Oxford

I went to Oxford to listen to a speaker for our International Issues and European Perspectives class. We took a tour of the city as we did in Cambridge, but I forgot my camera!

You can't blame me. Matt Panton, a high school friend, is visiting me for a week since this Thursday. We weren't sure what he was going to do while I went on the class trip, but James and Kevin came up with a good idea. Matt pretended to be Alex Tracy, who was supposed to go on the trip but is in Berlin for the weekend. All these names are probably confusing, but gist of the story, Matt told the administrator that he was someone else and both professors (two professors teach separate sections) taught he was in the other class so he slipped by scot free. Before the trip, we were scheming and hoping no one would notice so I obviously forget my camera. However, for the rest of the trip, everyone in my class called Matt Alex Tracy, and he was the butt of many jokes.

Despite this side story, Oxford was pretty. We didn't see any chapels that matched the one by King's College in Cambridge, but plenty of architecture and history existed. Apparently, in 1167, students first came to Oxford. They were kicked out by the schools in Paris so the king sent them to Oxford, a relatively close location but one intended to keep them away from London. In fact, Oxford was found in medieval times as the intersection of the (slightly north)western road from London and the northern road from Portsmouth and Southampton.

Like Cambridge, there are 38 separate colleges that amount to 20,000 students. Unlike Cambridge, it seemed like some of the colleges had specialties worthy of distinction, but it seemed like you could still study anything you liked at any college. That's a bit irrelevant since by the mere fact of making it to Oxford, I guess you've proven your intellectual worth.

Our tour guide, knowing we were NYU students, tried to make American connections throughout the trip, a thoughtful but overdone gesture. Apparently, the founders of seven colonies went to Oxford, and yes, he pointed out the college that each one attended. We saw Bill Clinton's lodgings for his first year as a Rhodes Scholar. America is apparently one of the biggest delegations (I suppose Oxford resembles the UN). 32 of 96 Rhodes Scholars are allotted to the States, and we make up 1,400 of the 20,000 students, second only to the UK.

For lunch, we had pie with mash(ed potatoes), gravy, and peas at the Covered Market. For the faint-hearted, there are whole rabbits and pigs hanging in the market. I got a whiff, and I scurried away, saying "I'm a vegetarian, I can't take this." My friend responded, "I'm a meat eater, I can't take this."

Also, we rushed into the Museum of Science before our talk. On the basement level, there's a blackboard with Albert Einstein's writing as part of his second lecture of three on the theory of relativity in Oxford in 1930. It's only about seven lines of equations, but obviously, we couldn't understand it. Ten of us rushed in, took pictures, got told that no flash was allowed, stood around for five minutes trying to decipher the variables, and left just as quickly for our talk without seeing more than three other things in the museum. I wonder why the British are perplexed by our mannerisms.