First day using the Radcliffe Science Library and Dessert

Yesterday, the main things I did were read for History of London (see previous post) and work on my Atomic Physics problem set.

For lunch, I went with Victor, Molly, and Heidi to Taylor's, and I decided that it is far inferior to Olive's down the street.

After History of London got out, I began working on physics. At a certain point, I decided I needed some textbooks from the library. The walk to the Radcliffe Science Library is probably 10 or 15 minutes, not horrible but still inconvenient. The nice part about the walk is that it winds its way through some of the oldest, coolest parts of Oxford. For part of the way, the streets are lined with high brick walls separating the colleges from the town. It also goes past the Radcliffe Camera and the Pitt-Rivers Museum. The library itself is also a sight to see. I'll take a picture of it later.

The inconvenient thing about the big libraries here, like the Bodleian and the Radcliffe, is that they don't loan out their books. I can only read the books inside the library. To compound that, the libraries close in the evenings. Yesterday, they kicked me out at 6:50! That's a lot earlier than I'm used to at Stanford, where Green is open until 1 am. Even some of the smaller libraries are open until 9 or 10. I'll stop whining.

I got back for dinner, where Lisa and Lily cooked a beautiful, tasty dinner for Victor, Heming, and me. They made us breaded cod with a mushroom, onion, and apple cream sauce, topped with some sort of fried fish cake (not really sure), and a side of steamed asparagus. It was really good.

Soon after that, most of the house went up to Shannon and Chelsea's room for a pot luck dessert. I didn't contribute anything, but I figured it was fine. The people who did brought tons of dessert. My favorite deserts were probably the rich chocolate pudding thing that Elizabeth and Maricarmen made and the Nutella cookie/cake/pie/brownie things. I'm not sure who made those. Shannon also invited over a bunch of her British Oxford friends for us to meet. I met David and Greg (?). David was a second year physics student at Corpus Christi and a very nice guy, so I may be seeing him again soon.

I left the party to battle Kelly in Peep Wars. The way Peep Wars goes is, both Kelly and I had a peep, bird-shaped marshmallows dyed blue and covered in blue sprinkles with little black dots for eyes. We put them both facing towards each other on a plate, stuck a lance into each of them (usually you use tooth picks, but we used pieces of spaghetti). The lances pointed towards the other peep, as if they were jousting. Then we put the plate in the microwave. We turned it on for about 30 seconds. The peeps ballooned up. The first peep to touch the other with its lance won. And my peep won!!!

That is all.