First Half of a Week Off

Today is a great day to stay inside and not venture out into the elements. Usually if it's raining here, it just rains kind of lightly and straight down; today we're having something more like a rain storm, so there's plenty of wind to accompany the rain. Fortunately, I need the motivation to stay inside today because I have lots of reading to do - finishing Shakespeare's second version of King Lear and reading a bunch of criticism so I can write an essay for Monday. I've been mixing a lot of fun with work this past week, so now it's time to hunker down and churn out some school work. I didn't have any tutorials this week as my tutor was away, so I got to do some visiting and being visited.

First, Kyle, one of my friends from Penn, came over from his study abroad program in Spain to visit. He got in very early in the morning last Friday (and by early, I mean approximately 4 am). He dropped his phone in the airport on the way over and it wasn't working right, so we had to find each other in the middle of the night without the ability to communicate. I went and stood out on the street in front of Pembroke, hoping that I would see him and getting funny looks from the people who were still eating at the food cart that parks outside of college in the evenings. When I hadn't seen him after about 20 minutes, I went inside to see if he had maybe emailed me or something to tell me that his plans had changed, but I didn't have anything from him - so I went back out. This time, I saw someone standing on the side of the road just down from Pembroke and called out "Kyle!" just in case it was him, which it was, thank goodness. He told me he was thinking about stretching out on the park bench near where he was standing in the next few minutes if he didn't seem me. Good thing we found each other!

After I had basketball practice on Friday morning, we had a regular Penn reunion. It turns out that our friend from the Penn Band, Katie Palusci, was also in Oxford that day. She's studying abroad in Milan but was, like Kyle, traveling for the weekend. So we met up with Katie, as well as with my friend Naomi, who is at Oxford Brookes for the term, for lunch at a really good Thai restaurant. My friends at Oxford and I like to go out for ethnic food when we can, since we eat so many meat-and-potatoes meals in our dining hall. After we finished, Kyle, Katie and I went to meet Zhana, another student from Penn at Oxford, and her boyfriend to go punting on the River Cherwell, which feeds into the Thames. You can rent punts - flat, wooden boats - on the river by the hour, so we decided to try our hand. This is how punting works: up to four people can sit in the boat, while one person stands at the back with a long pole. The pole is long enough to reach to the bottom of the river, and the boat takes its momentum from using the pole to push off the river bed, kind of like a gondola. One of the people sitting also has a little oar that's used as a rudder to help steer the boat. Punting is a very simple concept, but it isn't so simple in execution, as we discovered. It's really hard to keep the punt moving straight ahead, and we ended up getting turned around a couple of times and also bumping into the bank of the river. But by the end of our hour and our little loop around a big island in the river, we pretty much had the hang of it. We had a really good time trying to figure out how to maneuver the punt, and we enjoyed the scenery of Oxford and the fall foliage, even though it was a gray day and by the time we were finished, it was getting rainy. After our punting adventure, we took some time to warm up and run errands, then met again for dinner. We just went out to a pub, but it was so nice to just sit and chat with friends and share a meal with no time restrictions or really anything else to worry about. We saw Katie off then everyone came back to my room to talk and hang out.

Saturday morning I sang in a wedding in our college chapel. Apparently it's becoming more and more common for alumni and staff of the college to get married in college. There were 8 of us from the larger choir in the wedding choir, 2 on each voice part; we sang Josh Groban's "You Raise Me Up" as well as an arrangement of Amazing Grace. Each of us got paid 45 pounds for about 2 hours work - not a bad hourly wage! The wedding was short and sweet, we sang well, and everyone seemed like they were having a good time. I think the groom works at Pembroke - the couple didn't seem like they were too much older than me, which scares me every time I think about it. In the afternoon, Kyle and I had a walk around Christ Church meadow and did some general hanging about Oxford. For dinner, we went to hall at Christ Church! They filmed the dining hall scenes of Harry Potter there, and since Pembroke's hall isn't open on Saturdays, we are invited to their hall for dinner. Actually, Christ Church's hall doesn't look too different from Pembroke's, though they do have gilded ceilings and more portraits on the walls of their famous alumni. But it was fun to say we'd been there, and it was a good opportunity to introduce Kyle to my Oxford friends. When we were done with dinner we took it easy and went to Len's for awhile to meet everyone who was hanging out there and have a cheap drink.

Sunday is sort of a day of craziness for me, with Christian Union breakfast, church, and then chapel choir all afternoon, but I actually got to enjoy it all last Sunday as I didn't have the usual essay due Monday to worry about. I felt a little bad that I had to leave Kyle mostly to his own devices during the day, but he came to evensong, choir drinks, and dinner with me in the evening. Evensong turned out to be a very somber affair - it was Remembrance Sunday, which is kind of like Veteran's day in the U.S. We sang an atmospheric anthem by Herbert Howells, and there was a moment of silence for remembering the troops. After the moment of silence, there was supposed to be a trumpet call, but we didn't have a trumpeter, so instead we sang a setting of a poem with music by our very own organ scholar, Sam Baker. I can now say that I have sung in the UK premiere of a brand new choral work! It was very well done, and all the music made for a very special, if heavy, service. After drinks and dinner, during which we mostly talked to a grad student in the choir who is studying the bioengineering of spider silk, Kyle and I came back to my room for some skype chats. First, we talked to my mom and brother, then Zhana came over and the three of us talked to Landon, John, and Stephen back at Penn. It was so cool to all talk at once - it felt like we were in the same room. This of course was home-sickness inducing, but what can you do?

Kyle's bus left Oxford at 1 am, so we stayed up chatting, then some of the girls from my hall walked with me to take him to the station so I wouldn't have to walk back alone. I slept in Monday, got some reading done, went to basketball practice, generally had a lazy sort of day. Tuesday I did schoolwork in the morning, then in the afternoon I hopped on a bus and went to visit Laura Getz, my dear friend from Central PA! More on that later, in the interest of keeping this post of a manageable length.