Eleven More Days 'Til Oxford!

     

This maybe isn't as exciting as ten more days, or one more day, but I'm finding it hard to be patient. Yes my friends, I have eleven more days before I leave the country of my birth for the first time ever in my whole life! So basically I'm just super excited.

    I mean, the leaving will be exciting, guys, I have been ready to pack my bags for the past month and a half. The leading up to leaving and bag packing, however, has been the opposite of fun. Let me tell y'all, if you ever want to leave the country and have a wonderful time, maybe don't do it as a two week Summer class. Because my professor assigned nine books for us to read - nine. Ok, that's fine, I've had all summer to read them. And also we have to have several discussions questions per book before classes start - great, I don't mind. Oh, and also eight five page essays, the rough drafts of which are also due before class starts - wait what? Didn't get the prompts until halfway through last week, so I've been frantically trying to balance work, getting last minute travel things taken care of, and all of these essays. Eep! It's been a nightmare. I have three done, and four more days to knock out the rest of them.

     But, on the bright side this trip, and its fourteen hour plane ride, is an excuse for me to start a new cross stitching project! It's one of an Old World Map, you know, the kind with sea monsters and pictures of exotic native and all that (except instead of sea monsters there are dolphins and turtles, but hey, you can't have everything).  Kind of like this:

But with cross stitch. So I'm pretty excited to do that. And once we get there I'm determined to have a good time (which, I imagine, will not be very difficult). We got our official itinerary and I'm super excited. I'm especially excited to see Julius Caesar at the Globe theater. I've heard that when Shakespeare put it on, the actor who played Caesar would have a pigs bladder filled with fake blood, and when he was stabbed he would spray it on the audience. I'm pretty much counting on that still happening today. We also get to go to the British Museum, and I was looking at their website and I had no idea all of the amazing things they had there! I knew about the Elgin Marbles, so of course I'll go see those, but they also have an amazing astrolabe, Easter Island heads, and, oh yeah, the freaking Rosetta Stone! Whaaa??? Super excited. 

 

     We also get to go and do super British things like take high tea with English nobility (I forget who, probably the Queen). I'll get a chance to put all my hard work to use. I never used to like tea before, but as soon as I heard about this trip I made myself develop a taste for it. I have mastered the art of black English tea. Bwahahaha. Now I too can be incredibly sophisticated. And I'll get to eat English food - which I'm not actually that thrilled about, because they eat some freakish things - but I do like Shepard's pie, so there's that. 

This my friends is an English delicacy called stargazy pie. They also eat eels they fish from the Thames.

     Anyways, all that just to say, I still have more than a week until I leave, but I'm getting pretty darn impatient. I guess I'll write those miserable essays to while the time away. Three down, five more to go.