The First Two Days

The name of this blog is finally accurate, because I am now across the pond!

It was not easy to get here, I can tell you that much. Getting packed and prepared to spend a third of my year in a different country was stressful enough, but I then got to wake up on the day of I was flying out on to five degree weather and a cancelled flight.

It was a pretty hectic day. The group of kids I was supposed to travel with ended up split in half, and both flights were moved from Newark to JFK, mine at ten, the other at midnight. In the end we all arrived in good time and on uneventful flights, but the lead up was quite the experience. Once we got on the plane, though, my worries were assuaged by the wonderfully Irish pilot announcing his name, which was John McGowan! I decided to take it as a sign of good things to come.

I got my first dive into British culture on that flight, upon being (somewhat embarrassingly) surprised to hear that many of the passengers and all of the flight attendants were British. You’d think I’d be expecting that on a flight to Heathrow, but in all the running around I guess it got lost in my brain. I can’t express my delight for the British flight attendants, who call you love and walk up and down the aisles asking if anyone has “any rubbish.” Americans, we really need to get a nicer name for garbage. The Brits are ahead of us on that one. Along with a flight dinner that was about how you’d expect a flight dinner to be, I ate some kind of snack called an Aussie bar that I’m absolutely convinced you could use as bricks if you ran out of supplies building a house. It was good, but it was easily one of the densest things I’ve ever eaten.

I knew I was in for a typical London experience, at least meteorologically, as we were coming down to land. We descended through thick clouds for about half a lifetime. It must have been at least five or ten minutes where you couldn’t even see the end of the wing. Jolly Old London was gray and wet from the second we touched down, and the parts I saw as we were leaving the airport looked to be just as much of a concrete beast as New York, only with slightly more public art and the roads in reverse. I felt perfectly at home.

The bus ride to Wroxton didn’t get interesting until we actually got to the village of Wroxton, which is the quaintest and most adorable thing you’ve ever seen, with stone houses and walls and windy little streets. Some of the roofs are even thatched, which shocked me to see. It’s hard to remember people actually live there, and sometimes it’s hard to figure out how anyone functions there either. There are a number of roads that are so narrow they can’t even really be called one-lane roads. I’d go so far as to call them three-quarter-lane roads. Our bus driver absolutely deserves a medal for getting us through those tight fits without incident. At one point there was a car so close that I was sure we were going to hit it as we turned a corner. Then there’s the actual gate onto the Wroxton campus, which I assure you was not built with coach buses in mind. I was saying out loud as we approached, “There’s no way we’re fitting through there. No way.” Yet somehow we did. That bus driver is magical.

Once we arrived, ate, and got settled, we went through a series of orientations and information sessions, which is really fun when you’ve slept about three hours in the last thirty. The most notable of these sessions came from Dean Baldwin, who wore a three piece suit to greet us and introduced himself as Baldwin the Bastard. Having now heard him speak at length and been around him for a few days, I can tell you there are three things that Dean Baldwin is passionate about: punctuality, fire safety, and mercilessly making fun of people who show up to lectures even a minute late. I’m of the impression that if you google “sharp tongue,” his picture will be the first thing to show up, but I do like him. It seems like he takes no nonsense while liking fun at the same time.

That was the first day in the Abbey. Day Two, which I have just concluded, also has a lot to tell.

After breakfast, almost the entire class of fifty-five students got onto a bus and went to Oxford for the day. The bus was supposed to leave at ten in the morning. We got on it by 9:50, and it pulled out at 9:58, and woe to those who might’ve missed it. They really do not approve of tardiness here.

Oxford is, in my albeit limited experience, one of the most beautiful cities I have ever seen. As the class broke off into small groups to wander the city, we remarked that it almost didn’t seem real, in the way that a theme park doesn’t seem real. If you’re in Disney World or the Harry Potter section of Universal, for instance, you’ll be taken in by the appeal of a picturesque village, but you know it’s all fake; the flowers in the window boxes were grown in a greenhouse somewhere, the adorable displays in the shop windows are half made up of projector screens, and all the wear and tear that makes it look so quaint and charming was done purposefully when it was made. In Oxford, you get the same feeling sometimes, but it’s actually real. Some of the cobblestones are loose when you step on them and the meandering allies with gorgeous views at the end have been there for ages. You can’t help but take pictures of the buildings even when you remember that people actually live there. If it hadn’t been for my feet hurting so badly at the end of a day of walking, I would have never wanted to leave.

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We first went to Westgate Shopping Center, essentially the mall in Oxford, to get SIM cards for everyone’s phones. We then proceeded to wander around until we ran across a tiny secondhand bookshop, where it was intensely quiet and every shelf was full of leather bindings and gold leaf titles. I love stores like that. We were given fliers for an Oxford book fair in March, which you couldn’t keep me away from if you tried. Next-door, there was a tiny little store called Alice’s Shop, which sold every kind of Alice in Wonderland paraphernalia you can think of, from statues to finger puppets to teapots. Endless teapots. We didn’t stay long because people were packed in shoulder to shoulder, but it was very cute.

For lunch we went to a pub called The Cow and Creek, which one person in our group told us was famous for some reason. She neglected to mention why, but we had a good time there. A few kids took the opportunity to buy their first legal drink at the bar, which we all found exciting in a way that only newly legal kids can, I suppose.

After lunch we made our way to Christ Church. Certain Harry Potter sets were based on this building, we learned, and it was wonderful to see. Many of the kids in our group took pictures in hopes of going to the Harry Potter studio tour in London and comparing the sets to the real thing!

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The real purpose of us coming to Oxford was to allow the students to get some shopping done, mostly for full-size toiletries and anything we forgot to pack or couldn’t fit in our suitcases. My little group left shopping till last, which I’m glad we did, because it did put a bit of a damper on things. We had to go through about four or five different stores just to find toiletries and notebooks. It was incredibly frustrating to push through the crowds in a store called Boots, trying so hard to find a product you like only to realize they just don’t have it there. I was able to find every type of Herbal Essences conditioner except the one that I really like, and it took me a solid ten minutes just to find bars of soap. We walked for fifteen minutes to get to a store called Pens and More that proclaimed online it sold office supplies, only to get there and realize that it sold nothing but fancy fountain pens, and the “More” part of the store name had been a lie. By the end of that trek, we were more than ready to be done with our excursion, so we all shuffled back to the bus and returned to the Abbey.

After dinner, there was a “disco” in the campus bar, which is called The Buttery. At this disco/party, every student got a free drink, courtesy of a former student at Wroxton. He got his master’s degree here, but died young. In his will he asked that all new students at Wroxton be given a welcome drink on him.

The real highlight of my day, I must confess, was meeting Pip, the campus cat. At the Florham campus of FDU, there are cats that roam around, namely Dexter and Tigger, but they’re not tame and students rarely approach them. Pip apparently belongs to someone in the village of Wroxton and has figured out that the Abbey is always chock full of college kids who are happy to lavish affection on him. I’d heard about him from other students, but as I left the main building with a friend to go to the Buttery for the disco, one of the walls started meowing and Pip just came out of nowhere. This is easily the friendliest cat I’ve met in my life, and as soon as I knelt down to pet him he climbed right into my lap and let me pick him up and carry him around for a while. I can’t tell you how badly all the people who’d stopped to coo over him, including myself, wanted to bring him inside with us, but he’s clearly an outdoor cat and we let him be. My friend and I left the bar a little while later to get our wallets, since we hadn’t brought any money besides the voucher for the free drink and we wanted to stay and have another. Pip was still there waiting outside the Abbey, and I’ve decided that if any cat is going to be the one to turn me from a dog person into a both person, it’s going to be this one. Here’s a horrible picture of him taken when my friend and I decided we needed to capture him in a photo, so we carried him over to one of the lights on the front steps, and another one taken on an occasion when he followed some people into the entry hall of the main building when the door was left open.

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I’m now in the library, which is the only place I can get a good enough WiFi signal to write, and there’s something both calming and exciting about being the only person in such a spectacular room. In summary, I’ve had a wonderful first two days at Wroxton! Here’s hoping that the next fifteen weeks I spend here are as good as the first weekend. This week I go to the theater to see a show for a class and then spend the weekend in London, so expect more updates on those adventures. That’s all for now!