Thoughts and Words Ill-Sorted

We had a long day today, leaving Sydney’s professor’s house at 6:50 and tramping around Oxford all day.  I don’t know if it’s that the concrete is hard, or we’ve just done something crazy, but our feet are killing us.  Guess we’ll be figuring out the bus system right away!

Sydney has a room on the third floor of a large house along a main thoroughfare just north of Oxford’s center.  The room has some nice things: it’s got a bed, desk, bookcase, dresser, armoir, and bedding and towels.  There is a small kitchen unit on this floor, and a bath downstairs.  Our friend Alice is right next door, and the house apparently only has eight rooms.  We’ve filled the armoir with his clothes and his pantry (which I’m hoping to help fill while I’m here), and we picked up a kettle for tea.  Ahhhhh.  Although I was unsuccessful in my search for a shirt this afternoon (since one of the three I brought with me developed a large tear), we found Sydney an ethernet cable for his room and some other things that will help get him off the ground.  I’m hoping that, now that we’re where we have been trying to get all along, I’ll be able to slow down and simply sight-see and shop for a few things while I’m here.  Sydney, of course, appears to have books to be reading.  I’ll try to take the camera out with me tomorrow, but I’ll warn you: I was already hesitant to dig out the map today–embarrassment that is nothing to taking pictures with a camera in public!

Erin

I’m sitting in what will be Sydney’s room for the next eight weeks.  Fairly sizable, it has an armoir, a bookshelf, a desk, a bed, two chairs, an overhead light, and a sink.  Not bad!  Of course, while he and his fellow Cornell philosophy student Alice (who is, thankfully, living just next door to him in this house) are at a Plato class this afternoon, I’ll be scouting the territory for places that might sell ethernet cables, inexpensive reading lamps, and the like.  Oxford is fairly small, or at least the part of it that we tramped this morning was eminently walkable.  He’ll be getting his exercise, though: his quarters are something like 2 miles from the philosophy department–which is on the corner of Merton and Logic Lane, can you believe it?  Some funny names ’round here.

Erin

We strolled a mile along the road to an organic farm market this morning. This isn’t like Ithaca, though: the market was obviously part of a gentleman-farming, tourist-observing, fancy crowd. A small marble cheese board the size of my palm costs 50 pounds, if that’s any indication. But this place is known for great bread by those who live nearby, so we bought two kinds of bread (a pink beetroot bread for Sydney and a fruit-and-nut bread for me), local cheddar cheese (so much flavor!), some soup for dinner, and, since I know a good bakery when I see one, a lemon tart and a scone. Yum.

The weather is great: in the 40s, clear and sunny, but damp enough to make everything feel very fresh and lovely. Sydney’s leg/foot are still bothering him from our tramping around London on Wednesday, so we decided to settle indoors after our morning jaunt. I’m normally restless to get out and walk more, but after having numerous cars whiz by us on a narrow country road (that somehow doesn’t discourage them from going 60mph), I’m a lot less eager to go for long strolls. Being indoors with food, tea, book, and computer are just fine by me for awhile. However, if we were going to be here for longer I’d be acquiring some galoshes in short order, and then I’d be tramping all over the paths in the field!

With Sydney’s help, I’m attaching a few pictures from our walk this morning. This is the view across the road from the farm shop. For those of you reluctant to put on your glasses, clicking on this particular picture will open up a larger version. Our entire walk was filled with hedges, green fields, and picturesque trees.

Another one of the trees:

Sydney on the way home with our purchases (notice how narrow the road is, and yet it somehow sustains high-speed two-way traffic):

And this is Kingham, or at least a good chunk of it, where we are staying for a couple of days:

Erin

Sydney and I checked out of our London hotel yesterday and traveled to Oxford, where we took a taxi to the office of one of Sydney’s professors.  We spent the rest of the afternoon in that office, enjoying some down time, while the professor was at a conference, and then he brought us to his house, where we’ll be staying until Sydney can move into his own rooms on Monday.  So nice to be in a real house again!  We’re in Kingham, just north of Oxford, and we’re surrounded by countryside (sheep and fields and such).  We have the house pretty much to ourselves this weekend, so we’ve planned a leisurely walk to an organic market nearby for the morning and a quiet afternoon at the house in the afternoon.  We slept in tremendously this morning, and I think both of our bodies appreciated it.  Off to look at sheep!

Erin

The view to the west from St. Paul’s after a bit of knee exercise:

Somebody who matters to Erin apparently put toy boats in this pond as a child (notice the lovely London weather, by the way):

One of the birds on which I put the zoom lens to use. What are parakeets doing in England, anyway?

And possibly the most inappropriate memorial ever built:

(Erin thinks I should say more about the pictures — I think y’all can guess.)

We apparently walked our feet off yesterday, despite frequent jaunts on the Underground. Today I’m in sneakers and Sydney says his feet are still tender. But we’re finding the walking here a bit interesting:

– Since the traffic is on the left side, we thought people would walk on the left side, pass on the right, etc. But no, they only do that when going into and out of the tube stations, and that only because there are major signs to that effect all over and the escalators refuse to accomodate those going the wrong way. Most of the time, we find people walk on the right. We’ve confirmed this after testing it on the street: I’d walk straight toward the person about to meet us in the walkway, and they’d inevitably dodge to my left, as if I were wrong to think a country should be consistent in its traffic patterns!

– Londoners don’t wait for the traffic lights to indicate they have the right of way to walk. Instead, they take any opportunity to cross the street, including walking right in front of cars. Sydney and I are rather adventurous about some things, but we’ve been slightly appalled by their readiness to get out and paste themselves onto the front of a bus. Apparently this is inculcated in the Londoner in childhood: we saw a young mother hauling her toddler along by the coat when he didn’t immediately jump into the middle of the road while traffic headed toward him. With these kinds of risky behaviors, perhaps I can see why they aren’t worried about the negative effects of smoking . . .

These are just a couple of the bizzare things that have stopped us in our tracks or kept us guessing while we’re here. For the most part, however, despite the lack of street signs, we are easily finding our way. The underground actually has great signage!

Erin

While walking through the park just by Buckingham Palace Sydney and I were passed by something like 50 apple-cheeked rugby boys out for a run.

We did go to Harrods very quickly last night.  After passing hurriedly through the handbag section we bought fruit, cheese, tea, and fantastic little Arabic pastries with pistachios and cashews in them.  Yum.

We also saw Cirque du Soleil perform last night.  Our feet had had enough walking (seriously, we’re still recovering today) and we enjoyed watching somebody else on their feet.  Some really fantastic stunts, I have to say.  Great fun.

We walked through Kensington Gardens (where Sydney made use of the zoom on our camera to take pictures of birds we couldn’t identify) and tried to look nonchalant while walking past Virginia Woolf’s home nearby.

About the walking: though we think we’ve mastered the underground (the trains were very clean, easy to find, etc.), we still did quite a bit of walking yesterday, including the nearly 500 steps it takes to reach the top of St. Paul’s Cathedral.  Imagine a gigantic church, and then imagine a tiny spire at the top of the highest dome in that church, and then imagine some very tiny people peering out from a balcony at the top of that spire.  That’s us.  It gave us a great view!

Erin

Westminster Abbey:

I suppose you should recognize this:

And less aesthetically exciting, I suppose, but I find it amusing:

Sydney

After a pretty uneventful flight, we arrived  in London early this morning. Sleeping on the overnight flight turned out not to work too well, since there was a group of people travelling together sitting around us who had no intentions of doing any sleeping on the flight. So I think a long sleep is called for tonight. Given that we were a bit on the tired side, we didn’t do a whole lot in London today, but we did walk by Buckingham Palace and area and spent some time in Westminster Abbey (where we found the memorial to the Mr. Dryden who supplied us with the name for our blog). We also shopped for a few groceries — most notably I bought some ‘crunchy cereal’ (I take it this is the equivalent of granola) in the ‘adult cereal’ section. As far as I can tell, the cereal is pretty innocent.

Sydney

Highlights of our preparations:

– I have complained bitterly about Sydney’s keyboard (the keys feel sticky to me and they’re harder to push than most typewriters), not least because I’m coming from a light-touch laptop.  He, in turn, has complained about the lack of a mouse on my side of things.  So today we picked up a travel mouse for him and a fantastic new keyboard for me.  Sydney agrees that it types much more easily, and I can feel my typing picking up speed.  I only wish we did this last week, when I was spending night and day working on an application on Sydney’s computer.

– Our cat loves sleeping on our suitcases.  I actually kind of feel bad for not leaving one with her when we’re gone.  We take away our petting powers and we also take away the suitcases: a cruel blow.

Our posting will be pretty intermittent and possibly even nonexistent for the next two weeks, but then you’ll be getting two different reports from two different parts of the planet.  Cool, eh?

Cheers!

Erin