Today in Photos from the Shire (Day Three)

I'm blogging earlier today. Classes are now underway, and I need to reread Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" for class tomorrow as I volunteered to kick off class discussion of the poem. My albatross, I guess.

So much happens each day here, it's hard to choose photos to capture it all. Do me a favor and check out the Flickr photo link at right, and you'll see what I mean. I post about forty more photos a day out on Flickr for the truly bored or curious.

Here's Lena, in the street in front of our college. Every day, we enter and exit through the main gate, right in front of that bus. We walk through the "Porter's Lodge," which is also where I ask dumb questions and take Ed's daily letter for metering and posting.

After the photo above, Lena and I walked with half of the Bread Loaf crew for our formal introduction to the world-famous Bodleian Library. Witness:


Not bad, 'eh? It's an enormous and rare honor to study and research here. Each of us has a top security Bodleian ID card, for which we had to pledge that we would (quoting directly from the pledge here) "not bring into the Library or kindle therein any fire or flame" among other things.

Here are the Loafers in line for passport checking and pledge reading. We're in a room that housed Parliament a few times in British history, like after the Great London Fire. Later in the day, we attended an intense hour-long tutorial on use of the library, which is a research-only library (i.e. no books leave the Bodleian; you order what you need delivered to a reading room and, well, read it). The Bodleian holds a ton of treasures, including one I saw today: The original draft manuscript of Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," opened to its title page in a display case. Extremely moving.


Next, it was time to walk to class. I hiked the twenty minutes to a neighboring college with three other classmates, and passed a cricket match en route.

My class is located here, at Lady Margaret Hall, another of the colleges within Oxford University. Our initial class meeting lasted about a half hour, mostly for introductions and a review of the syllabus.

After class, my classmates and I ducked into Oxford's free Natural History Museum, which also houses the truly weird and awesome Pitt-Rivers Museum, described as "a museum... of a museum" that not only showcases things like shrunken heads and mummies, but highlights how the Victorians organized and cataloged Lots of Unusual Stuff. In general, loving it here. Love to all.