Week Three - punked, Medea-style.

One of my classmates invited a group of us over for lunch on Monday for a traditional Pakistani meal. His wife must have been cooking for days, because there were like 8 different dishes waiting for us (you can see some in the pic below)...

Having never eaten anything like this, I was psyched to dig in. Everything was amazing, until I ravenously chomped down on what I thought was a big olive. When my mouth started to burn like the fire of 1,000 suns, my face turned beat red, my nose spontaneously started to run, and my eyes started to stream tears, I realized it was not an olive. I had chomped down into my first hardcore exotic pepper. I frantically looked around for water, a napkin, anything to stop the burning sensation without causing a commotion that would alert my hosts to my wimpy tolerance for spices. Nothing could hide the faucet-like reflexes of my nose and eyes though. One of my classmates saw, but thankfully attributed the tears to those of joy at finally having some home-cooking: 'Look', she said, 'Vanessa is so happy she's crying!' At that point my mouth had started to numb, so she was partially right.

On Wednesday we had another crew dinner, this time at Chutney, an Indian restaurant. Having learned from my earlier pepper incident, I made sure to ask the waiter for the mildest dish on the menu. The chicken korma I got was amazing, and I was able to both feel my mouth and remain tear- and snot-free. Success!

On Thursday, a group of us went to see Medea at the Oxford Playhouse. Never have I been so baffled by theater. When the actors busted out harmonicas in the first scene, I was concerned, but was willing to overlook the strange musical honky-tonk number thinking that maybe my naive theater tastes weren't sophisticated enough to get the brilliance of this modern Medea. However, when the harmonicas were joined by the keyboard (being played like Ross on Friends, one strange note at a time), cymbals, and (no joke) an electric guitar, I started to look around for reality-tv cameras. We were being punked. Others felt similar pain... as one reviewer put it: "It seemed to bring out a comedic aspect to Medea that I had never before appreciated and am quite sure shouldn't be there. I think it's somewhat cruel to pick out any other aspects for paticular recognition as there was no detail that did not add to the horror." Oh Medea, harmonicas just aint your thang.

The one and only set. See the cymbals on the right?

On Friday night, we went to a fundraising "uniform party" for Unicef, so everyone came in some sort-of uniform costume (or "fancy dress" as they call it here). The pic below is a bunch of my lady friends, mostly dressed as schoolgirls (the easiest fancy dress to put together), with one cheerleader thrown in. (Cheerleading costumes are tough to find because, alas, cheerleading is only a US thing! Who knew.) One of my favorite things about this town is that there is a costume party -- aka bop -- basically every weekend ... it's like Halloween 52 times a year. My personal heaven.

Then on Saturday night, we went to a prosecco/gamenight at a friend's place for some Apples-to-Apples madness. I thought I loved Taboo, but Apples-to-Apples makes Taboo look like Medea. Long story short, it's a game where everyone writes down their responses for categories like "Things you don't say on a plane" and then you guess who wrote what. As you can imagine, the responses get more and more outrageous as the night (and prosecco drinking) wears on... we were laughing so hard that we got noise complaints, and I'm fairly certain at least one person peed their pants.