A March Day in Oxford

I've finished my thesis, it was sunny today... life is good. The only not-good thing was that I went out with my camera to take photos, because I don't take enough of this ridiculously photogenic city, but most of them didn't come out because I forgot to adjust the ISO and they were all massively over-exposed. :( By the time I realised there was no point retaking them, so I just have a few. I got some good ones, anyway.

As it says on the plaque, this is Christ Church War Memorial Garden, part of Christ Church Meadow. You can see the clock tower in the background.

A statue on the side of Magdalen College. Not sure who it is though!

Shadows of the dreaming spires. I edited this to look a bit moodier, I hope it worked...

Pastel houses in Holywell Street!

Anyway, I've been really behind with blogging, but soon enough the term will be over and I'll have nothing to do. Which won't make for very interesting blog posts, but I'll have the time to write said posts.... ah, the circle goes on.

Last of the Oxford Term

(I was trying to play off Last of the Summer Wine, but I'm not sure it worked...)

I was active with my camera the last couple of weeks, trying to capture a sense of Oxford in the cold depths of December. Tomorrow I leave for Amsterdam (and Havanah!) and I won't see Oxford again until January. So long, city! It hasn't snowed yet but you're still beautiful.

Ooh artistic ooh!!

My best friend from school came to visit! She loved our dining hall and dressed for the occasion.

You can see more of the hall here.

The next set of pictures I took one evening walking back to where I was staying (not in my college - they kicked me out and I'm currently staying at a friend's room while she's going back home to Italy). I really love the light in these; evening light in winter can make for some very stark, eerie shots.

And these last ones I just took today, my last day in Oxford. Other than the first one, which is of Hertford College, they were all taken in Radcliffe Square at night.

All photos are unedited because I'm lazy.

Ice Hockey!

On Saturday I went to my first ever ice hockey match. I went with - who else? - a couple of Canadians, my friend Jenny and her boyfriend Jackson. While I knew Oxford had an ice-skating rink, I didn't know ice hockey matches took place there. We were lucky this time, because it was the last (I think) match of the university ice hockey season, between the two best teams in the league: Oxford and London. Obviously I cheered for Oxford. ;)

And this match was, somewhat dramatically, advertised as the Battle of the Burghs.

Wait, that needs to be bigger.

The Battle of the Burghs!!!

That's better. 

Of course, I took photos, though they weren't great since the netting got in the way and my camera kept focusing on the netting rather than the hockey players! I got a few nice shots, however.

And a couple of us at the match.

Ugh, phone quality.

So I ended up enjoying it a lot! I'm not a sports fan and I don't go to matches, but this was really fun.

Being a Tourist in My Own City

I turned 21 yesterday. As the cliché goes, I don't actually feel any different, but one thing that did happen is that my friend Elise, whom I've known since we were at sixth-form together, came to visit me! She wasn't here very long, but I took the opportunity to show her around Oxford and be a bit of a tourist myself.

Elise outside the Radcliffe Camera, the very distinctive library that mostly houses history and English books.

In Brasenose, which is not my college, but I took her to the nicest-looking ones.

Lovely view of the roof of the RadCam from Brasenose.

In Corpus Christi, that pint-sized college!

The dining hall at Christ Church. And yes, that is the Hogwarts dining hall!

Also in Christ Church: the Harry Potter stairs!

The last few days have been appalling weather in Oxford, with torrential rain, but the last couple of days have been even worse and added gale-force winds to the mix. On certain streets it was almost impossible to walk into the wind. These are the kind of days when you wonder what the point was in styling your hair...

Update

Good Lord, it's been a while. I blame univeristy. Meanwhile, here's a selection of what I've been up to:

• Saw a rowboat burned because my college did well in the boat race. There was white wine and a lot of smoke. 
• Messed around in Christ Church and took goofy photos with my friends. Christ Church is definitely the grandest Oxford college and is known colloquially as "the Harry Potter college", since a lot of HP scenes were filmed there for the series.
• Went to a 90's themed party. Since I am terrible at costumes and only had half an hour to make mine, I went as the dissolution of the USSR. I did this by making a sign that I stuck to my front with the hammer and sickle drawn on it, and "USSR" in big letter with a crossing-out. I also stuck red stars to my shoulders. Funnily enough (or maybe not so funnily, my college leans heavily left-wing) people loved my minimal-effort costume. After that I went clubbing (fun!) and after leaving at 4 a.m. we got burgers from a kebab van where the owner asked me if I was Pakistani... ???? (I mean, my grandfather is from Peshawar and that side of the family is Anglo-Indian so it's not a totally unfounded assumption, but I didn't think it really showed, at all.)
• Saw a friend who came back to Oxford for her graduation ceremony and ate delicious Lebanese food at Elham's Lebanese Deli, which I recommend for anyone ever visiting Oxford. Yummy, nice place, and you get a DIY plate for £5. 
• Watched the production of Pentecost that was running at the Oxford Playhouse. I really liked it - the cast was good and the set was fantastic - although I got severe genre whiplash when it changed from a discussion about the nature of art and history in society in the first half, to a hostage drama in the second half. Still a very enjoyable play, and OH MY GOD THE CLIMAX WHAT WHAT.
• Fallen in love with Oxford's second-hand bookshops. You can often tell what bookshops former students offload their old books to - at the Oxfam Bookshop on St Giles I found a Syriac primer in the Foreign Languages section which can only have come from a Byzantinist - but I love them so much. There's so much variety! From Oxford second-hand bookshops I have so far this term acquired: Persepolis, The Dumas Club, Mr Fox, An Instance of the Fingerpost, Select Letters of Cicero (for my course, not my own pleasure...), The Seville Communion, Penguin Lost, Turkish Gambit, Seeking Whom He May Devour. Also Sarajevo Rose: A Balkan Jewish Notebook and Virginia Woolf's Orlando from the discount store.
• Read so many books about Alexander the Great and his Successors and decided to root for Seleucus. I'm not sure why.

I would say I'll be back with regularity, but Oxford is nuts and I never have any time - and it's finals this year, which makes everything a million times worse. I do like Oxford and I'm glad I study here, but in a lot of ways I'll be glad when it is over. If nothing else, working my first 9 to 5 will be a piece of cake after this.

Just Around the Riverbend...

It's been a while. Sorry about that - term has been incredibly hectic, I've had to write even more essays than usual, I had a death in the family, and I just haven't had the time to post. There are so many things I did that I'd have liked to blog about, but there's no point dredging them up now. So I thought I'd share some photos from when I went punting yesterday! They're terrible phone-quality photos, because I was paranoid that if I brought my camera I'd drop it in the water or my bag would go overboard with the camera in it, so I settled for bad photos rather than the stress of wondering whether my camera would make it out alive.

Yesterday wasn't the best day for punting, being fairly dull and cloudy, but it at least wasn't actually raining by the time we went in the late afternoon. While I'm fairly good with most types of boat (my mother ensured I could sail effectively by the age of 10 or so, and yet at 20 I still can't drive...), I'm terrible at punting, so I left it to more capable people and just lounged around eating and drinking. Also a lot of these photos feature Abbey (in the light blue jacket) because she was sitting opposite me in the punt.

A view of the lovely river, looking far too cloudy for bloody JUNE.

My lovely friend Abbey, my purple DMs, and my friend Jenny's boots next to me. The other punt on the right contains my other friends; the punts have a maximum of five occupants so we had to rent two.

More river.

Our snacks, a Polish... THING... which I found very confusing taste-wise. They're the exact texture of Cheesy Wotsits, so I ate them expecting something very savoury, but they're chocolate-flavoured. Nice, but odd.

 A third punt arrives, captained by Liska! I wish I'd got a proper photo, because she looked amazingly dramatic, up there all in black and barefoot, confidently steering the punt down the river.

This is from the point we took a break to drink Pimm's and eat more Polish snack food. The girl sticking her tongue out in the top photo is Judith; also present is (l-r) Francesca, Essi, Judith's friend Anna.

Ducks! Bridge!

A glimpse of St Hilda's in the very background of the first photo, and Abbey's mad rowing skills in the second.

Abbey took some photos which are much better than mine and also feature me and Jenny, so here they are, ripped off Facebook.

I'm the one with the glasses, by the way. And WOULD YOU JUST LOOK AT THE DUCKS?!

Anyway, after we got the punts back to the boathouse it was 7 PM and Jenny and I went for Malaysian food (she's half-Singaporean Chinese, so she grew up on what is essentially Malaysian food). OM NOM NOM MALAYSIAN FOOD.

And now I have to sadly drag myself through the last time, featuring not one but two essays due within two days of each other! One is fairly easy (oral history) and involves recycling a couple of first-year essays, but the other is on the collapse of the Byzantine state and the Ottoman conquest of Asia Minor and the Balkans, which I really want to do justice to, but I simply don't have the time.