CMRS: The Past Two days

Well the past two days have been VERY eventful and wonderful and tumultuous and amazing. Yesterday began with an academic orientation then a presentation of the field trips we're going on and wow, it's so exciting, we're visitng all sorts of awsome places that are all related to the curriculum we're studying so yeah, that's fantastic. Then, I had my Dante seminar. If I've ever seen brilliant it is this man. We talked basically about what we'd be covering and oh my god, it's going to be incredible: we're going to deal with everythign from the layered narrative structure and the complex relationships between writer and reader in Dante, to the notions of a fully-realized self and the journey for that throughout the text along with the underlying aristotelian vs. neo-platonic tensions throughout. Yeah, it should be amaaazing. Then afterwards, I went a-shopping. I got a plant and some artwork to make this room more homey, and I was quite successful (see pictures in this post). Following that we had the first of 6 St. Peter's College lectures, which was of course begun with champagne all around . This was then followed by a PHENOMENAL lecture from a gentleman who has lived in africa most of his life and showed us some amazing pictures on the wildlife and plants and bugs of Africa. It was stunning. This was all followed with one hell of a dinner. We all had a seating plan, we couldn't sit down until high table had arrived and the headmaster had said grace in Latin. The dinner began with smoked salmon and watercress as an appetizer. this was followed up with roasted lamb with elegant little vegetable packets wrapped in zucchini. Desert was food-tastic. Imagine a little pound cake, now imagine it dipped in raspberry juice and filled with fieldberries, now imagine that with clotted cream (somewhere between whipped cream and butter). Afterwards of course we all needed a walk so we walked around and climbed up the Castle Mount which was absolutely incredible. It's the site of the old old Saxon Oxford castle and from the top you can see most of the city, the view was simply stunning. On coming back I watched "King Arthur" with a friend since it was my homework for class today and then went to bed extremely content. Today was also pretty eventful. We had our admissions and swearing in ceremony at the Bodleian Library (the 2nd biggest library in the UK with over 8 million books), we had to swear an oath out loud and as we had the choice of doing it in any language we chose, I chose to swear it in Latin which I did :) After that I had my first Arthurian seminar, which wasn't as good as Dante but still quite interesting. I'm not sure what I'm going to write on for that yet, but it should be really quite neat. Later on, a few of us went to Christchurch Cathedral for evensong at 6, which was absolutley amazing, the music was breathtaking, the cathedral was heartstopping, it was the most amazing thing ever, almost like 1/100th of what it feels like to be in love :) After dinner we all went to this place called the Turf (quite cute actually, it's a little pub which sprawls around outside so you can sit in or outside) and played quiz night, which is basically like trivia night. We came in last but not by very much!! Anywhee I should go get some reading and sleep done, tomorrow we have a trip out to Winchester, and we also have a plan to go see Pirates of the Carribean on thursday so we have to look into getting pirate flags and grog fixings for that. Until later, I miss you all back home, B