Week Four was crazy busy as usual (in a great way though, as usual). Highlights included a Crew Dinner on Friday night and Bonfire Night on Saturday night. For the crew dinner, the Linacre Rowing Club got together with the Wolfson/St. Cross Rowing Club and we went to a great little indian restaurant for some delicious curry. (This was my first curry experience -- and I loved it! I have to admit that the crew said I had the "wimpy" curry, but I have to ease myself in! You can't go full curry in your first sitting.) Then we went over to the Wolfson College Bar for some pool and chillaxing. (We also exchanged lessons on American v. English lingo -- e.g. I taught them what pinky-swearing is and what it means to give someone a run for their money, all over a shoddy game of pool where these phrases/actions came in handy. I had no idea how many solely American phrases I used until then when I noticed that, at least half of the time, people had no clue what I was saying.) And then, I had my first Oxford Club experience at Kukui. Once I crossed the club threshold, it was as if I transported to Miami -- it was full of American pop music, plastic palm trees, 15$ drinks, and sticky floors. The only real difference I noticed was the hour-long coat check line. (I've never had to check a coat before!) As the ladies checked their coats, I was in disbelief -- they were actually wearing Miami-style strapless dresses under their huge coats. I have no idea how they didn't freeze their butts off on the way there. Next time I'll know to dress a little fancier and then just pile 9 coats over it. Bye, bye huge bulky sweater. It's Kukui time.
Oh yes, all the ladies (and some of the guys, scarily) painted their nails Linacre colors. (Our rowing blades are yellow with black x's.) My fingers look like little oars. So hot. After seeing my nails, I understand why we had to go to 8 different stores to find one that sells yellow polish.
We also went to Bonfire Night or Guy Fawkes Night. It's an annual celebration in England where they celebrate the night they stopped Mr. Fawkes and other conspirators from burning down Parliament. They do this by lighting bonfires (and, quite morbidly burning a statue of poor Mr. Fawkes) and shooting off fireworks. We went to the town celebration which had a carnival complete with rides and games (we shot a cross bow -- awesome!), enormous bonfire, 14,000 pounds of fireworks, and some delicious sausages and fudge (a strange, yet delicious combination). After that, still craving food apparently really badly, we stopped at one of the many Greek food van's that are parked all around the city center late at night, cooking meat barehanded right out of the van, just waiting for the hungry partyers that can overlook the swarms of flies, gloveless food-preparing, and towels that are used to wipe the food prep counter, and, good lord, the floor. Yes, we were those people on that night. I haven't been able to look at hummus the same since.
Yasmine and me warming up by the bonfire.
Hanging out at Magdalen College after the festivities...
This week I also saw my first English movie in an English movie theater. We saw An Education. It was really neat since the movie was about a girl who goes to Oxford, so we were watching scenes in Oxford while sitting in a movie theater, in Oxford. You can appreciate its beauty even more on the big screen. It was around this time (after seeing the movie) that I started having dreams in pounds (as in, I would have my familiar dream where I enter the mall and everything is on sale and I go insane, but instead of checking out pricetags in dollars, that's right, they were in pounds). Since I know they say people really learn a language when they start dreaming in the new language, I'm going to take these new dreams of mine to mean that I'm really acclimating to my new culture. Now if I can only start putting x's on the end of my emails/texts (everyone here does it, and I still can't figure out if it means x as in a person's signature or if it means kiss like xo does - but that seems like an awful lot of emotion for a text; I'm just not comfortable putting a potential kiss mark at the end of a text about what time lecture class is. call me crazy), then I'll really be British!
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