Oxford: Like Hogwarts but you have to walk everywhere…

I have officially made it through my first two days of classes at Oxford (I refused to believe I was actually taking classes until I walked into the classroom)! We have to be in class everyday at 9:00 for our intro to Shakespeare class (um what…if anyone needs the complete works of Shakespeare hit a girl up), and our professors name is Christopher Salamone.  He is really super intense and slightly intimidating but he is also fairly young! After Shakespeare is over at 10:30 we get tea (and coffee) and cookies for about half an hour in the dining hall (which let me tell is no Fountain).  Then we go straight back into the same class room for our British History class that begins at 11:00 and goes until about 12:30! Martin Holmes is the professor for that class and he is awesome! I have never had someone spew so much information about me at once and you could literally ask him any question and he would know the answer.  On the first day he told us about how he had been to the United States and actually visited NC State a couple of times and then proceeds to tell us “my favorite building in all of the Universities in America (and I have been to a lot) has to be Harrelson Hall! I have never been in a place where someone can get so lost so easily and spend hours trying to get out”.  I died laughing when he said that and any State student would agree with that (who seriously thought it was a good idea to have an inside core and an outside core…I still don’t know how to get to the bathrooms).

Yesterday after our classes we took about  2.5 hour walking tour of Oxford.  We saw so many buildings and got so much information at the end of the tour I did not even know which way was right or left (it also might have something to do with bikes and cars coming at me from all different angles…”look right then left then right not left then right then left” that is all I say to to myself when walking down the street).  The pictures below are pictures that I took on the tour, and I will try and describe them as best as I can to my memory! OH we also casually got to see places where Harry Potter was filmed…no biggie or anything.

So this is a picture of the outside of a building (?) BUT this is where the Harry Potter hospital was filmed so that is why I took the picture HAH its also really zoomed cause I only had my zoom lens (lesson learned right?).

This is a picture of the gates to All Souls College, and anyone who gets accepted into this college automatically becomes a fellow and it is a graduate school.  They used to have the entrance exam be just one word on the sheet of paper and then you had to write about that word in every subject you know for three hours….(I’m sure glad times have changed…or maybe I’m not…the word shoe sparks a lot of thoughts in my head).  The lawn inside these gates was really beautiful and green! (Everything is pretty here).

Some ivy on some building that I thought looked really cool….(that might be the most intelligent thing I’ve ever said).

This is a picture of our whole tour group (we split into two to make it more manageable) in front of the bridge of sighs.  They call it the bridge of sighs because this is where prisoners would cross from the court room into the dungeons that many of them would not see the light of day again so the story is that they would sigh as they crossed the bridge into their doom.

Today after class we went PUNTING! (I figured it out..its not punning its punting..but you are on a boat and not on a field). So basically you sit in a really shallow narrow boat and then one person stands on the back and stinks this really really long pole into the water and just pushes off and then you can steer it with the pole just like a rutter (I think) on a boat!

We also went to the famous turf tavern for dinner tonight and had fish and chips (were were SO good) and a drink called Pemms which was also very good!  This is a famous pub that many notable people have been too including our one and only Bill Clinton…this is the place where he famously “did not inhale” so yeah there’s that…

Tomorrow we are going to stonehenge so be prepared!