It’s been a very long time since I’ve updated. Sorry about that! But I come bearing pictures, so doesn’t that make up for it? You know it does.This past week marked the first where I felt like a real student again. I was running around all over the place and accomplishing things (that weren’t my readings) and hanging out with people and that? That is student life. I need to have downtime in my life as much as the next person, but this needs to alternate with periods of frenzied activity for me to be really happy. (And there are qualifiers on those activities. I have to have chosen them and I need to have the agency to back out of them if I want to. I’d never be happy if my insanely busy periods were dictated by someone else!)

I also went to London, specifically to the V&A and the Natural History Museum, on a “study visit” (aka class trip) on Tuesday (16 October). That was fun, but 3 1/2 hours on the coach there and 3 hours on the way back for a 5 hour stay in London? Not really something I want to repeat.

On Saturday (20 October…which marks one month in England!) I went to Oxford with my friend Jenna and the ISA (International Student Association). It was so much fun! I took enough pictures to run my camera down from a full battery. I’m not daft enough to try and post all of them here, but these are some highlights.The first thing we did was wander aimlessly while indiscriminately photographing everything from ivy covered buildings to especially picturesque public toilets. That may be a slight exaggeration but, as demonstrated by this gargoyle having a wee, only slight.

Of course we took all the usual tourist shots of the Radcliffe Camera, which was gorgeous.

The first genuine stop we made was at the Botanical Gardens, which Jenna wanted to see because of something His Dark Materials related. I’ve only just started reading the series so I can’t quite say what that is, but there was a bench. We photographed it. Maybe some of you get the connection.

The Botanical Gardens turned out to be gorgeous AND really good fun. First the gorgeous:

As for the fun part, the greenhouses were completely overgrown (in a good way). There were paths for you to walk around but they were entirely over-hung with plants. It was not a manicured North American garden! It made you feel sort of like you were cutting your way through an exotic jungle in the Amazon basin. I tried getting pictures of the path to show how it was all covered, but none of them came out right. Jenna took a picture of me amongst the foliage to demonstrate how ridiculous it all was, but I think it may have proved the ridiculous thing to be me! Or at least my outfit. Sometimes I suspect I might look like I’m in costume, but that’s just how I dress.

When we left the gardens we tried to use our youth and innocent airs to sneak into some of the Colleges. It worked at this one. Of course I can’t remember the name, but it had a fun staircase:

It did not work at Christ Church however. There was a scary man in a bowler hat who made angry faces at us and would have charged us money to enter. I’m a miserly sort so I contented myself with this picture of an outside wall:

We had lunch at the Eagle and Child Pub, which is where ‘the Inklings’ (J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis Carroll, yadda yadda) met and chatted. They called it the ‘Bird and Baby.’ Oh the cleverness of them… I had fish & chips, because it is one of my missions for the year to eat fish & chips in as many famous pubs as I can. (I already had them at Ye Olde Trippe to Jerusalem Inn in Nottingham, which claims to be the oldest public house in Britain. Now let’s see if I can’t find an old pilgrim’s pub at Canterbury to go to this weekend!)

The last stop of the day, and the longest, was at the Ashmolean Museum. It was a very pretty, very old fashioned museum.

There were many interesting things to see there, but there was also this one object that I’ve since become a bit obsessed with. I’m going to do my first paper on it so I’ll try to keep the exposition to a minimum as it’s going to kind of be my life for the next two weeks. Unfortunately I couldn’t get a good, glare-free picture of it because of the way the case was laid out. I give you ‘King Powhatan’s Mantle’…

HOW EXCITING IS THAT?!

OK, I don’t actually expect you to be as excited about it as I am. But honestly? Did it really have anything to do with Powhatan? It was in a Cabinet of Curiosities before it arrived at the Ashmolean; did that affect how it was interpreted? How did it enter the Tradescant collection initially? Was it always considered a ‘treasure’? How is it interpreted differently here in England than it would be if it were back in the US? Exactly what sort of stealth operation would Bill Kelso launch if he were planning an international art heist to steal this? And, perhaps most importantly, what the heck were the folks at the Ashmolean thinking when they wrote the wall-text stating that this probably wasn’t really a cloak, but perhaps a temple hanging. You know all those famous Native American temples from the Chesapeake? Yea, one of those. (And I guess that’s one way the interpretation would be different in the US than it would be here…)

Enough of my blathering. The next update will probably be either paper wangst or more photos from my upcoming travels.

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