Education never ends. It is a series of lessons with the greatest for the last.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Although we have been in Oxford for eight days, Oxford students began arriving in the city this morning… hauling bags, boxes, and all sorts of luggage with them. They also toted such non carryables as tan lines and laughter, as conversations and greetings echoed between the buildings and cobblestones.
Oxford students will spend their next few days in “collections”… a pre-term examination period to ensure that they studied… yes, that’s right, studied… over their holidays.
While we can sympathize with their impeding plight (and with the plights of students who are fighting to return to campus due to the copious quantities of ash in the air), we have been in classes (informally, but classes all the same) for the past week.
Today, however, marked my first day of formal lectures, with Art and Society- the history of Art as it relates to British culture.
After moving through 2,000 years of British history, I headed towards the Radcliffe Camera for our official college tour (we had the college library orientations yesterday). Our college student-liaisons were so thrilled to welcome us to Oxford that one actually wore a Stanford Red Zone t-shirt!
Our fantastic tour concluded at the dining hall where we joined our liaisons and 300 of our soon-to-be nearest and dearest for our first official college lunch. It was rather delicious with options including a salad bar, salmon (which was delish!), pot pies, vegetables and pudding heaped with custard for dessert. Always available: rolls, bananas, yogurt, chocolate milk, and juice.
Typical meals offer a chef’s hot bar with several entrée options, a salad bar, with just a few options, and a dessert bar, with two options: would you like your pudding doused with custard or would you like your pudding drenched with custard?
The afternoon was spent at the Oxford castle- which was a prison from 1071 (no this is not a typo) until 1996… we climbed hundreds of rickety stairs to reach the Saxon St. George’s Tower, and saw the entirety of the city of Oxford, we crept down into the crypt and met assorted ghosts of prisoners past, and we dashed in and out of cells, marveling at the tiny spaces and total darkness…
The jig is up,
ej
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