Hello! I hope you had a Merry Christmas and a terrific New Years! I know I haven't had a new post in a while, but it's for good reason; I went home for Christmas!
Shortly after last term, I went to the my host rotary club's Christmas dinner. We had a lot of fun performing pantomimes or pantos, which are traditional British plays (such as Jack and the Beanstalk or Little Red Riding Hood) performed each winter. Not only do the plays usually have a lot of jokes and men playing the roles of women, they are also a lot of fun because the audience participates throughout the show. My table put on Cinderella and I got to be Prince Charming (and yes, middle-age male stepsisters were sufficiently ugly!). The next day, I went with the president of the Banbury-Cherwell Rotary Club to Stratford-Upon-Avon. If that name sounds familiar, it's because it's where Shakespeare was born! On the other hand, if you didn't recognize it, then I guess now you have another piece of trivia, right?
This picture is from outside his childhood house. His father was a leatherworker, so their house doubled as his shop and warehouse. The welcome center next to his house underwent a recent renovation and has several terrific videos that talk about his life and the vast impact he has had not only on British culture, but the entire world. The glass panes signed by the first visitors are still in the house, but since it has now received over 27 million people, I could only sign the guest book. The number of visitors to the house is staggering, but even more amazing considering there were only about five million people living in the U.K. during Shakespeare's time!
This is a picture of one of the main streets in Stratford. The decorations looked great! On a completely unrelated side note, Stratford also had some delicious pasties, a pastry crust with some kind of meat and vegetable filling. I always tell my British friends that if I could take one thing back ot the U.S. it would be pasties.
Like I mentioned earlier, I made it home for Christmas! Other than my brother, my family wasn't expecting me, so it was a pretty epic surprise. In addition to spending time with many of my Michigan friends, I also went out to New York to be a saber bearer in a friend's wedding where I could also catch up with several of my West Point friends. I had a wonderful time seeing everyone back in the States, but it was also a lot of fun to drive (on the right side of the road no less!), watch football, listen to country music, and eat American food. My suitcases were full of presents for everyone on the way there which afforded me plenty of room to bring American food back over. James studied at Harvard for a year and developed a taste for peanut butter and Lucky Charms, so I brought him a 6 lb. package of the former and 2 lb. box of the latter. Hooray for Sam's Club! I also had some Betty Crocker cake mixes, pumpkin, and a few other things I've had trouble finding in Oxford.
Below are some pictures from around Oxford over the holiday season. The right is one of the butcher shops in the covered market downtown. Christmas dinner is much like Thanksgiving dinner in the U.S., so they had dozens of turkeys, pheasants, rabbits, and other animals hanging from the storefront. A few days ago, Oxford had an unusually large snowfall--about 8 inches--so of course I had to play in it! The second picture is the snowman I built outside of my house after a snowball fight I had with some of my friends; it's about eight feet tall!
These are some of the snowmen the other students built. It's a game- you have to find all ten.
I rode my bike down to a pub quiz before the snow really started coming down. The trip down was fine, but it was tough going on the way back, especially since I forgot to switch to my snow tires and chains.
Just a few more pictures from around Oxford. The bottom one is Hertford's chapel.
The first day of rowing camp went well! My legs are feeling fine, but my hands are already torn up pretty good. A friend has some great pictures of us clearing the snow off the raft with oars before we brought the boats out, so I'll try to get those up when I get them from her.
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