News from the Shire #2

Melanie and Lena at High Table Dinner.


Our campus.


Yummy soup and a lot of silverware.


In Deep Hall after dinner: Alison and Annie.


Right outside our door.

Today's highlight, among many, was the first "High Table Dinner" of the Bread Loaf session. Unique to Bread Loaf Oxford, the High Table Dinner generally features a guest speaker (for example, later in the season, the actor who plays Bottom in Royal Shakespeare Company's production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" speaks at a High Table Dinner; incidentally, all 70 of us go see "Dream" in Stratford) and (as I now understand) fancy dress, lots of silver, and great food (zucchini soup, salmon hollandaise, guinea fowl, potatoes/carrots/green beans, and something called "strawberry vacherin").

We kicked off the evening with a 5:30 introductory meeting, followed by drinks on the quad, then use of the proper fork and knife, and after-dinner tea and coffee in something called the "Junior Common Room." Bread Loaf, known generally for its fleece and shorts, turned up looking fine. Afterward, about 25 of us landed in Deep Hall, the campus pub, located (appropriately) under the dining hall. Given the prices in Oxford, it's definitely the most inexpensive place to hang out! There, I caught up with my friend Annie, who used to work in college admission at Bowdoin, and who had just started Bread Loaf when our friend Matt Lane introduced us at our national admission counseling conference in Milwaukee.

Otherwise, today was a blur of Oxford information and discovery: our first breakfast, served buffet style and taken in our very Hogwartsy dining hall; walking around downtown Oxford (we're smack in the middle of Oxford, so downtown is right outside the door); an orientation to Lincoln College's beautiful library; naps; "registration" (i.e. "this is how to do laundry" and "this is the location of your first class"). My first class meets tomorrow late morning, after we all tour the Bodleian Library (which involves a "Bodleian Pledge"), considered one of the three-or-four best research libraries in the world.

I meet my tutor and four other classmates (some of whom I met at dinner) tomorrow and will report back then on class and class expectations! Have a great day, all!