A Little Gushing about Classes, Shakespeare and Oxford

Being that it has been a few days since I have blogged, and much has happened in those days, I feel like I owe you all an update! In about 30 minutes, I will have officially been in the UK for an entire week, and what a week it's been! I already cannot number the cups of tea I have consumed and the days are literally flying by!

I have settled into my dorm room well, and settled into my classes too. And although it is hard not to want to go to class and then nap for a few hours outside on one of the massive, springy lawns somewhere, I have to force myself to at least bring along a book and spend a few hours reading for my classes. Despite knowing exactly how heavy those books were in my suitcase, I did not really anticipate having to read so much every day. It is hard to balance the desire to go wander around Oxford and find a pub to have a pint in with the realization that I really shouldread those 30 chapters I have to have read for the next class day...

Oxford is just splendid! Charming, wonderful, beautiful, old, green, lovely... I can list adjectives on and on... and on!

(This is the front of my college, Wadham College)

(This is the street heading toward the shops)

(And this is the grass in our courtyard that you're not allowed to walk on... despite the significant temptation!)

And my classes! Despite the student in me grumbling about the pages and pages I must complete daily, the lectures we have every day are so worth the "torment"! The two classes I am enrolled in have such great professors who really know their stuff, and who lecture, but encourage the students to provide input. They are intellectually stimulating lectures that give me questions that I really do want to answer, they say things that leave me puzzling for hours (Prof Barrish, my Gothic Lit professor, said on Monday that "Sexuality and desire are always perverse," and I have a feeling that that will be a phrase that I puzzle over for quite some time!) I sit in lectures that have me so entranced and engaged that I look at my watch and realize that the hour is almost over - and wish that we could continue on for the whole afternoon.

There is something magical when students and professors alike are on the same page - and I think that that is particularly evident here. I love that.

Yesterday, we took our first day trip, and we went to Stratford-Upon-Avon, which as I am sure most of you are familiar with because it is Shakespeare's birthplace. We visited Anne Hathaway's cottage (AH was his wife), and we visited the Shakespeare museum by the house where he was born (there was a really cheesy staged room with a doll in a cradle and a baby's clothing laid out on a bed. One little kid asked, "Is that Shakespeare?!" and an actress in the room speaking to us about it all replied, "If it is, he's aged splendidly!") After that, about ten of us had dinner at The Dirty Duck (which was renamed by the American GIs who would dine there during WWII - it was originally The Black Swan.)

We saw the Royal Shakespeare Company's Macbeth that evening, and despite the fact that I was so tired (and a few of our group were actually napping in their seats too - we'd had a long day!) I was enthralled by the spectacle of their performance. It was a thrust stage and we were sitting rather close on the right side, and boy, it was gruesome! Obviously it is a bloody play as it was written, but they certainly didn't hold back on the blood special effects! Instead of witches, they substituted children (who first entered from the ceiling hanging from nooses), and the spent the rest of the play being so creepy... Everyone left shivering - and it was awe-inspiring to see a professional company act it. It hit me a lot harder than the other times I've seen and read the play, and I am sure I will remember that performance for quite some time!

Tomorrow, I will be going to Bath, and this time I won't leave my camera behind like I did yesterday (stupid Stefanie!) and tomorrow night I will be heading into London to see Harry Potter 7.2! I'll be going with Siobhan and her friends to the midnight showing at the IMAX theater... and I CAN'T BELIEVE IT. I will be a total wreck by the end of it, but what a way to end with a bang!

As for now, I think that I am going to go find the post office, find a quiet corner in the pub next door, order a pint of something delicious and local, and get to reading the three hundred thousand pages I have to read.

(Okay, so it's actually a hundred and seventy, but still.)