Cambridge, violence, and London!

Went to Cambridge last weekend to celebrate Luke's birthday. A few slight hiccups, none of which were exactly expected, but overall pretty awesome. London this weekend, and the Cambridge are coming to visit, should probably tell them about Mexican Night 2.0 sometime soon.

In other news, violence in Oxford has risen steadily over the past week. One student was assaulted, one man was stabbed outside a restaurant near city centre, and another man's body was found in the Thames about a block down from our house. Makes me feel all warm and safe inside...

Tutorials are going alright. I started out with papers that definitely weren't my best, but it's totally okay because this means I can slowly "improve" over the course of the class, landing a good grade at the end. Uhmmm....that's about all I have right now. I think I've given up on visiting Morocco, but we're definitely taking some other weekend trip, and maybe two. Poland and Italy are high on the list.

This week's post: A Rant on English weather.

I have yet to experience a thunderstorm in England. There is no thunder, and there is no lightning. It's horribly boring and all I've gotten is a sad mix of dreary clouds, cold sun and windy snow. All the fun weather was left behind, though the awesome snowstorms that shut down the entire country did provide me some entertainment.

Get to see MacBeth tonight. It would definitely be cooler if I didn't have a paper due at noon tomorrow, which I naturally haven't started, and we won't be back until midnightish at best. Plus I'm tired so there'll probably be some dozing during the play. Maybe I'll get it on the bus ride into London instead. Should have a chance for some good London Eye and Parliament pictures.

It starts getting light at about 4 am now, and won't be dark until 9 pm. This cuts deeply into my sleeping time. I need more darkness. thankfully even when it is light the sun is almost never out, so I can just pretend and sleep on anyway.

Also, May Day was a couple of days ago. Some people jumped off bridges, some of us just stayed up all night to watch the singing and then go pass out for a few hours. I'll just blame my fatigue on that...

So, it's been a few more months, and I still fail at blogging. Real surprise.

Aaanyway, my new term resolution is a once a week blog. Maybe. We'll see.

So I spent the last month or so at home and in Spain. Home was great, I needed a break, and I got to see a lot of people that I'd been missing, as well as get my fill of super smash brothers. Spain was pretty good too, especially Granada and Seville, but Madrid was kind of ruined by the "OH NOES HOW WILL WE GET BACK" complex that hit us about halfway through. If you hadn't heard, a big ol' volcano went off in Ireland, and is still spewing some ash, which absolutely shut down the air travel in northern Europe. The ryanair flight that we were planning on taking back was similarly shut down. With great luck and ingenuity we managed to make it back, though. We caught a bus from Madrid to Paris (17 hours+80 euros) and a bus from Paris to London(9 hours+50 euros) and even got back in time for our first lectures(6 hours of sleeping in my bed, I didn't go). Still waiting on my refund from Ryanair, it'll help lessen the impact of that bus ride, but it's still annoyingly expensive.

Either way, we're back safe and sound, and the rest of the stragglers are slowly trickling in, though my house is still missing a third of its residents. My major and minor tutorials both seem like they'll be interesting while not being toooo much work, so I think I'm looking forward to the rest of this term. I'm certainly looking forward to the traveling I want to do during it, but I still have yet to find someone to go to Morocco with me.

My bad...

Alright, so I've really failed at blogging for a long time now. I promise to start again! Or at least try. I can share all my adventures from the trip as soon as I find my camera. I have all the pictures on my computer, but didn't upload the videos yet, and the videos are what will tell me specifically what I was thinking about what I was doing at the time. I managed to lose both my keys and the camera somewhere in this house within two days of getting back...

Anyway, for now I've just made it back to Oxford and we're getting to know all the new people. They're all from Mercer except for one, so they mostly know each other already, which is good, because all of the Oxfordians already know each other. Makes it a little less awkward than them jumping straight into a group where they know noone. Everyone's pretty cool! We've shown them around town, where all the best pubs are and where they need to shop, as well as where they need to eat (Noodle Nation & The Mission) and what days the pubs have their specials (Mmmm...Curry...). We'll see how everyone does when the tutorials start, but for now it seems like everything's going to work out fine.

It's really nice to be back after a month of traveling, and I'm not sure I can do another trip like that without a very long time to recharge. I'm still planning on traveling some in the next break, but more like one and a half to two weeks, not a month. We saw so many awesome places (Madrid & Alcala de Heneres in Spain, Copenhagen in Denmark, Amsterdam in the Netherlands, Munich in Germany, Prague in the Czech Republic and Paris, La Rochelle and Marseilles in France). It was easier in the places where we spoke the language, or in Prague and Amsterdam where tons of people spoke English anyway. Communicating in France and Germany was difficult at times, though, but thankfully we never really needed anything aside from a menu item we could point to or some kind of train or bus ticket that went to a city we just had to figure out how to pronounce. Apparently it's impossible to get Marseilles(Mar-sigh) from Marseilles(Mar-say). Only had a few traveling difficulties, like being stuck in La Rochelle for an extra three or four days and nearly missing our flight back to London because we thought it was the next day, and the Eurail pass was definitely and completely worth it. We saved a lot of money going that route.

Either way, it was fun and I'm really glad I did it. I'll start sharing more detailed accounts of what happened to us and what we did in all the countries we visited as soon as I locate my camera. If I never locate it, I'll just be sad, and will give a foggy recollection based on pictures!