P.S.

P.S.
Leave it to me to need a few more words... After talking to Ed last night (thanks, Ed!), I woke to a gorgeous morning, with sun shining brightly on Lincoln Chapel's steeple outside my window. It's going to be a great day for traveling! Love to all, Melanie

Last Full Day in Oxford

I can't believe it's my last full day in Oxford! My feelings are mixed: definitely excited to see folks at home and sleep in more than a twin bed, and awed at the great experiences of the last six weeks. Today, a dark chocolate raspberry milkshake from Moo-Moo's in the Covered Market seemed the appropriate complement to some thick emotion.

Lena left by bus this morning for Gatwick Airport, where she caught a plane to Pisa to meet Ilja, her long-term entanglement, for a week-long post-Loaf holiday. I walked Lena to the bus, and we talked about next summer in Asheville. I worked away on Seattle Academy projects for a while in my room, until BBC broadcast the Olympic Opening Ceremonies live! It's hard to see in this photo, but here's a small crowd watching the spectacle on the Junior Common Room's flatscreen TV.

I packed everything but the last few items I need tomorrow morning, and headed off with Alison to a favorite cafe in the bottom of St. Mary's Church (below).

This is the cafe! And its view, of Radcliffe Camera from its churchyard garden (below), isn't too shabby. In fact, when I studied in Radcliffe Camera, part of the Bodleian Library, I often read at the window directly facing the garden cafe.

We split spicy chai for two and read pleasure books. Alison's reading Bolano's "The Savage Detectives", below.

This evening, Bread Loaf planned a nice spread to celebrate graduating seniors and thank the Lincoln College staff at large. Here are the "hearty" appetizers!

Me, Alison and Heather at the reception, below.

They even had a nice cake for the "seniors." Congratulations to Alison, and to all the graduates!

It's definitely hard to close both the summer here in Oxford and the blog about the summer in Oxford, so I figured I'd make some lists (as is my coping mechanism):

Things I’ll Miss
The bells (sometimes)
The friends on my floor
That dog that chases the Frisbee in University Parks every day at the same time
Buying postage for Ed’s letters everyday from the Porter’s Lodge
Pain au chocolat at breakfast
Regular curry for lunch
The fun of an extremely small class on a topic I love
Finding mail from home on the table at lunch
Marks and Spencer Simply Food grocery store
1,50 pound t-shirts at Primark
All the natural light in my bathroom
“Dreaming” spires
Lincoln College’s unreal (and perfectly manicured) quadrangles
Access to the Bodleian, and the satisfaction of figuring out the Bodleian
The “tourists” who twice now asked me for directions I could actually provide
The leafy green alongside the Thames that outgreens any green
The tops of buildings in the golden twilight
SO much to learn and to do
More things than I can list

Things I Won’t
The bells (sometimes)
Nearly tripping (or actually tripping) on cobblestones
Nearly getting run over by bikes
So much meat at dinner (tactical error… should have picked the vegetarian meal plan)
The exchange rate
Twin bed

Favorite Spots: If You Visit Oxford, Definitely Enjoy…
Edamame (“homestyle” Japanese)
Chiang Mai (Thai)
G & D’s (bagels and gourmet ice cream)
Gretchen’s in the Covered Market (funky-fresh upstairs café)
Moo-Moo’s (source of the chocolate-raspberry shake)
Ben’s Cookies (last sampled: orange marmalade-chocolate)
St. Mary’s Garden/Vault Café (mentioned above)
Aziz (cleverly combines the Thai and the Indian, riverside)
Turf Pub (where Clinton supposedly inhaled)
King’s Arms (the first place I ate in Oxford; I still remember the carrot soup)
Head of the River (you can’t beat that patio along the Thames)
The Bear (college boys get their ties clipped and hung on the wall)
Jamie’s (Italian… with service just like home)

New Places (At Least for Me) We'll Visit on a Next Trip to the UK
Natural History Museum, where Jon and Ellinor work (London)
Edinburgh
Dublin
Brighton
National Gallery (London)
The Victoria and Albert Museum (London)
The Trout (Oxford)

I board a bus for Heathrow at 2 PM (my time) tomorrow and board a plane for Seattle at 6:55 PM (my time). To the Bread Loaf folks who read these posts, thanks for an unusually good summer and have a great year. To everyone who made this summer even more terrific by sharing the experience online, THANK YOU! I'll see most of you, soon, stateside. Much love!

Soaking Up Oxford

This morning, before my last tutorial, Alison and I took a long loopy walk around Christ Church Meadow, and along the Thames, where I snapped this photo. Afterward, I headed off to meet with my tutor, Christine, about my second and final paper of the summer. She and I had a great talk, and I earned an 'A' on the paper! Hooray! Christine also pressed me again about doing more graduate work and urged me to email her anytime if I need anything. Double-hooray!

After an afternoon of working on projects for SAAS, Alison and I walked over to meet Heather Brubaker at the Turf Pub. We walked along Radcliffe Camera, pictured here, beautiful in the twilight.

Here's Ali and me at the Turf Pub.

The evening's prime destination was Jamie Oliver's new Italian restaurant in Oxford. Raised in Cambridge, Oliver's plan is to open his first restaurants in college towns before taking his restaurants to other cities. Here are Heather and Alison outside Jamie's.

Whenever we walk by this restaurant, we see a ten-deep (at least) queue outside the door. We waited about ten minutes outside, then another twenty in the bar, before we enjoyed an amazing (and leisurely; once inside... no rush) meal of bruschetta, polenta crisps with rosemary and sea salt, and various pastas (Alison and I split the "Turbo!" spicy penne and pappardelle with sausage, while Lena and Heather both enjoyed the truffle pasta). We had SO much fun!

Tomorrow morning, Lena departs, first for a week in Italy, then for Baltimore. It's hard to believe another Bread Loaf summer is coming to an end! After breakfast tomorrow, I'll walk with Lena and her stuff to where her bus departs. Fun plans are brewing, however, for the rest of tomorrow: Olympic coverage on the big screen in the Junior Common Room, pleasure books outside at one of my favorite cafes (IN the churchyard adjacent to Radcliffe Camera), and an early evening reception for the seniors (Alison included!) graduating tomorrow.

One last Oxford blog... tomorrow! Have a great day, all!
Melanie

Freudian Sip

Today marked my last class and the due date of what became an 18-page paper on how Edith Wharton uses transportation vs. locomotion to mark passive vs. active behavior in The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, and The Age of Innocence. After all that, Lena and I needed a snack! (Above: Lena on the steps of The Snack Destination.)

We headed to Freud, the closest thing to a McMenamins (for those who know it) in Oxford. A church converted into a casual bar/restaurant, Freud is at once pretty, high-ceilinged, and intentionally rough around the edges. It's in a hipster neighborhood called Jericho, around a fifteen minute walk from Lincoln College.

We ate dinner at a little table on Freud's front steps.

In addition to olives, we shared hummus and pita, and a pizza with pepperoni and jalapeno peppers. Yum.

En route home, we encountered this, irresistable to the passing photographer meets former college admission person: the Oxford undergraduate admission office!

Tonight was the final night of "Deep Hall Entertainments," a sort of anything-goes open mike with truly high-level performances in the campus pub, Deep Hall.

Tonight, the acts included poetry, beat-boxing, Johnny Cash covers, original music, and a collaborative theater piece Heather Brubaker initiated. Here are Lena and Heather Lindenman before the festivities.

Heather Brubaker introduces her piece...

...created by the performers, Alison included, and staged inside one of the alcoves in the campus pub. Very cool!

Above, Alison gets into the act.

Tomorrow, Heather Lindenman leaves early in the morning (sniff). I hike out to meet my tutor for a conversation about the paper I turned in today, which she's grading tonight. Otherwise, it's final packing, some SAAS projects, and a special off-campus surprise dinner tomorrow night. Here's a hint:

http://www.jamieoliver.com/italian/oxford

More to come!

Five Things About Today

1. My ten page paper ballooned into a twenty page paper and draft #1 is now under the capable teacher-pen of Lena Tashjian. I'm telling you, people should hire this woman for the great, ass-kicking criticism she gives to any written work. My paper will come back all purple, and all the better for it.

2. Today = phone bonanza! Ed called this morning at 7 AM, and we talked for a good hour. Ed reports that the sun finally came out in Alaska (which could mean the weather's not great in Seattle; there's an inverse relationship), and the pinks, a species of salmon ideal for the Japanese School Lunch Program, finally "showed up" (on his birthday, no less), helping the Alsek bottom line. Ed and I also discussed/confirmed my destination for next summer, my graduation summer, which is... *drumroll*... Asheville, NC! Read more about Bread Loaf, Asheville at:

http://www.middlebury.edu/academics/blse/campuses/nc

(Someone teach me how to link that so the link isn't so cuckoo-long?)

3. Today = mail bonanza! Today was a record mail day, with a card from Mom and Dad, two cards from Ed (complete with diagram of rebuilt net; very cool), and a card from Cameron, the awesome Seattle Academy graduate fishing with Ed this summer. Cameron thanked me in his card for "helping me land the two greatest opportunities I have ever had: fishing in Alaska and going to Yale." Yes!

4. It's raining like a sonofabitch. It's raining so much, that a possible late-night study break to the cheap falafel stand might go on "rain delay." You know it's bad when it's too rainy for me to get FOOD.

5. Tomorrow begins the mini-vacation known as Oxford Without Homework. I attend my last class, turn in my last paper, and spend the next three days hitting the favorite haunts of Oxford and reprogramming my brain for actual work next week (wha?).

Have a great day! Love to all!
Melanie

Winding Down

Alison and I decided this afternoon to take our books and computers river-side and work outside at the Head of the River Pub. The setting is gorgeous: a huge patio with picnic tables and umbrellas, on the other side of Folly Bridge from the Indian-Thai restaurant the ladies hit Saturday night. I packed up so many books and notebooks for the outing, I forgot my camera. I hunted around online instead and was able to find a picture of the place, above.

Earlier today, I had my penultimate class, this time on Eliot’s “Mill on the Floss” (loved it, loved it, loved it). My tutor moved our last class of the session to Wednesday, so after Wednesday at 1 PM, I’ll be done with work for Bread Loaf Summer #4! My paper is also due Wednesday, so I’ll spend all day tomorrow researching and adding last details. My tutor wants to meet with each of us later in the week to discuss the graded papers before we go home, so that’ll happen Thursday or Friday sometime. Most everyone here is nearing completion on final projects, and the graduating seniors (Alison included!) are gearing up for the weekend’s festivities. Picture sort of a pleasant, mellow end to the session, with papers submitted, mild weather, overcast skies, and readiness for the next phase of the year.

The Meal on the Floss

After a day of reading off campus, Alison and I returned to a wedding here at Lincoln College. Bridesmaids dressed in our hall, a band played Amy Winehouse covers, and this little boy waited patiently for the wedding photographer.

Happily, the wedding forced all Bread Loafers out of the dining hall and into the many terrific restaurants of Oxford. The Loaf gave us each 14 pounds for dinner because we had no access to regular dinner (thanks, wedding party!). We headed to Aziz, which serves both Thai and Indian food (throw in some Flaming Hot Cheetos, and my culinary needs are met)! Pictured above are Alison, Lena, and Heather Brubaker at Aziz.

Aziz is situated smack on the Thames, with a beautiful riverfront (and river-height) deck adjacent to what's known as Folly Bridge. Here are Heather Lindenman, me, and Rebecca at our table outside, with Folly Bridge behind us.

Rebecca ran to the top of Folly Bridge to take pictures of us down on the deck, so I snapped this picture of her in the sun.

Swans swim up next to your table, perhaps looking for one of the incredibly good items we ordered: green curry with vegetables, red curry with prawns, chicken tikka masala, another Indian curry (now known as "number 63") with lots of garlic and onions, vegetable stir fry with ginger, papadum, and naan.

This was an amazing meal in an amazing setting. Witness the pinky-pretty sunset behind Heather, above. On a return trip to Oxford, I'll visit this restaurant straightaway. Tomorrow, I finish digesting tonight's curries and finish digesting Eliot's "The Mill on the Floss." Have a great rest of the weekend, everyone!

P.S. We saw the cheesetastic "X-Files" movie, which confirms 1) that Mulder and Scully sleep in the same bed and 2) that anyone can learn how to do a stem-cell procedure by Googling "stem cell procedure."

Stratford upon Awards

Happy news follows, only it seems a little awkward to write about online. If you'd like more details, I can share them over email. Otherwise, I take the self-absorption of a blog to a whole new level (not hard). Suffice to say, it's been an exciting week!

I'll break it down thus: Bread Loaf has an annual awards ceremony, and Lena, Alison, Heather Brubaker and I were recognized. We were invited to sit at High Table. Here's Alison, looking gorgeous, across from me at the table.

In this photo, Heather's engaged in the left-hand conversation, while Lena (far right) talks to her tutor. I had the good-fortune to sit next to my tutor, Christine. After dinner, Associate Director of Bread Loaf, Emily Bartells, introduced each award/awardee by reading written faculty comments from our files. The comments illustrated just how thoughtfully and completely faculty write about the different students in the program. Emily even cited specific papers each of us wrote, especially fun because for the last four-or-so years, we saw one another's papers in production. I asked Emily to forward a copy of the comments.

Yesterday, 70+ Bread Loaf students plus various tutors, administrators, and partners returned to Stratford to see "Hamlet" at the RSC. Due to road construction on our usual highway, we took a curvy route that passed the grounds of Blenheim Palace. After a yummy pub dinner, we walked through the gardens above, which occupy part of the property Shakespeare owned in Stratford as an adult.

Heather, Alison, and Lena stand in front of the RSC's Courtyard Theatre with the poster of the production, starring David Tennant as Hamlet and Patrick Stewart as Claudius. One of the actors in the "play within a play" had sort of a Spock-like 'do (a nod to Jean-Luc Picard?).

It's hard to believe we all leave one week from tomorrow! Nearly everyone is in buckle-down mode, wrapping up research and final papers. I'll spend today, tomorrow and Sunday reading "The Mill on the Floss" for class Monday, and then wrap up my analysis of how walking (really, walking) versus riding (sled, carriage, train, ship, motor-car) affects character-development in Wharton's "The House of Mirth," "Ethan Frome," and "The Age of Innocence." Then, I'll shift into back-to-school mode, crossing-off items that demand attention before the kids return to SAAS in just a few weeks. That said, tonight's study break? "X-Files" movie! (It's making, like, no money and the reviews are stinky, and I'm going to love it anyway.)

Have a great weekend! And happy birthday, Heather (August 1) and Ed (August 2)!

For the Birds

So, walking through the Covered Market just now, a bird shit on me. Lena says it's good luck, so I slathered on her hand sanitizer and continued to the Best Milkshake Place on the Planet, Moo-Moo's in the Covered Market. Here's the list of stuff you can mix in your milkshake, a sort of DQ Blizzard on crack: http://www.moo-moos.co.uk/menu.htm. I had dark chocolate and fresh raspberry. Bird shit forgotten.

As you can see from the photos, however, there are other positive developments in the bird world. Lincoln College has ducklings! Born yesterday, they're teeeensy and busy crisscrossing the perfect lawn. They fall down, stand up, fall down, stand up, go to sleep, stand up, etc.

They're just little poofballs! Nothing stops short (or happily distracts from reading) a group of Bread Loafers like a chick-pile on the quad.

In unrelated news, Ed called last night and we luxuriated in a big, 70-minute phone call. So awesome. Today at lunch, I got a great map-o-Wisconsin postcard from Britten! Thanks, you two! And have great evenings, everyone!

From Bath to Bloomsbury

Man, a lot happened since I blogged last! I just pasted too, too, too many photos below, so I'll let them do most of the talking. You can find even more photos of this weekend's hijinks by clicking on "Melanie's Photos" to your right. Friday, Alison and I started off the weekend with a day trip to Bath. Bath is named, appropriately, for the Roman Baths that are restored and central to the town today, even as they were in, say, 400 AD. We'll get to pictures of the baths in a second.

First things first, of course. Bath is also known for Sally Lunn's Buns (really). Sally Lunn fled France in the 1600's, presumably with a really tasty recipe for a glorified hamburger bun. These things really are tasty. Alison and I shared one bun, as it were, with lemon curd, and another bun with raspberry jam. Both came with clotted cream (as creamtastic as it sounds) and tea.

Fortified to meet the Romans, we next did the official Roman Baths tour. Here I am standing above the baths and the Roman ruins themselves, with famous Bath Abbey behind me. (Bath is awesome!)

Bill Bryson narrates a great audio tour that introduces visitors to the baths, but not to the water (no touching, no swimming). The "sacred spring" the Romans worshipped at their Temple Sulis Minerva still gurgles and bubbles on site.

Here's Ali adjacent to the magical spring waters.

Did you know the Romans invented the cell phone? Just kidding. That's Ali listening to the audio tour.

We walked on from the baths to something called The Royal Crescent, a curved string of adjoining (and very expensive, and rarely up for sale) houses in an exclusive part of Bath.

Designed by the same father and son team, "The Circus" in Bath is another example of Georgian architecture (and adjacent, curvilinear homes).

The next day, Alison, Heather B., and I all traveled by train to London as each of us had London plans for the weekend. We started out Saturday together, however, riding the Tube to the National Gallery and visiting the National Portrait Gallery. While there, we not only saw the only existing painting of the Bronte sisters together (painted by their brother, Branwell), but we saw the exhibition associated with the BP Portrait Award. 1700 portrait artists enter, and 55 winners are chosen to show their work.

After our visit to the National Portrait Gallery, each of us headed off for different weekend fun. I met up with Ed's long-time friends, Ellinor and Jon, at the British Museum. It was incredibly fun to meet them and to stay with them for a couple of nights after hearing so much about them from Ed. Before we met, I had time to run through and see the museum's Greatest Hits, including the so-called "Elgin Marbles," sculptures from the Parthenon, showcased in the gallery above.

Marbles.

More marble.

Here's twenty tourists (me included) jammed up against the display case to get a photo of the Rosetta Stone.

The museum's rotunda, with central reading room, is extremely striking. Here, I met Jon and Ellinor for lunch.

Here are Ellinor and Jon outside the Sir John Soane's (1753-1837) Museum, linked at the bottom of this page. Photography is not allowed inside, but if it was, you'd see about fourteen pictures here of Soane's (who was an extremely creative architect) innovation (and obsessive collecting). If Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the Winchester Mystery House had a baby, and it lived in London, it would be the completely engaging Sir John Soane's Museum.

Next, we rode the train to Ellinor and Jon's house, which is adjacent to the site where London moved the Crystal Palace after the six months it was in Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851.

The Crystal Palace was so popular that the "Crystal Palace Company" bought and moved it to Ellinor and Jon's neighborhood as an ongoing educational, entertainment, and financial venture. Included in 1854 on this new site were the first dinosaur sculptures in the world. The story of both the dinosaurs and the Crystal Palace is fascinating, and is linked at the bottom of the page.

I walked to see the dinosaurs as well as what remains of the Crystal Palace itself, which burned in 1936.

One of the remaining statues on the Crystal Palace terrace.

Yesterday, Ellinor, Jon and I decided to head south to Charleston, the farmhouse of painter Vanessa Bell, and the longtime meeting place of members of the Bloomsbury Group (Virginia Woolf was Vanessa Bell's sister, and the group also included E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, and Lytton Strachey). En route to breakfast beforehand, Ellinor and I stopped in to see (above) the Crystal Palace Train Station, which still operates a track or two.

Charleston Farmhouse.

Another view, with colorful garden.

The pond at Charleston, with sculpture.

In the garden at Charleston.

In the garden at Charleston.

Next, we visited a nearby church in which two members of the Bloomsbury Group, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, contributed murals.

Once inside the church, this switch illuminates the murals.

Murals inside the church.

We continued our trip south to see, among other things, the so-called Long Man of Wilmington, a giant of the Iron Age, carved in to the chalk in the distance. See him in the photo?

Here's a close-up. Read more about him at the link at the bottom of the page.

Next, we arrived at the English Channel. Here are Ellinor and Jon on the beach with chalk cliffs in the distance.

We drove for a bit along the English Channel before meeting a friend of Ellinor and Jon's at a pub called The Ram, not far from the Charleston Farmhouse we visited earlier in the afternoon. Returning to Ellinor and Jon's after a long, satisfying day, we had a great pasta dinner and crashed for the night.

This morning, Ellinor, Jon and I rode the train in to Victoria Station. I continued on to Oxford from there, after a little neighborhood exploring. Here's Buckingham Palace this morning, about 45 minutes before the Changing of the Guard.

By way of other updates, it's nearly midnight and pouring down rain outside. It sounds and feels great, as today was actually pretty hot (81 degrees F) and humid. I came home to a card from Auntie Janet (Mom, pass along my thanks to her!). Heather, Heather and I went out for Thai dinner so we could avoid the melon soup on tonight's menu. Tomorrow kicks off a home stretch of last researching and of paper writing, punctuated by another big dinner on Wednesday and "Hamlet" in Stratford on Thursday. I'll write next on a paper-writing break. Have a great week, everyone! And thanks again to Ellinor and Jon for a really fun weekend!