Saturday night, Sunday morning, and travelling to Oxford

While I got very, very little sleep last night, I had a delightful experience making new friends.

I had gotten into bed and was trying to make myself feel tired because I knew I had to be up and moving in the morning but I was very restless and around 11 o'clock, a guy near the door showed up, fell asleep, and started snoring like a chainsaw. It wouldn't have been bothersome to me except that I found it really funny.

Luckily for me, there is never a dull moment in a 15-bed dorm room and shortly after the snoring started, two very tall grey blurs stumbled in and since I already had my earplugs out to laugh at the snoring, I also eavesdropped on the whispered conversation that was happening very close to me. One of the guys was looking for an outlet to plug in his phone. Luckily for him, not only was I a) awake and b) paying attention, but also c) occupying one of the 2 or 3 beds that are directly next to a power outlet. Since I was awake and bored, I told him that there was a power outlet next to my bunk and he could charge his phone there if he wanted.

The two young outlet-seekers then left once more, and I decided that maybe I would fall asleep if I read for a while, but unfortunately I did not have a reading light and it was uncomfortably warm in the dorm, so I took "Game of Thrones" out to the little patio that separates the 15-bed dorm from the pub, bathrooms, and smaller dorms. There are two picnic tables there, so I sat down at one of them and finished Game of Thrones much too quickly.

The tall guys showed up again from wherever they'd gone, and they sat down across from me and we ended up talking for like the next 4 hours. Their names are Chris and Tom, Chris is from Somerset and Tom recently moved back to the UK from New Zealand. They were in London to see a band that played in the concert series at Hyde Park that I'd stumbled across earlier that day and were returning to whatever part of England that Somerset is in the next morning. Chris and I got into a really deep discussion about politics and capitalism and health care reform and the current prime minister of England whose name is David Cameron and Chris does not like him. We also discussed the various dialects of England and the States and the ideas associated with them - e.g. the way that low-income Detroiters tend to speak and the way that low-income Londoners tend to speak. At one point I was trying to explain to them what grits are, but given my own limited knowledge I don't think I did a very good job.

Then after a long time this Australian girl that I had met earlier showed up very, very intoxicated and told us about how she and her boyfriend work in the mines. (At least I think she said "mines.") Then I untied her shoes and entered the key code for her and the three of us just followed her into the dorm and got in our beds, too. I actually ended up sleeping for a couple hours, which I hadn't anticipated, but I got up around 7 o'clock to shower and pack up and check out, so unfortunately I did not have the chance to say goodbye to Chris and Tom but amazingly, Nikki (the Australian girl) was up in time for breakfast so I did say goodbye to her and her mining boyfriend.

From the Queen Elizabeth, I walked to the Fulham Broadway Station and switched to the Piccadilly line at Earl's Court Station and then rode it all the way out to the Heathrow Airport terminal where the buses to Oxford pick people up, and I ended up in the back of a bus with a handful of youths from Nebraska whom I was relieved to find out were not going to the same place as me.

View from my window.

In Oxford, I found the college right away and so continued what has been a steady improvement of my navigation skills. If I were a D&D character, I would get to roll a d10 for "dungeoneering" checks instead of a d6.

My room is way too nice and we aren't allowed to walk on the grass (finally my years of avoiding the grass just in case I'm not supposed to walk on it have paid off) and everything has an unnecessarily fancy name. The bathroom down the hall is a "lavatory," the cafeteria line where we swipe our badges to get meals is called the "servery," and all we're really missing is an apothecary. The fish-monger is down the street next to the shoemaker. I'm not kidding.

Indiana-Jones-like fire escape.

I ran into Professor Connery and the 8 of us who were here went on a very slow and long-winded tour of the surrounding area until Jenny and I picked a different place to eat dinner from the rest of the group and then found our way back to the college on our own even though apparently the tour had not been finished yet. I don't think I could've taken much more of it, anyway.

Currently I'm debating about taking a shower before the welcome dinner and looking for some London shows that I can go see on free evenings. We're touring the big library tomorrow - the one that they used for the Hogwarts library in the Potter films, if I'm not mistaken - and I'm probably going to be doing a lot of picture-taking. Also I'm probably going to be doing a lot of things on my own or with Jenny, because the rest of the girls are a little too slow-moving and high-maintenance for me. Maybe I'll eventually make friends with other students who aren't from OU - there don't seem to be a lot of British students in this area, mostly Americans who are studying overseas temporarily.