Oxford

There was plenty to do last weekend. In less than three days I went to a musical, visited Oxford, played paintball and dropped by the Natural History Museum. Some of these activities were nothing but fun, while others didn’t exactly go as planned.

Lets start with the first activity; one that didn’t go as planned but was still plenty of fun. As you probably know, one of my aspirations for my last month here was to see Patrick Stewart starring in Macbeth. I’d stopped by the box office and checked the internet for tickets several times.

Unfortunately, the box office is completely sold out. Buying online would currently require me to sell my kidney as financial backing, so the idea of seeing Macbeth has become nothing but a ghost. But Deb and I couldn’t leave London without going to the theatre, so we moved on to plan B.

In retrospect, plan B seems like a bit of a cultural step away from Macbeth. Not because it is any less British, but because it is an entirely different slice of culture. We went to see Monty Python’s Spamalot, which is based on the ever-popular Holy Grail.

The show was great fun. It contained the perfect mix of scenes completely stolen from the movie and new material so that it covered all the high points, such as migrating coconuts but was still fresh and worth seeing.

Friday we boarded a minibus outside Faraday House and rode to Oxford. Now, the main point of going to Oxford was essentially to say we’d been there. There was no studying going on and we essentially walked around and looked at a bunch of colleges from the outside. At least, we looked at them as best we could through the white fog that was our breath. It was bitterly cold Friday.

Since it was so cold, it obviously makes sense that we spent hours and hours walking outside. By the time we’d seen about seven colleges whose names I don’t remember, my feet were numb. As I recall, highlights of colleges included the one Bill Clinton attended for a time and one where there are no students, only professors who sit around and learn all day long.

Oxford follows the pattern of a British town in that there are old back roads to stomp around, some of which could be taken straight from hundreds of years ago, but if you round the right corner, you are right on a miniature version of Oxford Street. Deb and I had to go to Oxford’s commercial plaza just so we could pop in to KFC (Yes, the American KFC). We went there not because we had forgotten to pack a lunch, but because we needed to sit somewhere warm.

After a tour inside some college that will, unfortunately, remain forever unnamed in my memory, we stopped by a traveling French market that had luckily set up shop in town for the day. Deb and I each bought a pastry to eat, but she showed off by ordering in French. I can tell she’s gearing up for our day in Paris in December.

On the bus ride back we could see the mountains of Wales off in the distance. That’s probably as close as I’ll get to them this trip. No hiking in Wales for me.

Saturday we had signed up to play paintball at the urging of one of the security guards at Faraday, who runs the trip every semester. It was just about the perfect day to play paintball – dark and threatening rain. We were slotted to play ten games on 4 courses, which made for a very long day indeed.

The day got a lot longer in the middle of the sixth game, when our organizer suffered a very scary moment. Somehow, when he was falling, a paintball went under his mask and hit him in the mouth, knocking him out cold. He fell over on his back and swallowed his tongue, cutting off his oxygen supply. If one of the marshals (paintball referees) had not gotten to him and been trained to pull his tongue out of his throat, the scene would not have been pretty. As it stood, he ended up being pretty shaken up and we had to suffer a few scary minutes off the field when we didn’t know what was happening.

Fortunately it wasn’t any worse than that, and we got to go home on the bus with exhaustion as our only ailment.

Sunday was, by necessity, a little less adventurous than the previous several days. Work doesn’t do itself, and the end of the semester is fast approaching. But we did spend a little time in the Natural History museum, which is just a walk through Hyde Park away from our flat. Entry into national museums in Britain is free, and it has been foolish to not visit the several galleries that are situated just south of my humble home.

The museum taught us about bugs, dinosaurs, and the planet earth. On the way home, we even got to help a little French boy who had wandered away from his family and was running around panicked on the street. Rather, I should say that Deb helped the little French boy. I just walked along and tried not to alarm him with my beard.

It rained on the walk home, setting up a theme that the papers say will continue throughout the week. What a dreary time. We don’t get off for Thanksgiving, and the weather won’t even give us a break.