Cookie for Lunch; French Cuisine for Dinner

Cookie for Lunch

I kept meaning to make myself a real lunch. However, when Noura and Shannon were going to get Ben's Cookies at around 3 in the afternoon, I had to tag along even though I hadn't eaten lunch.

I have been hearing about Ben's Cookies for the past several months. This place is just really famous for having the best cookies, or so I have been told. So, I had to tag along for the cookies. We walked down to the Covered Market on High Street, where there are all sorts of shops selling different things (the royal wedding cake photo was taken there). Shannon and I both got Triple Chocolate cookies - chocolate dough, chocolate chips, and white chocolate disks on top. They were almost fresh out of the oven, so they were really just half cookie and half goo. They were so good. The chocolate chips were not even chips, unless chips can be a liquid.

The cookie was absolutely delicious, and did not disappoint. I will say, though, that they had been hyped up so much, and I am not sure that they are truly the best cookies I have ever had. I will have to go back again to see if they are.

We continued walking around downtown. We stopped in the famous Blackwell's Books to look for materials for our courses. The store looks quite modest from the outside but is actually an enormous building that extends way behind the store front and into a giant basement. I have been told that it used to be the largest bookstore in the world. Maybe it still is; I don't know. Anyway, it was very cool to visit. I expect I will be back again when I have a better idea of what I will need for my classes.

French Cuisine for Dinner

Later that day, everyone from the Stanford program got to go out to dinner at the Brasserie Blanc.

Quick, funny story - The previous night, when I was walking back to the Stanford house, accompanied by Elisabet, the Danish lady at the seder, we passed this restaurant on Walton Street. She pointed it out and told me that they served very good food. That was the only restaurant she pointed out on the whole walk. The next morning I found an email from Stephanie Williams saying that we were going there for dinner that evening.

The food at the dinner was excellent - avocado salad, beef stroganoff, sticky toffee pudding with ice cream, and nice French wine. The conversation was also excellent. I sat across from Stephanie Williams, the administrator of the Stanford program at Oxford and probably one of the most stereotypically British people I have met so far. She talked a lot about England, wine, and British accents. Next to us were also Yordanos, Tara, and Lily. I got to know them all much better as well.

Overall, I am just loving all the people I have met on the program. They are wonderful and a lot of fun to be around. I'm sure there will be more on them later.

That is all.

First Day at Oxford

Yesterday was a very long, packed day.

For me, the day started at 3 am, when I woke up. I lay in bed until 4 am, at which point I gave up trying to fall back asleep. Instead, I finished writing the previous two posts and dealt with other things on the internet. At around 7 am, I went out for a walk around the neighborhood, taking pictures along the way.

The photo of the college with the green is Christ College, if I remember correctly. The last one is of punts on the river (the Thames I think) flowing underneath Magdalen Bridge. 

Later in the day, we had a series of logistical orientation meetings dealing with academics and living in the Stanford House. It is still unclear as to which classes I will be taking, since the two I signed up for, History and Architecture of Oxford and History of London, are both over-enrolled. I am guaranteed to get at least one, probably History of London. I am also definitely in my tutorial, Atomic Physics. I already have my first assignment. It looks daunting, but I have not started it yet. 

Later in the afternoon, we went on a guided tour of the area around the Stanford House. 

This is in the quadrangle of Corpus Christi, the college I will be going to for meals and socializing.

This is a decorative cake, illustrating the royal wedding. It may be hard to see, but Prince William is on the floor next to Kate with a bottle of champagne. Everyone else is also doing ridiculous things. 

This is the quadrangle, I think, of Wodham College.

Above is the Radcliffe Camera, which houses part of the Bodleian Library and is possibly the most iconic building in Oxford. 

After the tour, I did some shopping with other people for the program. They all had to get stuff for the potluck dinner I was (sadly) missing for my Passover seder.

Since the seder wasn't starting until 8:30, I meant to at least hang out at the potluck, even if I wasn't eating, but I slept straight through it. Again, Victor saved me by waking me up around 8 pm. I had set an alarm, but it didn't wake me. All the other guys went to a pub, but I took a long walk out to Rabbi Daniel's house for the seder. 

The seder was wonderful. There were a dozen or so people there, the majority of whom I think were graduate students. It was a pretty traditional Passover seder and had a lot of great discussion. I really liked the people I met there, so I hope to see them again at Shabbats or other events in the Jewish community. The seder went until 1:30 in the morning, and I didn't get back to the Stanford House until after 2. And then I went almost straight to sleep. 

Getting to Oxford

Getting to Oxford

My trip to Oxford started with leaving my house at around 4:10 on Sunday morning. I just stayed awake until then. I said goodby to my mom, and my dad drove me over to the airporter. We said goodbye and I was off. 

The first flight was at 8 - San Francisco to Toronto. I slept more than half the way there. I chilled at the Toronto airport for two or three hours. Then I went Toronto to London Heathrow for around seven hours. I watched movies for most of the flight. Tron was a petty mediocre movie. The Tourist was not that special either. I had two seats, a window and an aisle, all to myself, but I couldn't sleep. 

Before landing at London Heathrow, the sun rose over the British Isles:

When we were landing, I overheard the lady behind me asking about how to get to Oxford. I told her to take the X70 bus, since I knew. On the way off the plane, we decided to look for the bus together, and we got to talking. 

Her name was Jodie (Jodi?). She was a middle aged woman from Alberta, Canada. She's working on her Master's degree in, I think, library science. As part of that, she's doing a three week internship type thing at the Bodleian Library. After figuring out how to get to the bus station and get tickets, we sat next to each other on the bus. She wasn't super talkative, but we talked about random things. I learned that she is a teacher of some sort. We talked about England, Oxford, and Canada. She told me about wines they produce up in Canada (apparently there is a valley known for its white wine grapes up where she lives). She told me that the Queen Mum was especially fond of Canada. We said goodbye when I got off. I might see her in the Bodleian soon enough. 

Funny anecdote - I was standing next to Jodie and another Canadian in line at the UK border control. The Canadian guy asked me, "Hey, is that C_____?" I had to admit that I didn't know who that was. "C_____, like the former prime minister," he said. I had to tell him that I really didn't know my Canadian prime ministers. He realized that I wasn't Canadian, but Jodie saw the same guy and agreed that it definitely could be him. He didn't have any entourage, so it was hard to tell. After he moved around a bunch, they were pretty sure. We were really sure after we got through the border control and saw a guy waiting outside with a sign that said, "C_____." Jodie pointed it out to me. They guy holding the sign saw us looking and just smiled back. I offered several times to take their picture next to him, but they didn't want to go up and bother him. 

Arriving at Oxford

After the bus dropped me off on High Street, I found the Stanford House (65 High Street) pretty easily. One weird thing is that  the street address numbers seem to increase in the direction of traffic, so they increase in opposite directions on opposite sides of the street. A bit confusing at first. 

I got my room. I will post some pictures of it soon. It's on the fourth ("Third") floor, kind of tucked up in a corner. None of the walls are parallel, and the ceiling is sloped on three sides. It has a pretty good view of HIgh Street, though. 

The House really is almost as confusing as people made me believe. I have not yet gotten lost finding my room, which isn't too hard. Some of the other rooms, including the music room and library are almost impossible to find. I will have to spend some more time exploring this house, which, I have been told, used to be seven different apartments. That explains why hallways and rooms are not connected in any sort of a logical manner. 

After I got my stuff organized in my room, the first of us to arrive (I was the third, since my plane landed around 6:30 am) had our first little orientation meeting. Afterwards, my roommate, Victor Liu; Molly; and I went for a walk down High Street to get a bit of lunch. We found a nice Indian place. I wasn't very hungry. Then we went shopping. I got some soap and shampoo at Boot's, but then I think I forgot my bag with them in it when we bought groceries at Sainsbury's. 

I meant to take a shower when I got back, but I ended up passing out on my bed. I set my alarm for a 25 minute nap. When I turned off my alarm, I just fell back asleep for another hour. Thankfully, Victor woke me up half an hour into afternoon tea so that I wouldn't miss all of it. 

The rest of the day was a sort of frenzy of meeting people and going around Oxford. After tea, Cole, the Junior Dean, gave us a walking tour of some of the area around the Stanford House. Sometime soon I will just post pictures of Oxford instead of trying to describe how cool it looks. I will just say that there are tons of old, awesome-looking buildings everywhere. If you want to see where I live, you can just put 65 High Street into Google StreetView and take your own walking tour. 

We got back to the Stanford House. A bunch of us ate dinner here with some food that the program provided for us. I met a lot more people, and heard a bunch of stories about people traveling in Europe before coming here. 

I ended up completely forgetting that I had signed up for a Passover seder. For some reason, I thought that the first night of Passover was tonight instead of tomorrow night. In any case, I was so tired that I don't think I could have made the 30 minute walk to and from the Rabbi's house. Instead, I went to sleep a little after nine. 

And that brings me to the present. I woke up a little after 3 am and couldn't fall back asleep. After 4, I just gave up, came downstairs and started writing these last couple blog posts. 

Today there will be some more orientation stuff, and, at night, I will go to the Rabbi's house for the second seder, probably apologizing profusely for missing the first one.