I have now been back in America for two full weeks, though it feels like much longer.  I do not feel like I’ve had a normal post-study-abroad adjustment period, and unfortunately I doubt that I ever will.  In fourteen days I have said goodbye to the country which had begun to feel like home, seen my best friend and house for the first time in ten-and-a-half months, finally had to come to terms with the fact that my dog died while I was in England, packed up my entire room and thrown away many of my childhood belongings, moved to a new town thirty-five minutes away, and stayed only one night there before rushing off to my friend’s lake house on Lake Winnipesauke for the week.  I am on my way back from New Hampshire now, and I will have only two-and-a-half weeks at home before I go back to school.  Because I’m going through so many confusing changes in addition to coming back to America, I’m almost too confused to say anything about reverse culture shock or anything else that I might have felt more distinctly if I had returned to a settled, slow-paced environment.

One thing I know for sure is that I definitely want to spent as much of my future life in England as possible.  Anyone who is familiar with me at all will know that I don’t like America very much, and that this is one of the reasons I want to live in England.  But more importantly, when I was at Oxford I finally found a place where simply existing made me happy.  Although this year was amazing, it wasn’t perfect.  But no matter what kind of stress I was going through while I was there, I felt good simply because I was in England.  I think that it’s small things like that which create happiness in the end, rather than big, dramatic events.  So, to some extent I lost that feeling of simple happiness now that I’m back in America. This loss has definitely been one of the major themes of my return so far.

Of course, there have been positives to my homecoming as well.  Thanks in part to my academic experience at Oxford, I now have a clearer idea of the kind of career I want to pursue.  For this reason I’m looking forward to returning to my home university.  Like all of my other experiences abroad, this year has given me a lot of confidence and perspective (I’ll never be afraid to write another paper after Oxford) and I’m excited to apply everything I learned to my American life.  Also, seeing my friends has been amazing.  It’s great to meet new people, but it can be exhausting after a long time and sometimes it’s nice to be around the people who know you already.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the concept of home this year, both when I was abroad and now that I’m back in America.  Did it make sense to call England “home” over the past year because I was so happy there, even though I’d spent less than a year in the country?  Can I really say that I’m “home” right now, if I am likely to spend less than a total of two months in my brand new house over the next year?  Every familiar place and person here feels slightly and indescribably different, a sensation that I can link to my year abroad with certainty.  It’s disconcerting, and it makes this country feel less like home than ever.  But while study abroad might be the source of this displacement in a way, it has also taught me how to move past it.  I now have a clearer idea of what I want in life, and I’ve learned to deal with uncertainties better.  While I may be unsure of where to call “home” at the moment, I am confident that, sometime in the future, I will be capable of creating my own sense of belonging wherever I decide to do so.

I realize that this post is extremely late, but I wanted to finish out my year of blogging properly.  In my defense, I really have been non-stop busy ever since returning to America.

Just before I went home I spent two weeks in Wales.  I participated in HelpX, an organization similar to WWOOFing in that you help out a host in exchange for free room and board.  The difference is that with HelpX you’re not necessarily on a farm – you could be helping a sickly older person or someone with a disability, or an ordinary family who just needs things done around the house.  Some of the HelpX hosts even live on boats.  I was helping a family in Snowdonia who liked DIY.  They posted a listing on HelpX because they want help with their home and gardening projects.  They had a cozy house right on the edge of a beautiful valley called Nant Francon (Google it – it’s amazing).  The views from the house and past their large garden were stunning.  The father, Alaric, is going to retire from an occupational therapy job in October, and the mother, Rosy, works a few days a week at a local hotel information desk.  They have three grown children, 25-year-old Aaron, 23-year-old Osian, and 20-year-old Clara.  Once again I got extremely lucky with a host family.  Both of my host parents made me feel very welcome, and they were so laid back with work that the experience almost felt like a regular homestay rather than a HelpX one.  I didn’t have to get up at any particular time, which was great since I was exhausted from the month of travelling I’d done before arriving there.  Technically I had to work 4-5 hours a day, but Rosy and Alaric were very understanding about my desire to see the area so I often only worked for a few hours a day.  They even drove me to local sites.  When I was working, my tasks were really nice in that they were varied.  One day I’d be gardening, the next I’d be painting, and the next I’d be cleaning and polishing.  I never got bored doing the same thing over and over, like I often did WWOOFing.

I also liked the other members of the family.  Clara was, funnily enough, in Sweden for an environmental conference during the first week of my Welsh experience, and she was great to talk to during the second week when she was around.  I also met Osian, who came with his longtime girlfriend and all of her Iranian family on my last day.  He was very busy entertaining his guests – it was insane cramming fourteen people into that small house (Alaric’s brother and his wife came over on the same night), but Osian seemed very nice too.  Oh, and I can’t forget my host family’s dog, Tara!  I LOVED her.  She reminded me a lot of Roxy, actually – she was a black lab mix too, and she was loving and mild-tempered.  I took her for a few beautiful walks in the valley.

As I try to think of other things to write about, I’m realizing that what I really should admit is that I spent a lot of time sleeping in Wales.  I was profoundly tired and I didn’t really need to set my alarm, so I think I might have missed out on some day trips around the area.  But it was the end of a very fun but exhausting year, and I needed to sleep.  It’s not like I stayed in the house all the time.  I went to Caernarfon, a cute town which is home to the castle where the Princes of Wales receive their title.  The castle was beautiful and interesting, but I experienced more than a typical tourist trip on my visit.  I was wandering around the castle when one of the guys who worked there stopped me and initiated a chat.  He was pudgy and probably in his late thirties or early forties.  He started talking about how I liked the castle and Wales in general, and then he progressed to slightly more personal topics.  When he learned that I went to Oxford, he said that he’d studied Medieval history at Trinity College, Cambridge.  Only a minute or two later he suggested that we stay in touch.  Naturally, my answer to this was awkward and vague.  I think I said “oh yeah, I’ll just…be in my host family’s garden” or something.  Anyway, he finally let me go with the thrilling promise of seeing me on my way out.  That he did – bearing gifts.  He was carrying a gift bag for me, in which there was a little book about historical Anglo-Welsh relations and a card with my name on it.  I had to wait a little while for Rosy to pick me up across the street from the castle, and the guy actually came out onto the street to go on some errand, chatting with me again on the way.  He informed me that his e-mail address was in the card if I wanted to “exchange history tidbits”.  I hid as he was coming back from his errand because I couldn’t bear to talk to him again.  So, that’s my story from Caernarfon Castle.

My other tourist trips were less eventful.  Rosy and Alaric have a thirty-five-year-old friend who lives in the nearby town of Conwy, which is another historical place with a castle.  I met her when she came over for dinner one night, and she invited me to spend the day with her in her town.  I had a great time in Conwy because we saw four historical houses (including the castle, which was actually used more for war purposes), and of course seeing historical houses is one of my favorite things to do in Britain.  Two of the houses were especially interesting because they were once owned by middle class people.  Most of the houses that are open to be toured belonged to the nobility, so it was cool to see how a more ordinary person would have lived.  One of the houses was Elizabethan, and the second was probably the oldest house I’ve ever visited – it was built in the 1400s.  The fourth house was (literally) the smallest house in Britain.  It was right across from Conwy’s waterfront, and contained only two rooms.  One was on top of the other and each were roughly the size of a king-size bed.  It was actually quite a pretty house.  Apparently a fisherman used to live there in early 20^th century.

One of my other outings was to Penrhyn Castle.  Lord Penrhyn made his fortune in Snowdonia slate mining in the middle of the 19^th century, and apparently he was a massive jerk.  He was active in the slave trade and only paid his workers in his own goods, ensuring that they’d stay reliant on him and that he’d stay very rich.  Still, his castle is impressive.  If I remember correctly he built it to look like Norman architecture, though of course the inside was Victorian.  I think I prefer Georgian houses, but I still enjoyed my visit very much.

I think the only other major trip I took in Wales was up Mount Snowdon in a steam train.  The views were beautiful, of course, and I happened to go up the mountain on the same day as the annual footrace to the top.  I think the race started at the exact same time as the train ride began, so I got to see a lot of the runners.

I had one last adventure after I left Wales.  I took the train to London to stay with Priya for the night before my plane ride home the next afternoon.  It was great to see Priya again, and to explore her area of London.  It’s called Hounslow (it’s where Bend it like Beckham takes place), and she’d told me a lot about it over the year so it was nice to finally be able to see it for myself.  It was also the perfect bookend to a year which had begun with my night in Ciara’s room back in Boston, ten-and-a-half months ago.  It’s mind-boggling to think of how much has happened between then and now.

Yet another few weeks have passed, and I am one trip closer to the end of this adventurous year.  In Sweden I was once again lucky with a farm choice.  Our host was an extremely friendly man named Pär (after much debate and struggle, we learned that you can’t really pronounce this name correctly without have a Swedish accent, but most English-speaking people call him Pahr).  He has three kids, but they were away at their mother’s house for the first week we were there.  The oldest, a sixteen-year-old daughter named Saga, helped with the farming when she was around, and she was nice and seemed quite artsy.  There was a ten-year-old girl named Ingrid who mostly watched TV, and an insane five-year-old boy named…something very Swedish…who ran around yelling in a very, very high voice.  Pär’s friend Paul also came over to help on the farm and brought his son David, and Paul was extremely friendly too.  They all started teasing me about my fear of worms, etc. (predictably), so the banter was good quality.

During the first week there were three other WWOOFers – a hippie Swedish couple (Sweden seemed quite hippie in general, actually – it reminded me of Maine in landscape and culture) and a French girl named Charlotte.  They were all great – Anton, the Swedish guy, was really tall and had a deep voice made extra epic by his Swedish accent, and he and his girlfriend Kajsa (pronounced like “kaysa”)were both very nice.  Rosie and I had more contact with Charlotte, since she lived with us in the little four-bed bungalow while Anton and Kajsa lived in their caravan.  We joked about her in good nature, because she was quite thin and soft-spoken but a few days in we found out that she was a rugby player.  She told us a story about some girl who’d yanked on her ponytail during a rugby match, and how she’d fought her off and everything.  She also ate SO MUCH – like, more than Rosie and me, which is saying a lot.  Whenever we couldn’t find food we’d always say “CHARLOTTE!”, even after she left, but we were just messing around.  Did she make meals feel like competitions?  Yes.  But she was still great.  She, Anton, and Kajsa all left on the same day, and Scott, a 20-year-old American, arrived only a few hours later.  He was basically a stereotype of a California surfer dude, though he had a lot of Oregon hippie in him too.  He was obsessed with living in the middle of the woods and eating plants and worms.  On our last day he BIT INTO A WORM.  In case you aren’t aware, this is SO MUCH WORSE than eating the worm, because after you bite into it you then have to watch the REST OF IT SQUIRMING as you CHEW.  He even said “oh look, its guts are hanging out” as he ate it.  AHHHHHHHHHHHH

Moving on from that horrific memory…the work was very chilled out.  It was almost exclusively planting and weeding, since Pär doesn’t have any animals or anything, and it usually seemed to go by really quickly.  I think we worked almost as much as I’ve worked at any other farm – it was probably the daily schedule which made it feel quick.  At the English and Irish farms we’d always worked all morning with a quick break for tea and biscuits, and then have lunch and then work some more.  But in Sweden we’d get up a half-hour earlier than we did at the other farms, work only a few hours, have an hour long coffee break, and then work two more hours before lunch.  There was no work after lunch, which never failed to be surprising.  Oh yeah – that “coffee break” was really “fika,” a Swedish cultural tradition where you drink a hot coffee out of a normal glass (therefore burning your hands…go figure) with people who you want to get to know better.  That sort of thing is the reason I like WWOOFing – it was cool to experience a daily event like that with Swedish people.  Also, Pär was an INCREDIBLE cook.  He made everything from soups to salads to meat dishes, and it was all amazing, so lunches were consistently fantastic.

Ah yes, I almost forgot to write about the two days during which we worked with some neighboring farmers instead of Pär.  It sucked.  Not only did they make instant coffee for fika and not have milk for my tea (!) but our first task was shoveling sheep poop.  We’d heard horror stories about this job from Anton, Kajsa and Charlotte, who’d done it before we got there, but it didn’t turn out to be SO bad.  It wasn’t fun, though.  And the other task they had us do was hay barreling, which entails standing in a huge crate attached to the back of at tractor, which is picking up hay and launching it at you in the shape of a square.  We were meant to stack the hay in the crate, and it would have been quite fun if it hadn’t sent Rosie and Scott’s allergies wild.  Scott even had an asthma attack and had to go to the hospital!  I didn’t wear long trousers so I got a rash, but nothing worse.  Needless to say, we missed Pär after a day and a half of those people.  The dad of the neighbouring family was a bit odd, too – he was Scottish but raised in Africa and he sounded English, and he is apparently quite a famous Cambridge archeologist.  He found out that Rosie went to Oxford, and without knowing that I did too (sort of) he got very chummy with Rosie in a pretentious way.  One day we were walking to the bungalow down the path and he pulled up his car, asked “do you like Magnum ice cream bars?” and gave us a bunch of sweets and Coke before driving away.  We never really spoke again.  Odd, but I was happy to take the sweets.

Rosie and I experienced many failures in Sweden, to put it gently.  The one time we had to make lunch for ourselves we basically ate untoasted bread with jam and uncooked vegetables.  It was pathetic.  We also managed to mess up making our pasta dinners (which were our fare every work night) almost EVERY SINGLE TIME, whether it was a spillage of water, pasta, or uncooked tomato sauce that was the problem.  Once I even created some sort of snot-esque goo out of the pasta by overfilling the pot, being unable to stir it properly, and overcooking everything at the bottom.  Rosie and I also consistently tripped, got on the wrong trains, failed to speak Swedish, planted crooked vegetables, and got lost.  To be fair, our living situation at the farm was only a step above camping, so it invited accidents.  The bungalow was one room, and while it was cosy in a way it was quite buggy.  You also had to walk through a path of overgrown weeds to get there, and there were stinging red ants swarming it.  They seemed to love the suede on my Birkenstocks.  t was so weird – they’d just sit on it, almost seeming stuck there – and then they’d bite me.  So often.  There were also several electric fences you had to leap over to get to the bungalow, and I zapped myself three times over the two weeks.  We had to come and go from the Bungalow constantly, too, since all of our refrigerated food was in a creepy cellar below in which two unidentified dead animals hung from a line.  We needed to walk up the drive to Pär’s house a lot, and then there was the bathroom.  It was across the road in a barn, and the toilet was a compost thing.  I’ll leave it to your imagination to come up with what that entailed.  Right now in Wales, I am VERY grateful to have a bathroom right next to my room.

Rosie and I didn’t have many concrete ideas about what we’d do on our days off; on the second Sunday we did basically nothing at all.  On the first Saturday we went to Stockholm, which I thought was a very unique and interesting city.  We saw the royal palace but didn’t know what other sites to see, so we spent a lot of time wandering around – especially in the Old Town.  The streets and buildings kind of reminded us of Italy, but of course the climate was very different and the whole city is really an archipelago.  The islands and relatively small population gave Stockholm a very clean, relaxed feel that’s missing from all the other international cities I’ve visited.  It was very beautiful – it seemed like a great place to live.  On the first Sunday we tried to go swimming in a nearby lake because the weather was nice, but it got cloudy RIGHT when we got there.  Charlotte and I still went in, and now we can say that we’ve gone swimming in Sweden!  …yayy!  Right as we left the sun came out again.  Figures.  On the second Saturday Rosie and I went to Uppsala, a university town north of the farm.  It was nice too, though a lot of places seemed to be closed and quiet without the students.  Again, we spent most of our time wandering around the university buildings and local gardens (and graveyards), though we did go into a ruined castle.

I think that’s pretty much all I have to report from Sweden.  It’s a unique place – for example, it didn’t ever get darker than dusk- and it was very fun to go WWOOFing with a friend rather than by myself.  In a few weeks I’ll write again – from America!!??

Hello from Sweden!  I’ve just finished my first day of WWOOFing north of Stockholm, and I’m writing this in a greenhouse thing in which you feel like you’re outside when you’re not.  It’s all pretty good so far.  But more about that in the next post.  This one is about France!

It feels kind of odd that it took me so long to get to France, since for most of my life I’d been planning obsessively for my junior year abroad there.  But I finally made it, and it was extra good because I had Camille to show me the country properly.  I arrived in Paris relatively early on the first day so we had quite a bit of time, and I saw the area called Montmartre.  I liked it a LOT, as my mom had predicted, because there were lots of windy streets.  The Sacré-Cœur is also there, a church which was built to remind the defeated revolutionaries of the second French Revolution that religion would always have an important place in France.  Nearby we stumbled across a fantastic vintage store, where I bought a skirt for five euros and a dress for ten.  We also went to the red light district, and I saw the Moulin Rouge of course.  Then we had a very late dinner, which was well worth the wait.  It was actually one of the best meals I’ve ever had.  It was in a tiny restaurant with a hot waiter, and I got a tartiflette (a cheese/meat thing) and a Crème brûlée.  Both were INCREDIBLE.

Over the next few days Camille and I took walks around a lot of the famous sights of Paris.  We went past the National Assembly, the square in front of it where a bunch of famous people got their heads chopped off, some famous fountain, the Louvre, a bunch of university buildings, the catacombs, the Champs-Élysées,Camille’s favorite Parisian graveyards (she’s weird), a beautiful park, and more.  We also visited Notre Dame, which I really liked.  I think it might be my favorite cathedral that I’ve seen in Europe, actually.  We went to the top of it and saw some great views of the city.  We went to the Jewish quarter and ate some falafels on the second night, and then Camille showed me the bizarre and modern library that she spends her life in while she studies in Paris.  We also tried Berthillon, the famous ice cream place, and it REALLY lived up to its reputation.  I think I might have liked it better than the one gelato place in Italy, actually (!).  Another night we went to Shakespeare and Co., the English bookstore, which was THE COSIEST PLACE ON EARTH.  I could have curled up with a book and fallen asleep there.  Oh, and of course I saw the Eiffel Tower!  Maybe because it’s SO famous I didn’t think about it that much before going there, because I knew I would see it at some point, but it was AWESOME.  You can really see how enormous it is because there’s so much space in front of it, unlike the Empire State Building which, of course, is next to a bunch of other skyscrapers.  We spent our last day in Paris at Versailles.  I was amazing, and would have been more amazing without the crowds of tourists, I’m sure.  Unfortunately we didn’t have time to see Marie Antoinette’s nearby castle or much of Versailles’ gardens, which was too bad since Camille said those are the best parts.

After nearly missing our train, we finally made it to Alençon, Camille’s hometown.  It was pretty late when we got there, so we basically just ate and slept.  Camille’s house is SO COOL.  It was built around 1795, and it’s quite big.  There are a lot of mysterious things in it, like the staircase Camille found only a few years ago and the sculpture of a head her family found hidden in a closet.  Camille even has a BOOKSHELF WITH A LADDER in her room.  My dream.  Her town is nice too, as I found out the next day.  It’s kind of exactly what I wanted for a host town when I was thinking about going to France for my junior year of high school – an old, small city.  That night was la Fête de la Musique, a holiday in which everyone is encouraged to go outside and make music for others to enjoy.  Most of the music was bad, but there was some interesting (and comical) traditional dancing and just generally great people watching.

The next day we took a trip with Camille’s parents to Mont Saint Michel, a steep island with a famous church at the top.  It’s an amazing place, with a touristy little town winding up toward the church.  The day after that Camille’s parents took us on yet another trip, this time to the Loire valley to see some castles.  The first one was Amboise, which had a nice perch above a pretty town but was relatively uninteresting inside.  Chenonceau, the second one, was much better.  It’s built IN a river, so the sun reflects off the water and makes beautiful patterns on the walls in some of the rooms inside.  What a good idea for a castle location – I can’t believe no one else thought of it!  The inside was really beautiful in general, and we got to see the kitchen at the bottom, which was the best area for servants I’ve ever seen in any of these sorts of places.

My last day with Camille was spent in Alençon.  We woke up late and then went to a restaurant where Camille’s parents had made a reservation.  It was the weirdest restaurant ever.  It was in the middle of a bunch of random fields, and surrounded by extremely old statues, doors, and other household decorations.  Camille says that sort of thing is normal in France, though, and my duck and chocolate cake were delicious so I’m not complaining.  After the meal Camille’s parents dropped us off at Alençon’s annual cultural festival, where people from different backgrounds come and sell things from their country.  We watched some extremely impressive breakdancing, Balinese dancing, and salsa.  It was a very cold, wet day, so after Camille’s dad picked us up I kind of drank some tea and passed out in the house.  After dinner that night, Camille’s parents brought us to a huge bonfire, which is also an annual thing and is supposed to celebrate summer.  The weather put a damper on things (literally…ha), but it was a great last night.

I left Camille to return to Paris the next day, and I stayed in another hostel so that I could catch my flight to Sweden in the (EARLY) morning.  When I made it to my hostel I locked my stuff up and had a nice, relaxed metro ride to Ladurée, Paris’s famous macaroon shop.  I bought a bunch of flavours and then ate them with a slice of quiche on a bench.  It was a great evening – Ladurée is the BEST THING EVER.  It’s like…more than food.  That’s all I can say.  Just go to Paris and eat some.

After a 5am wakeup the next day and TONS of travelling, here I am in Sweden.  France was great, and it made me think a lot about how badly I wanted to spend a year there during both my junior year of high school and college.  I would be so different right now if I had!

I like to believe that this will not be the last time I live in Oxford, so I will not write that it is.  Besides, there’s no reason to get too sentimental in this post, since I’m not going home for another six weeks.  I’ll be in France for ten days with Camille, then Sweden for two weeks with Rosie, then Snowdonia for another two weeks, then at Priya’s house for a night.  This year abroad is not over.

But my time at Oxford is essentially finished.  Somewhat surprisingly, this experience has been nearly everything I hoped for and everything I feared, so in summary it has been wonderful.  I was going to do this thing where I look back at my first post and write a sort of response to it, explaining how I’ve changed since then or whatever.  I have decided not to do that, because a few seconds of reading that post has almost made me cry.

I DO NOT WANT TO LEAVE ENGLAND.

That said, it’s time to go.  I can tell that I’ve gotten all that I was ever going to get out of this experience, and I don’t think I have any learning left to do here (for now).  I have managed to find a place where simply EXISTING makes me happy.  That’s pretty great, and it feels nice to know where I want to be for the rest of my life.  At the same time, I’m looking forward to seeing everyone back in America.  As much as I love England, I my American friends a lot.  I wish I could have the best of both worlds.

Anyway, I suppose I should give some sort of summary of the last half of my last term.  It’ll be quite short, because my studying picked up in the past month or so and I haven’t had much time for much else.  I’ve participated in some football here and there, seen a Pride and Prejudice play, which I’ve always wanted to do, spent some time with Asiyla and had a sad goodbye with the Radwans.  My grades for this term have been really good, and I made great connections with my tutors.  I’ll really miss most of them, actually.  I suppose this should come as no surprise, but I think that I have grown enormously as a result of my academic experience at Oxford.  I just…feel a lot CLEVERER, although I’m not sure that I actually am.  Maybe it’s less the actual knowledge that I’ve gained, and more my sense of capability and accomplishment.  Because after you get four hours of sleep every night for a week while simultaneously trying to write one essay on a 900-page novel and another on the French Revolution, you feel like you can do anything.  My confidence has grown enormously this year – especially this term for some reason – and more importantly, I have somehow met one of the most important, challenging goals I had for myself at the beginning of the year – I have started to embrace the uncertainty in my life.  I still don’t love feeling uncertain about my future, but Oxford has given me the confidence I needed to understand that it’s not that anything can happen to me, it’s that I can do anything.  Maybe it’s corny, but it’s important.

Also, while I have begun to accept uncertainty, I have begun to feel more certain about certain things.  The academic stimulation (and the end of my English major) that I’ve experienced here is persuading me that I could have a real future in academia. I’d love to do research in neuropsychology, a job that would be practical enough (increasing the effectiveness of treatment) while still allowing me to use my writing skills and my love of the university scene in general.  I think it won’t be too long until I am back here in England, studying for a PhD in psychology from Oxford or Cambridge or St Andrews or King’s College London.

And I will conclude this post by conveying the good news that, according to one of my best friends, I now have an English inflection.  Not an accent, but an inflection.  It’s a start.

This post was going to be about how happy I am.  Well it still is, but interestingly I am writing it to a song which was on the River Island soundtrack.  *twitch*

So yeah, I AM SO HAPPYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY.  This country is exactly where I want to be, and I currently have a surprisingly fantastic work/exercise(well this part is slightly questionable)/sleep(!)/friends ratio going on right now, and it’s just brilliant.  Plus I still fell insanely lucky to be going to Oxford, along with a million other things.  And I have excellent (though annoyingly unspecific) travel plans for this summer, and I’m even excited to go home for a month before going back to Kenyon.  So life is really, really good right now – and this term is flying by.  (The weather, though, has been abysmal.)

Some highlights from this term so far have included the Blues and Colours football awards ceremony and Oxford Holi.  You know how in period movies when they’re at parties you always see those footmen holding trays of wine?  THEY HAD THOSE GUYS AT THE FOOTBALL AWARDS CEREMONY.  In a spectacular show of history nerdiness, I freaked out.  And drank wine.  The ceremony was more like a cocktail party with speeches and certificates, but it took place in the beautiful, glass-ceilinged Natural History Museum.  I was milling around next to the last dodo skeleton in the world for a few hours.

Holi was even better.  For those of you who don’t know, Holi is an Indian holiday where you get loads of coloured powder, mix it with water and throw it at people.  Everyone wears white, so you get extra colourful.  It was seriously the BEST THING EVER.  It was mad…people running everywhere…colour still stains the ground where it took place and it’s been weeks.  It was really funny because I’d see someone who I’d met only once, and they’d be like “oh hi again” and then chuck green water in my face.  Best holiday idea in the world.  I would do it every day if I could.

What else?  A week ago today I was at the Warner Bros Harry Potter studio!  It was the actual place where they shot everything with a set, and they also had props from the films.  They had everything from the cupboard under the stairs to the Burrow to the philosopher’s stone to the Gryffindor common room to the Ministry of Magic to Diagon Alley.  Overall it was really fun to go there, but at the same time it was kind of depressing.  I guess I just expected a film set to be more…epic.  But in reality it was basically one ENORMOUS building with tons of different places from my imagination stuck into corners.  It just goes to show how freaking amazing the human imagination is, and how much better books are than films.  Anyway, I bought a copy of The Tales of Beedle the Bard and resisted a Slytherin scarf and flag.

Ohh, I feel like I’m leaving so much out!  I guess I’ll just go on to more everyday life stuff.  So, academics.  They’ve been great this term, as usual.  Children’s literature is my primary tutorial, and I can’t tell you how fun it’s been.  Just an example – two weeks ago my assignment was the first Harry Potter book.  Also, I care about children’s literature way more than any other kind of literature, so it gives me way more personal satisfaction to study.  My tutor is REALLY COOL – she’s from New Zealand and she’s a DPhil student.

My secondary tutorial is also going very well – it’s the “The Troubled Reign of George III” with Kate Watson, the same tutor I had for French Revolution in Michaelmas.  I still really like her, and last time we spent like half of my tutorial talking about my story instead of the American Revolution.  She kept saying how interesting it was, and how she couldn’t stop thinking about it, which obviously made me want to cry with happiness.  She’s going to give me much-needed sources for historical research, and she gave me BRILLIANT ideas about the origin of the house.  BRILLIANT.  I can’t even write about this anymore because I am getting too excited.

Again, I feel like there should be more…but there isn’t, I guess.  I was worried about this term because football is over, but that has been a surprisingly easy adjustment.  I’ve been going to random friendlies and college practices anyway, and I’ve been running with Rosie (my football friend and summer travel buddy) too.  Also, Asiyla is back in England so I’ve been hanging out with her.  LIFE IS GOOD.

Well, I guess this is my second to last post about Oxford!  Amazing.  See you next time…

Ari

P.S. I now have my official plane ticket home – July 25.  It’s exactly two years from the day I went to England for the first time. :’(  SOMEONE WILL HAVE TO DRAG ME CRYING ONTO THE PLANE

As the title of this post implies, my parents were recently here!  We had a lot of fun.  I dragged them jet-lagged around Oxford on their first day.  On Sunday we went to Blenheim Palace and the pretty town of Woodstock.  I’d already done both things almost immediately upon arriving in England in 2010, but I didn’t mind going back.  Blenheim is the birthplace of Winston Churchill and the ancestral home of the Dukes of Marlborough.  It’s very beautiful (though I think I prefer Chatsworth…it’s cozier somehow, and I think the grounds are nicer because they’re hilly), and they had a really interesting interactive history thing with videos, cool sets, and lifelike manikins.  I hadn’t seen it last time, and I’m glad I didn’t miss it altogether.

On Monday I continued my Oxford tour, and we also paid a visit to the Radwans and the footpaths.  The weather was horrible – these were literally the worst ten consecutive days I’ve seen this whole year.  But the visit was a lot of fun, and I think my parents still enjoyed seeing the footpaths.  On Tuesday we went to Bath, which was great…but Wednesday was a bit of an epic fail.  Aaaaaaaaand it was entirely my fault.  On Tuesday we kept debating about what to do the next day because we knew the weather was going to be exceptionally terrible.  Finally we decided to go to Highclere Castle, the place where they shoot Downton Abbey.  I was really excited, and we got the nicest, chattiest taxi driver to take us there from the Newbury train station.  (When I said I go to Oxford, he said ‘oh, I’m sorry you didn’t get into Cambridge’.)  But it turns out that I’d somehow been wrong about the castle being open that day…and Downton Abbey was actually being filmed when we got there!  In a way it was actually really cool to see – there were a bunch of white trailers, and we could see a bright light being used for filming right in front of the house.  Unfortunately we were relatively far from the castle, so we couldn’t see if there were any actors there.  I really wanted to go and check!  But we had to leave.  My parents must REALLY have missed me because they didn’t immediately kill me for wasting like seventy-five of their dollars on the trip.  We had to just go back to Newbury and explore a little before returning to Oxford.  Oops!!!!!!!  Well…the next time I see a really REALLY rainy scene in Downton Abbey, I’ll know I was right there!  I’m probably going to go back with some friends from the football team.

The next day we went on a trip to the Cotswolds.  The weather was horrible again, and because of the bus schedule we didn’t really get to spend that much time in the individual villages.  They were all beautiful, of course – we went to Moreton-in-Marsh, Lower Slaughter, and Bourton-on-the-Water.  I think the prettiest one was Stow-on-the-Wold, though, and we only passed through it.

On Friday I had a tutorial while my parents when to London for a concert.  I joined them on Saturday morning.  We went to the British Library first, and we saw the Magna Carta and Jane Austen’s notebook, along with lots of other very old and important books.  Once again the weather was disagreeable, so we spent the rest of the day in art museums.  I actually ended up enjoying that well enough, though.  I was getting pretty tired from running around with them so much.

Sunday deserves its own paragraph for the extent to which it was such a failure, but I won’t bore you.  I will just say that, due to a the largeness of a book store, my absorption in a book, an unfortunate Tube separation, and a forgotten phone number, my mom and I got separated from my dad in London and couldn’t find him for so long that we reported him as a missing person to the police.  Might that have been an overreaction?  Maybe.  But I was panicking, okay?  I was planning what I’d wear to his funeral, since clearly he’d gotten attacked in broad daylight by London thugs, who must have hidden his body in a dumpster off Bank Street!!!!!!!!  Obviously!  (By the way, this was the ONE TIME that the sun decided to come out.  Typical.)  Um…long story short…he’s alive.  And fine.  He had a lovely four hours browsing the British Museum whilst my mom and I searched the city for him practically crying.  Whatever.  It’s over now.  We had a really good evening at Parliament after dark, which is always a nice sight to see.

On Monday we went to the Tower of London, which is something I’ve always wanted to do.  There were lots of horrific torture stories, and the crown jewels are there too of course.  We also walked around the eastern part of the city and then to the parks near Buckingham Palace.  I was sad to say goodbye to them, and I left for Oxford that night very tired.  After being a tourist for so long, I was ready to sit down and study again.

So I think that’s what I’ll do now…you know, go off and study…HARRY POTTER.  Yep, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is this week’s reading!!!!!!!  BYEEEEE

As I write this I’m finally back in Oxford.  Due to the fact that I seemed to arrive at Rock Farm at a relatively hectic time, I wasn’t sure of my impressions of anything until near the end.  So, I’ve decided to wait until now to write a post about my experience there.

Firstly, I should just say that the setting of the farm was incredible.  I lived with the other WWOOFers in a centuries-old gatehouse, which was right next to the castle along with crumbling stables and old servants’ quarters that stretched back to the epic gate near the road.  There were views of the castle, the Boyne River and rolling green hills from every window in the apartment – it was seriously beautiful.  The apartment itself was nice, too – there were decorations, a slight homey clutter and brightly coloured walls.  Not to mention the fact that everything was really old, which, of course, will always win me over instantly.

Secondly – the host family.  I had a whole week to wonder what they might be like, since they went on a five-day vacation the day I got there.  It turns out that they are aristocrats, which I didn’t know when I signed up for the farm.  I DID know that there was a castle there, but I had no idea that it was my host dad’s father who owned it.  It turns out that the father is the Marquess of Conyngham.  On a tour of the castle which Alex (my host dad) gave me two days ago, I learned that the Conynghams were the largest land-owners in Ireland during the nineteenth century.  The first Marchioness of Conyngham was King George IV’s most important mistress, and the second marquess was the man who told Queen Victoria that she was queen at her succession.  Today Alex’s father, Henry, makes money for the estate by hosting concerts at the castle by the likes of U2 and the Rolling Stones.  Who knew???  Being a huge Georgian history nerd, I was very excited about all of this.  Also, the whole thing was just an interesting experience.  I’ve met so many different kinds of people in my life, and I’m only twenty-one.  That’s pretty exciting.

The family was very nice, too.  Alex and Carina’s children are ADORABLE.  The elder is a three-year-old girl named Laragh, and she has a two-year-old brother called Rory.  I became rather attached to him, which is strange because I don’t normally become so enthralled with children.  But Rory has these angelic blond curls that remind me of my own hair when I was his age, and he has the cutest shy smile.  I also loved the family dogs, of course, big Tarka and tiny Pernod.

Moving on to the other employees on the farm.  Laura, the children’s au pair, is a Spanish woman who used to be a WWOOFer and got asked to stay on.  She’s a really nice person and a FANTASTIC cook (her food was basically the only real food that I ate, since she made most of the lunches – I made pasta sprinkled with cheese for myself at almost every dinner).  When she started living in Slane permanently, Laura brought her boyfriend Lucho over and he became the farm manager.  I really like Lucho a lot – his English isn’t very good because he didn’t know a word of the language when he arrived in Ireland eight months ago, and it made for a ton of really funny conversations.  He says random English words, like “WHAT” and “more or less”, in completely incorrect places.  When the family was on vacation and I was the only native English speaker on the farm, conversations between him and the other WWOOFers could be hilarious failures.

The other WWOOFers were great, too.  When I arrived there was a French guy, Charles, and a Spanish girl named Rosa.  Charles left about a week and a half after I got there, but Rosa and I happened to be leaving on the same day so I spent a LOT of time with her over the weeks.  She’s very friendly, outgoing, and fun-loving, so we had a good time together.

Okay, so we’ve finally reached the part where I tell you about the work.  Since it was spring I got to do a lot of planting, which is relaxing and easy.  There was also just general maintenance of the plants that were growing and the building of new fields (the farm is very new).  The field-creating was really boring and tiring, but the rest was fine.  WWOOFing is great when the weather’s nice, since I’d want to be outside anyway, but when it’s cold it can be seriously awful.  We had a real mix of weather when I was there, which is to be expected of Ireland I suppose.  There was one almost hot week when Rosa and I basked in the sun after work, but the last full week was freezing and rainy, leaving us hugging the radiator at the end of each day.  The only other main job we had was feeding the chickens and pigs.  Chicks were hatching in our apartment near the end of my stay, which was really exciting since I’ve always wanted to see that.  I was not a fan of the pigs, however – Mr. Piggy, the adult male, bit me on the first day.  I wasn’t nervous going in to feed him just because I’ve never really thought of pigs as dangerous animals, but these ones are huge (Google “ginger pig”).  As I went in to feed him Rosa said that she was nervous on her first day, and then I asked her if I should be.  Right after she said no, Mr. Piggy bit my leg on top of a huge bruise I had from varsity.  After that I wasn’t really keen on going into the adult pigs’ area anymore, and on the third and last time I did he head butted me.  When I started sprinting away, he got his hoof on my hamstring and now I have a long cut/bruise on the back of my leg.  WHY DON’T THEY JUST KILL HIM AND EAT HIM, ALREADY?  He’s very mean to Matilda, his mate, too – he’d push her into things to make sure he got to the food first.  Apparently he tried to kill his own children, too, so they had to put him in a separate area.  The piglets were cute, but even they were annoying and, well…hogs.  Piggish.  I know people say that pigs are actually really smart, but I don’t get it.

By now, if you’re still reading, I’m sure you’re wondering when I’m going to finish this absurdly long post.  Not yet, I’m afraid!  I haven’t told you anything about my adventures off the farm.  I was so tired from this exhausting year that I often just wanted to sleep in on my days off, but I forced myself to explore Ireland.  I saw Dublin, which I liked a lot.  It reminded me of Boston in that it was a small yet major city, and somehow the architecture of the two places seemed similar to me. Rosa and I also went up to the Hill of Slane, which is supposedly where St. Patrick did his first Christian ritual or something.  Now there are ruins of a 16th century church and monastery on the hill, and Rosa and I climbed all over them.

I met up with my friend Kathleen from the hostel in Rome on a Thursday in Dublin, which was fun.  On that Sunday, Rosa and I cycled 10 kilometers to Newgrange and Knowth, the 5,000-year-old tomb sites, only to find out that all of the tours were sold out for the day (you can’t go in without at tour).  This was the SECOND time Rosa had gone there without getting to see the tombs, since she’d gone by foot before, underestimated the distance, and arrived when it was closed.  It turned out to be a beautiful bike ride, though, and Carina drove us there the next Friday so we got to see it eventually.  It was pretty cool – inside it’s mostly just a stone room with an interesting roof, but the knowledge that it has remained watertight for 5,000 years is incredible.  It was also built so that, at dawn on the winter solstice every year, the sun goes into a carefully placed window and lights the entire chamber inside.  The tomb is then pitch black for the rest of the year.  There’s a lottery to see this happen, but last year over 31,500 people applied and only 100 get to go.

On the last weekend I went to Cork, because I hadn’t really left the Dublin/Slane area and apparently that’s where my dad’s dad’s side of the family is from.  Rosa was supposed to go with me, but she got a stomach bug that made me a huge hypochondriac for the rest of my stay.  Seriously, what is it with my luck when I try to travel with friends?  Or rather, what is it with THEIR luck?  I try to visit Rome with Lauren – her aunt dies.  I try to visit Barcelona with Asiyla – she gets food poisoning.  I try to visit Cork with Rosa – she gets a stomach virus.  All I have to say is – I’m sorry! And don’t visit me!!  Anyway, Cork was pretty cool, though including transport to Dublin it took 5.5 hours to get there.  I got to see some very nice Irish towns and nature on the way, though.  Cork was very pretty, if a little bit run down.  I was there for less than twenty-four hours, so all I did was walk around the city, see University College Cork (which is beautiful), and go to the Cork City Gaol.  I didn’t even get to go to the famous English market, because it was Easter Sunday on my second day there.  Still, the gaol was very cool – it’s an old jail that looks like a castle.  I did an audio tour and watched a corny movie.  Basically, they treated prisoners horribly there.

I have only one more thing left to say – I made my dad’s pasta and my lemon squares for everyone on my last night.  Despite my general lack of culinary skills it actually went really well (minus a mild mishap with the lemon squares, surprisingly), and Rosa, Matt (the American guy who arrived two days before I left), and I went to the local pub afterwards to listen to local Irish people playing traditional music.  I wish I’d gone to the pub more often, because it was really fun – Rosa and I were just really lazy most of the time and stayed at home every time we thought about going.  Oh well – it was a perfect last evening.

So, that is the novel which details my month in Ireland.  If you’ve actually managed to read everything, thanks!  I genuinely enjoyed my time there, and I miss it even now.  Tomorrow the studying starts again.  Sunday is the beginning of 0th week, and my parents arrive a week from tomorrow so I want to get as much 1st and 2nd week work done as possible right now.  In a few weeks you’ll have an update on my new, football-less term.

This post is going to be about my trip to Barcelona.  For those of you who don’t know it, Murphey’s Law states that everything which can go wrong will go wrong sooner or later, and that was certainly true for this trip.  Still, I had a good time and I’m very glad I went.

The first problem was the flight from London.  We got on the plane at a normal time and everything, but they didn’t shut the cabin doors until about two hours after the plane was supposed to take off.  Since my flight was already at 5:40pm, this meant that I didn’t get into Barcelona until after 11:00pm.  We ate dinner at 1:30am.  Also, Asiyla’s flatmates adopted this evil cat.  They found her on the streets when she was a kitten, so now she’s really mean to new people, i.e. me.  She was especially protective of one of the bathrooms, so every time I needed to pee I had to back into a corner with her hissing at me.  She even managed to get through TWO CLOSED DOORS to find her way into the room where I slept the second two nights.  HOW DID SHE DO THAT?  Terrifying!

The next day went normally enough.  I walked around the old part of the city a bit in afternoon with Asiyla, and we went to this museum about the Roman ruins underneath the city.  It was interesting and beautiful with the kind of windy streets that I always love.  After we ate lunch Asiyla had to go teach a class, so I went to the waterfront to read.  It wasn’t a beach – it was the built-up part of the waterfront – but it was really sunny and it felt great to lie on a weird metal bench-thing and relax for a while.  Then I wandered over to Las Ramblas, the touristy street with older roads branching off from it.  I decided to take one of the tiny winding streets, and I think that was my favorite part of the city.  I found so many interesting stores there, and the general setting was really cool.  I also went to La Boqueria, the famous market off Las Ramblas.  Most of the stands had fruit, though some had sweets or fish.  I got a DELICIOUS fruit juice thing.  After that I went to a cafe to wait for Asiyla to get out of her class, and then we went to a seafood restaurant where the food was alive like fifteen minutes before we ate it.  At the time, this seemed cool and it was SO GOOD.  However, it was not cool for very long…

…which leads me to the next problem of the trip.  That night we just watched an interesting movie and all seemed well, but by 9:00am the next morning Asiyla was sick.  It seems that she got some sort of food poisoning from the fish, which was quite undercooked.  We’d planned to go into the Pyrennees that day for a short hike, but obviously that wasn’t going to happen anymore.  Asiyla suggested that I go to this hill/park area. I walked around for a long time up there – the weather was beautiful and there was lots to see.  I saw an old Olympic stadium and pool, an enormous art museum that looked like a castle (which overlooked some realllllyyyyyy long, grand steps leading to a huge fountain that was sadly not on), a bunch of gardens, a castle where Franco imprisoned his enemies during the civil war, and generally beautiful views of the city and surrounding mountains.  That night I basically did nothing, since Asiyla was sick and everything.

The next day Asiyla was still sick so she couldn’t spend time with me.  I went to the Sagrada Familia, which I assume everyone knows.  Then I went to the beach.  It wasn’t REALLY warm enough to hang out on the beach in a sweatshirt – I got a bit cold sitting there finishing my book – but it was sunny and I still enjoyed it a lot.  Plus, the walk there was really nice – most of it was down a long street with a pedestrian walkway in the middle.  I still regret not getting ice cream on that walk.  Then I had another quiet night.

The final problem of this trip was the most potentially problematic, in a way: when I set my alarm for 7:30 on Sunday so that I could catch my flight, I forgot that my phone was still on UK time.  This meant that when I woke up, it was actually 8:30 – and I didn’t realize this until 9:00 when Asiyla pointed out the time. I panicked, packed as fast as possible and barely managed to make the next train to the airport.  I was supposed to arrive in time for boarding, but my ticket said that the baggage check desk would close an hour before – which was 10:00, exactly when the train was supposed to arrive at the airport.  I panicked again, assuming that I was about to have to pay for a new ticket to Dublin.  However, when I arrived at the desk it turned out that some other guy happened to be there ten minutes late too, and all was well.  Still, the desk was one of the farthest away, the terminal was the far one, and my gate was literally the last one in the terminal.  I was lucky to get the flight.

So it wasn’t smooth, but I enjoyed Spain.  It was especially fun speaking Spanish.  Obviously I did this minimally, but I understood most of what people said to me which was cool.  Right now I am at the farm in Ireland, and I have a ton of exciting things to say about it already.  However, I think I’ll save that for another post when I’ve been here longer.

I almost forgot – a week ago today I went to Chatsworth.  It was SUCH a great day.  The countryside around the house was BEAUTIFUL, and the mansion wasn’t at all disappointing.  It was so great to see the place I’ve wanted to visit for about six years.

So I know I ended my last post by saying that this second half of term has been eventful, and it definitely has…but for some reason I can’t remember all the details right now.  I’m going to try…in general, things are starting to feel very interesting here.  For the past month or so, I’ve been in a mindset that I’ve never experienced before – one in which the thought of home brings me a feeling of adventure.  When I think of Vermont or Kenyon, it feels mysterious – I have distinct and powerful memories of those places, of course, but what has changed there since I left?  What will America look like to me now?  And I’ve STILL got more than three months to be away from it, too.  It’s very cool.  So cool, in fact, that it’s almost distracting me from the present.  It’s not that I want to go home, exactly – it’s almost like I want a VACATION home.  The “headquarters” of my life, to put it weirdly, is in America, but I wish it were here.  I want a “vacation” to America to see my friends and family, only to return within a few weeks to my beloved England with a more permanent life set out for me here than I have in reality.

In terms of academics, this term has continued to be less challenging than Michaelmas.  Not much changed in the way of academics since my last post, actually – film was still easy and fun, and creative writing was still emotionally stressful, INCREDIBLY rewarding and fun, and useful.  Both tutorials ended extremely well.  I am positively glowing with happiness about my creative writing tutorial, to be honest.  One interesting tutorial ended up with me explaining all of the plot that I’d planned so far to my tutor.  His reaction was that I was trying to do something extremely difficult and complicated, involving the motivations of a TON of characters – but that if I could pull it off, it would be good.  You can’t imagine how happy this made me – for years now I’ve been afraid that the reason I can’t figure out the plot is just that I’m not good enough or not motivated enough, when in reality it’s just that I’m challenging myself a lot.  This, of course, is a great thing – I don’t want to write some crap vampire romance or yet ANOTHER story about a corrupt government.  Of COURSE it’s hard.  But I can do it.  Having a ton of characters is, in my opinion, the way that J.K. Rowling was able to create such a complete world.  I think that this world is the reason her books are so popular.  Soon I’m going to send the first chapter of my book to a woman my tutor knows who was commissioned to write a series for girls that takes place in early nineteenth century England.  Oh, and by the way, my tutor also thinks that my story is going to be insanely long.  Interesting – I guess I should have seen that coming.

Hmmm okay, what else?  Football has been freaking amazing, as usual.  Varsity (which means an Oxford vs. Cambridge match here in England, not high school athletics like in America) was SUCH an incredible experience.  I feel so lucky to have been able to participate in the Oxford/Cambridge rivalry during this year.  The night before the matches we had a fun dinner, and then we gathered in New College to make motivational signs for each other.  After a good night’s sleep, both teams proceeded to BEAT Cambridge!!  We (the Furies) won 2-0, and the Blues had an exciting 2-1 finish.  We got medals and trophies!  Throughout the match we yelled traditional anti-Cambridge songs like “I’d rather be a leper than a tab” (“tab” is a derogatory term for someone who goes to Cambridge) and the song “Oh Oxfordshire is Wonderful”.  Cambridge, who are obviously a bunch of crass idiots, just sang “you can stick your dreaming spires up your a**”.  The hostility didn’t end with the matches.  I knew there was going to be a formal dinner, but I didn’t know Cambridge would be attending, too.  When I learned this, I pictured us sitting together, getting to know one another.  This was not exactly the case.  We sat at COMPLETELY separate tables, and proceeded to insult each other throughout the meal.  It was brilliant!!  Plus, the four-course meal was SO GOOD and it took place in the New College hall, which was one of the most stunning halls I’ve been in so far in Oxford.  At this point I can’t believe that I almost didn’t try out for the university football team.  It has been a huge, relatively unique, and wholly positive part of this experience.  I couldn’t imagine life at Oxford without it, and I’m seriously disappointed that it’s over now.  Well…at least we have dinners next term.

Otherwise, I’ve still been involved in the Harry Potter society, mostly just going to the film showings.  Hopefully next term I’ll do more with them.  I’ve developed quite the…ahem…reputation for having joined this society.  WHATEVER, NERDS WILL RULE THE WORLD SOME DAY.

I feel like I’m leaving some things out…but I can’t remember them…in any case, I have a potentially fantastic break planned.  Tomorrow I go to CHATSWORTH, the famous country home of the Dukes of Devonshire, which is Pemberley in the 2005 version of Pride and Prejudice.  On Wednesday I leave for Barcelona, and on Sunday I go to Ireland for my almost-month-long WWOOFing experience.  Then I have about ten days to get my work done for first week before my parents arrive!

Miss you all,

Ari