Stanford... crazy. And then it seems like they have all the good stuff of Stanford -- the random conversations and the study breaks and all that kind of stuff that college creates. Not us! We Paris kids live in a non-stop, beautiful vacation and I love it. :) So it was strange for me to be in that kind of environment again -- not just the dorm, but the whole "college city" feel. I guess Oxford is the original college place; that's where university was born, I would assume. And today, the inner core of the city is nothing but colleges and the pubs and businesses that support them, surrounded by parkland. It's picturesque, and pleasant; the fifteenth century version of Palo Alto. Sub Gothic for Mission Romanesque in the architectural recipe.

England is beautiful in a soft, melodious way. On the bus from Heathrow to Oxford I was struck by the huge amount of livestock. In France it seemed like there were mostly plants, grains and mustard and whatever else is growing in those rolling fields, but not that many animals. But England had them everywhere -- clusters of sheep, and statuesque cows, and big majestic horses with their manes blowing Lisa Frank style in the wind. And everywhere there were hills, and clusters of plump trees, and streams. It's a homey kind of beauty, a little different from the straight-trunked beauty of nature in France.

One of the biggest shocks of visiting England was the language. It was so odd to step off the plane and be able to understand everything! That might sound obvious, but seriously, it took me off guard. I think my brain is so used to devoting most of its capacities to decoding French that it didn't even know what to do with itself. It was certainly disorienting. Because the English are paranoid I faced a long inquisition at Her Majesty's Customs or whatever and could barely remember how to engage in official business in English. And yet... as the weekend went on it became more and more clear that I wasn't really understanding English. There were so many times when I had to be like, "What?" Those accents can be hard! And in general, it is a very foreign place, English-speaking or not. I feel it's deceptive because you feel like it will be easy, or I did, at least. How hard can it be without the language barrier? Well, there were still tons of cultural cues I didn't understand.

On another note, I think the English are even more obsessed with tradition than the French. In France, the past is always there, especially in Paris, which lives in the nineteenth century. But there are modern things in France, too. I don't mean like telephones and cotton candy -- I mean modern architecture, modern re-interpretations of things, modern thought. England felt completely obsessed with its own past, though. All the modern architecture was thoughtless and ugly -- not ugly in a Tour Montparnasse way, but in an anonymous no-one-cared kind of way.

Let's see... let me stop this rambling and get specific. Here's some stuff we did:

:: Punting. This is perhaps the dumbest mode of transport ever invented in the world. It is also an Oxford tradition. It's boating on the winding streams that drift past the colleges and pastures of old Oxford. But it's not a normal boat. It's a long, flat vessel, like a ladder with plywood nailed on one side and stubby walls jutting out, so that it's like a long shallow tray. One person rides in the front and the other stands on the back, and that person propels the boat forward with -- yes -- a twenty foot metal pole, by pushing said pole against the muddy bottom of the river. Now, this is ridiculously difficult. The biggest problem is steering; how do you fight the current and wind with that thing? We ended up backwards several times. It's also hard because once you get a good push, you have to haul the stupid pole up, out of the water (and it's twenty feet long!) and put it back it. It's so clumsy and odd. Oh, when you go on this, they also give you a two-foot paddle, which I think is a joke, because it's uses are somewhat limited.
Screw that, it must be said. I'm rowing next time!

:: We went to English Tea right after I got there, which was a lot of fun. I tried clotted cream for the first time, which is much better than it sounds. The Tea came with the works -- scones, jams, creams, cucumber sandwiches, and chocolate cake, all of it on a three-tiered silver platter. And tea, duh. It was really satusfying.

:: Francie introduced me to the English habit of eating cheese with chutney, which sounds awful but is jaw-droppingly delicious.

:: We went for a long pub crawl through Oxford! So different from the Parisian night scene... it was fun to just stop, grab a pint, and then go on and do the same thing elsewhere. We got quite drunk off pints, it must be said. And they all had phenomenal pub names, like Eagle and Child (the one Tolkien and CS Lewis used to frequent! Too bad I don't like fantasy or I would have been more moved, perhaps....)

Oh goodness, I'm afraid I'm quite tired and should stop here. But don't fear, gentle readers-- next installment will describe our magnificent day in London (including the Magna Carta, the Rosette Stone, and new favorite musée, the Tate Modern), and the Parisian adventures of the past week! (Including Peruvian food, beautiful parks, liqueured café in the company of an enormous clock, Edouard Manet, and the presidential palace of France)

Bon soirée, mes cheris....