The Road Goes Ever On and On

The Road goes ever on and on,
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet. 
And whither then? I cannot say. 

We literally just returned from our week of wandering through Spain and Switzerland. Stephen and Aidan are still in transit, but Kalie and Sean and I just stumbled through the door of 29 Faulkner Street, and--after saying a quick hello to Janice, who is downstairs packing up our house--promptly collapsed. I'm drowsily sprawled on my creaky mattress in my room. Odd to think that I am the last OOSC student who will be sleeping in this room. Odder still to think that soon it won't be my room anymore.

It's empty and sun-drenched, the way it was when I first moved in about three months ago. So strange.

I think we're going to use the house as a home base for the next few days, until it's time to overnight in London for our flight out of Heathrow. In the meantime we want to do a bit of travelling: Canterbury, Bath, Stonehenge, another day or two in London. A jam-packed final week in England.

I'm glad we're ending it here. I really like Europe, but England has begun... no, not even that. England feels like home. It is another home. What is it that Bilbo says to Gandalf about Frodo? "In his heart he's still in love with the Shire. The woods, the fields, the little rivers." I know how he feels now, having lived in Oxfordshire. It's hard to pull myself away.

But there is another adventure behind this one. The road curves behind a hill, and there lies a new beginning. And there are friends who will take that curve with me, and friends I will meet again on the other side of it, and friends I haven't even met yet who will come into my life when we least expect it.

All semester, I've been caught up in the worry of what is beyond that curve. What will I do after Oxford? After graduation? Right now, though, I don't care. I know that the road goes on, that the pursuing of it and--maybe more importantly--the enjoyment of it is a choice... and right now, I think that's good enough for me.

Till We Have Faces

"...The sight of the huge world put mad ideas into me; as if I could wander away, wander for ever, see strange and beautiful things, one after the other to the world's end."

~C. S. Lewis
Till We Have Faces

In Which I Procrastinate with Absolutely No Shame

There comes a point in every semester when you reach the stage Kalie likes to call "burnout." Your brain is saturated with information and you can't process it all, and in order to write your papers you have to wring it out like a sponge and look helplessly at the mess you have to sift through. (I probably could not have picked a more gross analogy. Sorry, guys.) Alas, I have hit that point. I have two papers left, one of which is due tomorrow, and I just lay back on my bed in my empty house and wailed, "NOOOOOOOOO, I DON'T WANT TO DO IT!"

I have had a gloriously fun time procrastinating today, though. Kalie and I decided that the kitchen needed a thorough scouring, and we cleaned while singing--at the top of our lungs--Disney songs playing on her computer. (We did this for an hour at least. The neighbors probably hate us.) And after that was done, we sat with Stephen talking to Sean's two visiting friends, Jeremy and Andrew, who--as Kalie and I were discussing earlier--are a hilarious Laurel-and-Hardy duo, more entertaining than anything on TV. Now, however, everyone has gone to the Covered Market to retrieve birds for tomorrow's Thanksgiving feast, and if I plan on making a pie at all, I need to get working.

But, as I've said, I've hit that point.

I used to think that there wasn't a point. I've been told by multiple sources (okay, almost everyone I know) that I'm way too hard on myself. So I kind of expected myself to just be perfectly fine with churning out essay after essay. I'm an English major, right? I find writing essays so much fun! (Please, please pick up on the sarcasm there.) Therefore, when I find myself falling a little flat, I put it down to a character flaw. This is a really, really dumb thing to do, and I only ever attribute it to myself: I never think that other people getting burned out aren't justified for it.

Somehow I never really let it sink in how much work we've had to do at Oxford. Last night I went to a C.S. Lewis Society meeting at The Eagle and Child and had a nice talk with some of the other students. There was a very nice girl, Nicole, who is working toward her second BA in theology here at Oxford, and she was talking about how rigorous the course load is. Somehow I assumed that she was taking a more rigorous path of study, but during the conversation I realized: she's doing as much as I am. Two tutorials, one every week and one every other week, a paper due for each of them. Which means that, in the past month and a half (since the Oxford term didn't start until early October), I've written ten essays. Ten individual essays, each incorporating several complete texts of reading, all of which had to be read in a week so that I could write the paper over a few days. And that's a lot of work.

But I can't say that I haven't enjoyed it. I've turned out some good work that I'm actually proud of and might submit to conferences and journals after I clean it up some when I get back, and I've been able to read a lot of great stuff. Even this week, for this essay I don't want to write, I loved my reading material, and I'm really looking forward to my topic for next week. Academically, Oxford has been really good for that aspect of my growth.

All the same, we're all hitting that burnout point, if we haven't hit it already. But we have creative ways of combating it. One can always leave the house during the fleeting hours of daylight to take a walk around the meadow or up Cornmarket Street to clear your mind. Sarah, one of the girls in the program who came from another school, has introduced to me the wonderful activity of "procrastibaking," which is as delicious as it is fun. (Stephen does this too, to wonderful effect, but Sarah came up with the name.) When Kalie and I are writing papers at the same time, which happens fairly frequently since our tutorials are on the same day, we closet ourselves in her room and work with a reward system: we get to watch things every time we finish a paragraph or a page. In this way we worked through the last three seasons of How I Met Your Mother, and when we ran out of episodes we started watching movies online. (The most recent conquest: The Emperor's New Groove. You know you're jealous.) And sometimes I blog to put off my papers.

But I think I've procrastinated long enough by writing this post about procrastination. Now I have to go back to work, or else these pies won't get cooked, and that, my friends, would be a tragedy. I hope everyone has a happy Thanksgiving tomorrow!

In Which I Show Myself to be a Foodie (which we all knew already)

I realize that my blog hasn't been exactly culturally revelatory for my readers. What with infrequent posts and random vignettes and updates about my (oh so fascinating) life, I've given you little to no idea what it's like to live over here. So here is a little snippet to fill in the gaps I have left in my narrative.

We've been feeding ourselves here in Oxford, which has been good for all of our wallets in addition to being delicious, because we've got some really good cooks in our houses. Teaching myself to cook British dishes like steak and ale pie, bangers and mash, and jacket potatoes has been one of this semester's big adventures, and I've been very happy with my progress. I mentioned in my last post that we usually buy our groceries from the covered market, which has the cheapest fruits and veggies and the best meat, but often we also have to run to the local grocery store, Sainsbury's.

British grocery stores are a little befuddling for an American. Usually in stores back home everything is located in the same general area, even between different chains. The grocery stores here are organized differently than the ones back at home--I mean, I know they make sense to the Brits, but our first few times in Sainsbury's were disorienting. It's not too bad, of course: the fruits are grouped together, the vegetables are grouped together, and the bread is grouped together. Not too hard to figure out. But trying to find canned stuff or jam or honey can be a bit of an adventure, and once we spent nearly fifteen minutes hunting through Sainsbury's for eggs. Turns out that the British keep them, unrefridgerated, right next to the cereal.

I know. I don't get it either.

Today threw me for a bit of a loop again. You see, the fifteen Americans who are here as part of the OOSC program are throwing a Thanksgiving feast for ourselves on Thursday, to keep us all from missing our families too much and also, honestly, because we all really like to eat. I've been assigned mashed potatoes (as a compliment to my cooking, Sean has deemed me "The Potato Mistress," which I was really happy about until he verbalised it to one of his friends and I realized how silly it sounds) and pumpkin pie. I have never made pumpkin pie before, so I have been looking forward to learning.

We bought pumpkins on Halloween to carve into jack-o-lanterns, and we'd intended on using those pumpkins for the Thanksgiving pie. So after we gutted them and separated the seeds, I put the pulp in a bowl and stuck it in the freezer, thinking I would boil it and blend it until I got pumpkin pie filling. After a few days of sitting out in the English weather, we threw the jack-o-lanterns away.

So up until a few days ago, I thought I was golden in the pumpkin pie area. Until, that is, I called my grandmother, who informed me that you're supposed to make the pie out of the rind, and that the guts are pretty useless. So, I have no pumpkin for the pie.

No big, I think. I'll just go to the store and get some canned pumpkin. Earlier today I walked on up to Sainsbury's and perused the canned goods aisle. Unable to find what I'm looking for and thinking that this is because I'm a silly American, I ask an attendant for help.

Me: Excuse me, but do you guys carry canned pumpkin?

Well-meaning Sainsbury's employee: Do we carry... what?

Me: Canned pumpkin. You know, for pumpkin pies.

Well-meaning Sainsbury's employee: I, er, don't think so. Honestly, I've never even seen that before.

Hm. Well, this posed a challenge. I supposed that maybe British stores just don't carry canned pumpkin because they expect you to make your pumpkin pie literally from scratch, like a real domestic Wonder Woman. But I was holding out hope that I might still be able to find something so I wouldn't have to boil down and carve a pumpkin. Later, as I was paying for an apple at the grocery store at the head of Cornmarket Street to break my 20-pound bill for bus fare, I asked if they carried canned pumpkin.

"Sorry, no," said the girl behind the counter, smiling as she passed me my change. "I suppose that's an American thing."

"I guess so." I explained to her that I was baking a pie for a big dinner coming up, and she seemed very interested.

"Oh, I've never even seen one of those," she said brightly. "If you manage it, would you bring it by so I can look at it."

Whoa. Hold on now. Never SEEN pumpkin pie? Like, never TASTED pumpkin pie? I was honestly astonished. Maybe I thought our ancestors brought pumpkin pie over on the Mayflower in their "Ye Olde Booke of Cookinge" or something, but it had never crossed my mind that people over here didn't eat pumpkin pie. Sure, Britain had a lot of things I'd never heard of before, much less eaten. But... pumpkin pie? It's like there's a whole realm of heaven to which they've been denied access.

I assured her that if I managed to find a pumpkin, I would definitely bring her a piece of pie for her to try, and I left Sainsbury's a little wiser, if a little more astonished.

I know this isn't a very deep post, or very poignant or anything like that, but it just goes to show that the quirks of different countries never cease to surprise me, and even when you start feeling pretty well at home, the new culture you're in reminds you that you still have a lot to learn. Even if it's something as simple as the food you eat.

Words Worth Pondering

"Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden; it is easier to say "My tooth is aching" than to say "My heart is broken". Yet if the cause is accepted and faced, the conflict will strengthen and purify the character and in time the pain will usually pass. Sometimes, however, it persists and the effect is devastating; if the cause is not faced or not recognised, it produces the dreary state of the chronic neurotic. But some by heroism overcome even chronic mental pain. They often produce brilliant work and strengthen, harden, and sharpen their characters till they become like tempered steel." ~C.S. Lewis
The Problem of Pain

In Which I Observe Some Shady, Furry Dealings

I walked through Oxford's Covered Market earlier today to pick up some parsnips for the pie I was making for dinner. As I was passing the grocer's stands that are right by the exit to the market, I had to do a quick double-take in the direction of something that had just scampered across the floor. A squirrel was loping into the Covered Market, making its way very purposefully to the stands next to me.

Perhaps I've been reading too many Narnia books lately, but when the little creature pattered by just feet away from my sneakers, I said out loud, "Hello--you don't belong here." (I didn't actually expect the squirrel to hear or understand me; it was more of a reflexive observation. I'm not crazy, people.) The squirrel, of course, paid no attention to me, although when I stepped forward its lazy lope became a little more earnest. It ducked behind a crate and I followed it inquisitively. The squirrel, having nowhere else to go, just sat looking at me, looking at the stands, looking at whatever happened to capture its short attention span for the moment.

"You should probably get out. Go on, shoo." I tried to gently wave it back towards the entrance. By now I was not the only person who had spotted the squirrel, and a few people were starting to stop and stare at it.

"Be careful, he'll bite," said a man standing nearby.

Of course he'll bite, I thought irritably. It's a squirrel. And it's not like I'm trying to pick it up or anything; I'm not that stupid. A moment later, though, someone else completely threw into question all assurances I'd ever held about proper human-squirrel relations, going far beyond the common-sense knowledge that one should not pick up a wild squirrel.

"Don't!" cried the owner of the stand, rushing over. We all stood back as the squirrel, alarmed by all the movement, bounded back toward the exit. "Don't scare him off! He's just here for his nut."

She was holding out an acorn. I looked at her with raised eyebrows.

"You mean he's--?"

"Tame, yes." She crouched down and tossed it to him lightly. The squirrel snatched it up in his delicate paws and took it to the threshhold to work on it, as delighted passerby pulled out cameras.

"I'd rather just give him a nut than have him climbing all over the produce," the stand owner said with a shrug, and then she went back to her groceries.

I stood still for a moment, processing what I had just heard. This squirrel had gotten accustomed to coming to the Covered Market to receive a nut. The stand owner gave him one in order to keep him off the groceries. This happened frequently enough for the stand owner to think he was "tame."

That squirrel wasn't tame. I laughed out loud when I realized: that squirrel was getting paid protection money. One nut in exchange for leaving the rest of them alone. "Give me the acorn and no vegetable gets hurt." He was a member of some furry division of the Mafia.

I was still chuckling to myself as I walked past the squirrel and his crowd of spectators, who were deceived by the cuteness and little suspected the diabolical blackmailing scheme he'd divised. (Although, to be fair, he certainly didn't look as though he had anything as complex as bribery going on between his furry little ears.) Only in Oxford.

Slowly, Slowly, October

O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
To-morrow's wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
To-morrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow,
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know;
Release one leaf at break of day;
At noon release another leaf;
One from our trees, one far away;
Retard the sun with gentle mist;
Enchant the land with amethyst.
Slow, slow!
For the grapes' sake, if they were all,
Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost--
For the grapes' sake along the wall.

~Robert Frost

Every now and then you come across a poem that gives you a framework by which you process a certain time in your life. During my trip to Armenia over the summer, Cavafy's poem "Ithaca" provided that framework. Now I've moved on to this poem by Frost.

It's no wonder, really, that this poem has captivated me so. It captures that feeling you get when you realize that, although you are standing very still, time is sweeping by like the wind that pulls the autumn leaves from the trees. Try as you'd like, you can't catch it, and its swiftness--while exhilarating--is excruciating. Adding to the allure of this poem is the delicious, elusive sense of what Lewis called "the Idea of Autumn." Fall is my favorite season: I love the cool snap in the air, the sharp blue sky, the vibrant colors, and the smell of bonfires that hangs in the air on certain days. I love the sense that the approach of the holidays is quickening. Somehow, though fall is typically thought of as an end, it always carries the brisk excitement of a beginning. So many good things have happened, for me, in October. Don't get me wrong, a lot of yucky things have happened in October too, but overwhelmingly my associations with it are good.

This October, for instance, has been fantastic. I'm so glad I came to England in the fall, because my seasonal exuberance has only compounded with my love of being over here. Last week I got back from five days in Scotland, which was one ridiculously fun adventure (that you will have to ask me about if you want to hear the story, because it would take entirely too long to do the trip justice here). Tonight, to celebrate Halloween, we're going to take a spooky tour of Oxford Castle--which is literally a five-minute walk from our houses--and sometime this weekend we'll be carving pumpkins, which I bought today at the Covered Market. I'm feeling very festive.

But I'm also feeling very torn. November starts on Tuesday, and my last day of term is December third. Two months didn't seem so long; one month seems even less. It's not that I feel as though time has been going especially quickly. Every day has been full to bursting, one way or another; I don't think I've had a single day where the time has gone quickly for the simple reason that I wasted it. (Hence my infrequent blog postings: I've been too busy.) It's just that I'm coming to realize what all those adults I didn't want to believe said I would realize: that we don't have nearly as much time as we thought we did when we were children. Two months seems like a short time because it is.

I'm not ready to say goodbye to the fall-ripe leaves, the crows, or grapes clustered on the wall. I'm not ready to say goodbye to all of this. Luckily, I don't have to just yet. I still have time, though from where I'm sitting it doesn't look like much. And I hesitate to say that I wish I had more time, because I now have one or two more reasons to want to get home quickly than I did when I first arrived.

Instead, I ask like Frost for October--and November, and December--to beguile me. Make it seem slow, since nothing anyone can do can make time pass at a different pace. Let me make the most of it: let me go where I haven't, learn what I don't yet know, and strike my roots as deep as I can before I have to pull them out.

"Slow, slow! For the grapes' sake, if they were all,
...For the grapes' sake along the wall."

"Hey, Remember That Time When Brittani Threw an Apple at a Cat?"

Just a few minutes ago I charged out of Kalie's room, where I'd been working on my essay for the better part of three hours, in a blind and raging fury. Wearing my pajamas and thick wool socks--an outfit that somehow downplayed the intimidation I was hoping to inspire--I stormed into the kitchen and began to scour the items on the countertop in search of a suitable projectile. At the sound of me stomping down the stairs, Stephen emerged from his room and followed me into the kitchen. Still blazing with hostility, I met his confused and questioning look with the only thing I could articulate in the state I had achieved:

"I'm going to kill that cat."

Now, fellow travelers, I should probably explain that I'm not typically the kind of person who likes to do cruel things to animals. I love animals so much it's ridiculous, and it both amuses and exasperates my friends who have to put up with me wanting to pet every dog I pass. Though I'm typically not a cat person, I don't mind them unless they go out of their way to be mean. We have a cat here that will sit outside and mew sweetly until you come out to stroke her, at which point she will turn into a purring machine until she is satisfied with the attention. I am a fan of this cat.

However, there is another cat. And maybe it isn't mean, but we have come to despise it with every ounce of animosity we can muster. This cat does not cutely beg attention like the cat Debbie christened Juliet last year. Oh no. It sits outside and yowls, horribly, like it's either having a cat-gasm or dying. It's like a banshee, or a feline harbinger of despair and sleeplessness, since its favorite time to go caterwauling is when it's dark outside. I described it to my friend Holly as "Satan, with fur."

We've put up with its wailing for the most part, but you have to understand, fellow travelers, that it has been a stressful few days. The deadline of our first paper is upon us, and we're all (with the exception of the few who finished it early, because they're overachievers) a bit stressed out. I'm actually pretty proud of how productive I've been, although I still feel overwhelmed. Combined with a shortage of sleep, a bout of homesickness, and a stomach that had been threatening to mutiny against me all day, I was at the breaking point. And then the cat started up.

I'm not the most pleasant person to be around when I'm stressed. I recognize this. And I'm coming to realize that I'm probably going to be stressed quite a bit when I'm here, just because now that our tutorials are starting we are about to really hit the books. But still, that's what we're here for: the challenge, the academia, the experience. We're here to learn, and we're here to work. Luckily this work sometimes entails choosing leisure time over productivity; at least, this is what I choose to believe Mark Twain meant when he said you should never let your learning get in the way of your education. Kalie and I already missed a lecture we wanted to attend because we were working on our papers instead, but we don't intend to let it happen again. And in two weeks, we're going to Scotland, where the challenge really is going to be not falling behind in our schoolwork while refusing to sacrifice the experience of travel. It's a balance: a balance that I'm not good at, a balance that I'm looking forward to practicing. I can deal with stress as long as I have something fun to offset it.

However, I can't deal with stress and that cat.

Let's return to the narrative at hand. To set up the scene, I am standing in the kitchen in my pajamas, an absurd contrast to the absolutely murderous expression on my face, and I'm grabbing for what seems to me the most logical choice of a hurl-able weapon: a Fuji apple I bought at the market and never ate. With Stephen watching me, still looking bewildered (but kind of excited, because he hates the cat too), I charge out the door and into the night.

The cat goes silent as soon as the door bangs open, but I spot it staring at me just beyond our gate. Maybe it can tell that I have absolutely no good intentions, because it starts running just as I take aim and throw the apple like a softball.

My aim has always been notoriously bad, but I actually came pretty close to hitting it. Not close enough to actually hurt the cat--which, now that I'm in a calmer state of mind, I realize would have been a very bad thing that would have made me feel horrible later--but close enough for me to feel satisfied with the throw and to make the cat bolt in terror, probably too scarred to look at an apple the same way ever again. The apple itself bounced over the cobbles, flinging juicy shrapnel over the road in its wake.

The cat paused under a streetlight to stare at me with a kind of indignant horror as I went to retrieve my weapon. I was tempted to try again, but the cat saw me looking at it and scarpered. Stephen was staring at me as I walked stiffly back to our house, torn between triumphant in that I had shut the cat up or highly embarrassed at my behavior. With as much nonchalant dignity as I could muster (which was not a lot, let me tell you), I informed him that "I didn't hit it."

Kalie's voice rang out delightedly through the open upstairs window: "Did you really throw something at the cat?!"

My composure broke. Standing there in the dark, in my pajamas, clutching a ruined apple under the incredulous gaze of one of my housemates while the other cracked up in the room above us, I started laughing. Because sometimes, when you're stressed and everything seems awful and you don't really know what to do about it, that's all you really can do.

We're all back in Kalie's room now, pounding out the pages for these essays. We've brightened up a little bit after the hilarity of the night's oddest incident and after a nice cup of tea. The apple has been enshrined in the refrigerator, in all its mangled glory, until its services are required again.

This is probably going to be the first of many anecdotes about the crazy, sometimes irrational things that my friends and I do when we hit the height of our stress levels. And you know what? That's okay. Because you've got to cope somehow, and sometimes the only way to do it is to throw apples at cats.

Just don't tell PETA.

In Which I Procrastinate (a little) and Try to Make Up for Being a Bad Blogger

What I'm doing right now: Not reading the essays on Dickens I'm supposed to be reading, which inhibits me from writing the essay on Dickens I'm supposed to be writing. Oops.

What I'm also not doing: Not updating my Ireland adventures. I have left quite a gap between my last posting and the "to be continued" sequel. But still. My blog. I can do whatever I want. (Less petulantly and in my own defense, I promise that we've been really busy here. More on that below.) Also, I'm not putting up pictures yet. Sorry, Mom.

What we've been doing: We've had so many adventures! We've been to the Globe, to St. Paul's Cathedral, to Hampton Court Palace, to various historical buildings in Oxford, and to The Eagle and Child (C.S. Lewis's pub!). Kalie and I made it down to London last weekend to see Wicked. I've seen Shakespeare's hotel room, his illegitimate son's baptismal fount, and his theatre. (Well, its recreation, at least. Also, I've seen his milkshake bar. But that's not a historical site, in case you were wondering.) We've been wandering the city, exploring and trying new things. We've found meadows and castles and churches and cathedrals, and I'm discovering that there's no way I'm going to be able to fit it all in by the time I leave. Which, although it makes me sad, is only fortifying my resolve to return. This is an amazing place, and I can't say enough about how wonderful Penelope and Francis are. We had tea at their house the other day, and Francis let me hold a compilation of pages from one of Shakespeare's original folios. My knees literally went weak. And Penelope's cooking is surpassingly delicious.

What we do on a typical day: We wake up and eat an English breakfast, which usually consists of toast and jam (I'm never eating jelly again, not after this stuff). Then we book it through the Oxford streets to St. Peter's College, where we have two lectures, punctuated by tea and biscuits. Then, typically, we spend a good part of the day doing homework (or pretending to [I seem to like parentheses a lot today]) and/or exploring. When we get hungry, the five of us--me, Sean, Aidan, Kalie, and our housemate Stephen--combine our efforts to cook dinner. And this provides good times with good friends and good food, and meals are actually one of my favorite parts of the experience so far. We've had some great, intellectual discussions inspired by our lectures and our reading material. One night we sat around our kitchen table with a pot of tea, a package of Hob Nobs (You don't know what Hob Nobs are?! I pity your soul.), and a compilation of Tennyson poems, out of which we took turns reading aloud. It was for class, sure, but it was still incredibly interesting, fun, and food for an English major's soul.

It's been such a wonderful experience so far. I'm being stretched, which I love, and I have the freedom to run around and explore all I want in the best playground I've ever had. And I've learned so much--about this place, certainly, but also about myself and about my friends. We've had a few bad days, but I'm still so glad we're getting to share the adventure with each other. And besides, having a bad day in a new place means you're breaking in a new home. And sometimes the bad days turn out to be your best opportunites to grow--for everyone involved. And even if they suck, you end up pretty grateful for them.

What we're doing tomorrow: Oh my gosh, so much. Warwick Castle, Stratford-upon-Avon, and a performance of Macbeth. Plus some. I cannot articulate my excitement.

What I'm going to do in about five minutes: Finish this blog post and then take my book to the hill at Oxford Castle, where I will read while I watch the sun set over this city of dreaming spires. As one of my GHP instructors used to say: Peace out, cub scouts!

Thoughts from Places: Newgrange; or, Of Burial Tombs and Battlefields

This is a few days late in coming, but this post is the beginning of the promised Ireland recollections. I've already covered our first two days in Dublin, so I'm picking up on Days 3 and 4, in which we travelled through the town of Drogheda (DRAH-heh-duh--gotta love them Irish) to get to the ancient passage tomb of Newgrange.

You should know, fellow travelers, that Sean and I approached this trip with a very spontaneous mentality. In other words, our travel strategy consisted of hearing of someplace interesting and saying, "Oooh, let's go there!" Remarkably, this strategy actually worked really well for us, and we had no mishaps along the way. We had heard of these passage tombs that pre-dated Stonehenge and the pyramids, and were so intrigued by the idea that we couldn't pass up the chance to visit.

We took a train through some of the prettiest countryside in the world. They aren't kidding when they call Ireland the Emerald Isle: on those rare moments when the clouds peel back and the sun pours out, the grass practically glows in the light. Behind moss-covered stone walls, sheep and cows and horses graze languidly in pastoral quaintness. After stopping at the hostel, which was the prettiest one we'd stayed at so far, we walked the short distance to the visitors' center for the burial tombs.


No one knows what the builders of these tombs--Newgrange and Knowth--intended at the time of their construction. Their size belies the simplicity of the tunnel system in that, though one would expect a honeycombed network beneath the mound, there are really only one or two tunnels. And these tunnels actually only house the bones of a few members of the community. The main point of Newgrange, it seems, was not to be a tomb at all, but a sort of ceremonial monument. The entrance to Newgrange is painstakingly aligned so that the sunrise on the winter solstice casts a perfect column of light in the interior chamber, after the longest night of the year--a reminder that the long winter would end, that the sun would return, and that the seasons would repeat their cycle instead of descending further into the cold and dark. In a time when the world seemed harsher and less predictable (as if it has ever gotten more predictable), the people would gather around this little warm beam of light to receive the hope it offered.

The next day Sean and I rented bikes from the hostel and pedaled out to the site of the Battle of the Boyne, fought between the armies of James I and William of Orange. I was a grouch for a few kilometers because I hadn't ridden a bike in years and it was proving more of a challenge than I anticipated, but I brightened up after I got the hang of it. From thereon out it was only a matter of not getting hit by cars as we biked the six or seven kilometers to the battlefield. We walked through the exhibit at the manor house and then tramped through the fields, past fields of hay and low stone walls, sheep and horses, and the most gorgeous, rolling Irish landscape you can imagine.

What I liked about visiting these places was not just the picturesque quality of the landscape, which was so beautiful you couldn't take a bad picture of it if you tried. I liked to see the way the region's history lapsed into legend, then myth, then history again; it's like looking at the striations in a rock face. Because the tombs were built so long ago, their meaning began to wane in the memories of the descendents of the tomb-builders. During the Christian age, the people who lived on the Newgrange mound used the tomb as a refrigerator because it was consistently cooler than the air outside. People built settlements on top of the mound, and grass crept up the sides, until it resembled little more than an abnormal hillock. The original use of the mound had long faded in the memory of the people by this time. When the Vikings invaded and siezed Newgrange for its strategic placement as the highest hill around, the meaning was entirely forgotten. Sometime in the long gap between this complete erasure of the mound's identity and its rediscovery centuries later, whispers and rumors surrounded the strange geographical formations like mist. They were strange places--perhaps magic, the people thought. They became the fairy mounds, regarded with a suspicious eye by locals as entrances into the Otherworld--not far from their original meaning, as symbolic passages into the next life.

You have to wonder, don't you, what the Norse descendents felt as their children played on these hills with the air of mystery and superstition, threats so very real in their minds back then. What the people of later centuries suspected as they passed the tombs hidden beneath the grass, looming in a twilight that made one think that the fey people flitted just out of the corners of your eyes. What James and Williams' armies must have thought as they forded the Boyne just below Newgrange's hill, holding their guns over their heads and casting nervous glances at the legend-haunted hill that portended some unreadable omen for the battle ahead. It's interesting, isn't it? How one thing can mean so many things at so many different times--and, finally, come to signify all of them, even as it accumulates new ones?

I think it's fascinating.

In Which My Excitement Renders Me Somewhat Incoherent

It's been about a week since I last updated. A glorious, whirlwind, amazing week of travel and adventure that I can't wait to tell you about. That, however, must wait for a little while. There are far more important things for me to be telling you right now. For instance, the fact that I am currently lying on my own bed, in my own room, in my own house, in Oxford.

Oxford.

I'm so freaking excited.

This morning Sean and I left the hostel in London, where we had spent the night after returning from Holyhead (which was incredible--details coming soon). We had spent that night wandering around London with my friend Eli and a few of his friends at the college he's attending, and for a few hours we just walked the streets, going up to anything and everything that looked interesting, and generally partaking in holy-crap-we're-in-London giddiness. After spending a night in a hostel room that was blissfully devoid of some of the terrors we've encountered on the trip (i.e. the snoring that shakes the rafters and the restless sleeper in the bunk below), we caught a bus to Oxford. I can't explain to you just how excited we were to finally be getting to the school that has really been the goal all along; we were singing modified versions of the opening to A Very Potter Musical: "Oxford, Oxford--we're finally going back!" By the time we knocked on the door of our program coordinators' home, I was so happy and nervous and fluttery that I thought my feet were going to leave the ground.

The Warners, Frances and Penelope, are wonderful. Penelope is this lively, spunky, maternal woman who seemed almost as excited to have us as we were to be there. She drove us to our houses, talking animatedly, and gave us each a tour of the rooms before going back to her house to pick up Aidan, who arrived shortly after we did. As soon as I got back to my house--alone, because my roommates don't move in until tomorrow--I was so elated that I ran around the house yelling like a hooligan, just because I could.

We have a kitchen, and armchairs, and our own wardrobes, and Penelope told us that there's a cat that likes to loiter in front of the stoop, so we have our own pet (and I am thrilled beyond measure about this--it's not a dog, but I'll take what I can get). And the sun is shining through my window, into my room, in my house, in Oxford.

Term doesn't start officially for a few days, so until then I have time to unpack, do laundry, find groceries, finish reading Bleak House, and catch up on telling you about our adventures in Ireland. So the posts are coming, fellow travelers, if you have any interest in them. I'm pretty happy to have a few days of downtime in which to reflect on them, before we're off again in a very different way.

I feel like I'm only just realizing that I honestly have no idea what I'm getting myself into, coming here to study for an entire semester. And that thrills me more than just about anything else.

Leprechauns, Vikings, and People who Aren't From Barcelona: A Review of the Trip Thus Far

So, fellow travelers, I've tried five or six times to begin a blog post about my adventure so far that is detailed enough to keep you informed but short enough to not be considered a novel... and I can't. I can't do it. My thoughts are racing from all I've seen, and my feet (and legs, and back) are aching from all the places they have carried me, and there is just no way I can present to you, in narrative form, a condensed version of our time here.

So, in lieu of that, here are some statistics of our journey.

Country count thus far: Three. Sean and I landed in England on Thursday afternoon and hopped between London and Oxford before settling down for the night in London, not far from Baker Street. Then we rose early and walked to the London Euston station, where we boarded a train to the port town of Holyhead, in Wales. The only thing I knew about Holyhead before I went was that it was home to the only all-women's Quidditch team, the Holyhead Harpies (J.K. Rowling told me so, and she doesn't lie). Once we got there, though, we found it to be a very pretty little place, and had the chance to explore it a bit after we missed our first ferry to Dublin and had to wait two hours for another one. Then, one ferry ride and a cab later, we checked into our hostel on the Emerald Isle.

Museums: Four. Today we visited the National Gallery, where we saw lots of art, and the National Museum of archeology, where we saw lots of truly fascinating relics: early church trappings from the influence of the English, weapons and objects of war during the Viking period, cooking utensils and pagan carvings going even farther back than that. They actually had displayed some of the bodies that had been found preserved in the peat bogs, and, while somewhat macabre, it was fascinating to read the stories surrounding them. And yesterday we visited the Chester Beatty library for its beautiful book and manuscript collection, and—just for kicks—the National Leprechaun Museum. And if you want my honest opinion, that last one was my favorite.

Churches: Three. We got to see St. Patrick's Cathedral yesterday, and it's honestly incredible. I've seen a fair few cathedrals—I just got back from Armenia and Georgia, where you can't go anywhere without seeing two or three—but this one struck me as very unique. I've always found cathedrals to be buildings rather full of themselves: gilded and ornate, puffing themselves up to make them seem more important. St. Patrick's is very different, in that instead of insisting you to focus inward on the cathedral itself, it directs your focus outward: on God, on His servants, on the people He wants to serve. The whole place is full of the tombs of civil servants, including Jonathan Swift, who fought fiercely to help Ireland's poor and mentally handicapped with his biting pen and his political maneuvering. And then, of course, the whole place is shadowed by the memory of St. Patrick himself, who—from what I read of him on the displays inside—was incredibly humble, hardworking, and caring. Reading his quotes gave me a sense of a real servant who was devoted to God and God's love for people. The cathedral is beautiful, yes—inside and out, from every angle—but it's also thought-provoking and simultaneously refreshing and challenging for your spirit. One of the memorials inside bears an epitaph declaring its subject to have “exhibited in a useful and devoted life the practical influence of the truth he preached.” I can't think of anything I would rather have carved on my tombstone.

Miles Covered: I have no freaking idea, but I am SORE. We've walked literally everywhere we've gone, and we've covered about a third of the city, no joke. Temple Bar, the quay by the river, St. Stephen's Green (which is the most gorgeous park I have EVER seen), Merrion Square, and Trinity College—and that's not all, folks.

Favorite food: The chips we bought from Leo Burdock's famous fish and chips shop in the medieval area of Dublin. Oh my word. We sat and ate them outside Christchurch Cathedral, feeling like quintessential Dubliners (we're obvious frauds, but so it goes), and I thought I'd bitten into spud-themed heaven. I've discovered that I don't like cod very much, but the Irish—as one would expect—can do absolute wonders with the potato.

The Place: Is amazing. Point blank. And there is so much to see, for whatever kind of nerd you are: literary, historical, medieval, musical. I can tell you from the literary aspect, it's bursting. We've seen the Oscar Wilde memorial and his birthplace, and Thomas Moore's statue, and lots of statues of authors and poets of whom I've never heard, but Dublin sure is proud of them. And James Joyce is everywhere. He has a statue just off O'Connell Street, but that's just the beginning. If you look down as you walk, you'll find little placards sunk into the pavement featuring quotes from his novel, Ulysses, which takes place over the course of one day in Dublin, a date the Dubliners commemorate by dressing up as characters from the book's era and talking in antiquated accents (as if their accents weren't awesome enough already).

The People: Are some of the friendliest I've met in my travels, which was a wonderful surprise. Without fail, if we stand looking at our map for longer than fifteen seconds, someone will come up and ask us what we're looking for and will point us in the right direction. They're helpful, hospitable, and hilarious—they're incredibly open and up-front about joking with strangers (or maybe Sean and I just give off a vibe that we're fun to poke fun at?). We approached one guy for advice on a good fish and chips place, and he responded, “I just came from Barcelona; I know nothing.” After we apologized and thanked him for his time, skeptical but unwilling to be rude, he called us out on it: “Really, with an accent like that, how could I be from Barcelona?” It's a lot of fun. They're a proud people, the Irish, and they know where they've come from, but they've been very welcoming, and I like that.

I don't suppose you can stand to read much more, even though I'm positively bursting to tell you every minute detail. So I'll cut myself off here, and say farewell for now. Next on the docket: the interior of Ireland, the countryside, and the Newgrange burial grounds! Coming soon to a blog near you! (Bear with me; I'm still figuring out how to end these posts gracefully.)

Ruminations from Last Night

The day of departure has arrived. I can't think of anything else to cram into the bags sitting ready in my bedroom, and aside from one more hostel reservation I think I've made all the arrangements I could possibly make. The trepidation of the past few days has settled down into a flutter in my chest, and every glance at the clock emphasizes just how close I am to stepping off the plane in the London airport.

That is, if I can survive the layover in France first.

If you're reading this blog, then you probably know enough about me to know that this is not my first time abroad. Specifically, it's my tenth. What you might not know is that the last night before departure still strikes me with a sort of gravity. Last night I curled up with my Bible and my journal to write and think for about an hour before I went to sleep in my own bed for the last time prior to departure.

The journals I've kept over the past few years are littered with "last nights" and the thoughts that come with them. Typically, a "last night" is a good time to let the reality of the trip sink in (as much as it can before you actually get over there) and to let the bigness and excitement of a journey commenced engulf you for a moment. But it's also a good time to look back at what you're leaving behind. My journal for this past year has helped my capture one of the best, strangest years of my life in quite a while. I've been able to make fantastic new friends, grow closer to the friends I already had, reunite with old friends and watch all of those relationships change in wonderful, surprising ways. It's been an incredible adventure, and as I thought about it last night I realized how grateful I am to belong to the community I'm about to leave, and how glad I am that I will get to rejoin it.

During the past week or two many of my friends here have returned to school, and the constant influx of "I'm so glad to be back at college!" Facebook statuses have made me feel a little bit like the Hogwarts Express left without me. I'm going to miss being part of their adventures, being in the midst of their company, being present to listen to their problems and to seek solace in them for mine. While I'm gone, my brothers are going to get taller, my dogs older--in short, everything is going to be different when I return. But that's part of the adventure too. And in the meantime, I'm actually going to Hogwarts (okay, not Hogwarts, but you get the idea).

On "last nights," I always take a moment to think about what I want from the journey I'm about to take. Last night I thought about it and prayed over it, and this is what I came up with:

1. I want this to go slowly. The other day I read Robert Frost's poem "October", which perfectly captured the way I feel about this coming semester. The last few days have been a whirlwind, but I don't want the trip to be like that: I want time to sit by a river and just think, and read, and absorb, and be. I want every moment to count, and I don't want a single one to slip by.

2. I want to grow. I want to grow as a friend to the people going with me, and I want to grow as a friend to the people I haven't met yet. And I also want to grow by myself--just me, figuring myself out.

3. I want to learn. Everything. Anything I can get my hands on, about England, Oxford, literature, life, and, specifically, God. I've heard good things about Oxford offering a good theological community of enlightened discussion, and I'm excited to tap into that. There's a reason I've chosen C.S. Lewis as my major, and it isn't just because I'm still convinced I can find Narnia if I open the right closet.

Ten hours until liftoff. I think I'm going to go play with my dogs for a little while. The next time I write to you, fellow travelers, I'll be on the other side of the Pond!

Sinking the Island (but not really)

This story actually started a few months ago. My friend and I were sitting in my room, pretending to do our homework but actually talking about our pending acceptance into our school's study abroad program to Oxford University in England. A number of people had applied, including two other close friends of ours, and I asked with a thrill of anticipation, "Can you imagine what would happen if you, me, Kalie, and Aidan were all set loose on England at the same time?" Sean looked up from his Great Books text and said, quite seriously, "We are going to sink the island."

Nine months later, I am preparing to leave for merry old England in just three short days. In the time since I found out I was going, my excitement has swung from long periods of dreamy happiness at the thought of the future, to outright ebullience, to (most recently) oh-my-gosh-what-was-I-thinking-trying-to-plan-international-travel-in-the-last-month-before-departure anxiety. I've spent the last two weeks spending as much time as possible with the friends and family I'm going to miss over there, drinking in their presence before I have to leave them for four months. After I wrap up my last visit to my college friends, I'll hop home to pack the last few things and, on a red-eye flight leaving Wednesday, I'll be on my way with a friend to explore Ireland for two weeks before the Oxford term starts.

A lot of people have asked me if I will be keeping a blog while I'm abroad. This is it. I've had the domain for a month and haven't done a thing with it because I've never had a blog before. (This entry was actually my third attempt at writing a "first entry," and I'm much happier with it than the other two.) But I'm going to do my best to update regularly and to tell the stories that I think are going to make anyone who reads feel like they're over there with us.

I feel like, before this adventure begins, I ought to explain the title of my blog, because titles are important and I spent a long time trying to come up with mine. "We" is the first important word in the title, because I don't see this as just my adventure. My favorite stories involve many people coming together, and I'm lucky enough to be traveling with four of my dearest friends--the three I mentioned earlier and one more from another school. The fact that I'm going to get to share these experiences with them makes me so eager to get started. They are the "we" I was thinking of when I formed the title, but the pronoun encompasses more than just the American friends I'm getting to take with me. "We" will include all the English friends we make along the way--and, if you want, it will also include you as you read our stories.

"Wander" is the second really important word in the title. I paradoxically love and hate planning. (Remember that really long, overly hyphenated phrase I used a few paragraphs ago? That culminated at about one o'clock yesterday afternoon, and it wasn't pretty.) If I have the choice, I prefer to fly by the seat of my pants with only a rough outline of what I'm doing, trusting that everything will work out in the end. Fellow travelers, this is sometimes a very stupid thing to do, particularly when logistics of survival are involved (like when you're arriving two weeks before term and, four days before you get on a plane, you realize you don't know where you're going when you land). Other times, though, it is the very best part of traveling.

Wandering--with no agenda, armed with only a sense of direction and curiosity--is one of the very best ways to get to know the place you're visiting. My friend Aidan, whom I mentioned earlier, once told me that his favorite approach to exploring a city was to get as lost as possible and then to wander until he found his way back. You become so attentive to your surroundings when you go into them without knowing what to expect. Mental wandering is good, too: when you leave behind your expectations of what you thought this experience was going to be, in favor of discovering what it really is. I've found that on any journey, the parts that you didn't plan--good or bad, external or internal, mental, emotional, or physical--sometimes end up being your favorite parts of the trip. The best things sneak up on you when you aren't looking for them--when you are, instead, just wandering.

I intend to wander everywhere. All over London, all over Oxford, all over England and Ireland and wherever else my feet and a rail pass will take me. With friends or on my own (safely, though; don't worry, Mom). I intend to explore every alley and curve in the road, and to seize every opportunity I never expected to appear. I anticipate being surprised and confused and sometimes frustrated, but I expect to learn a lot that way.

Eventually I'll wander home. But that's four months from now, and though I'll miss it here I don't want to hurry my adventures there. I can't wait to get started.