A Sunny Day in Oxford Town

Oxford University, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom.

I feel a bit like a foreign knight from faraway realm visiting court. I arrived late at night by bus from Heathrow Airport (19 pounds, 1 hour). The local lords and ladies have been quite civil in their reception, and I am greeted and treated with interest and care... people have been quite interested in conversation. It may have helped that brought Swedish chocolate for AM's (my best friend from high school) housemates, and am on my way to Cambodia. The graduates students here are marvelous: remarkably a highly international group, deeply concerned with the state of the world around them, and wicked smart.

This evening, we dined in the New College dining room for the formal sitting, eating with a Vlad, a second-year Marshall scholar. The ceiling rose high above, with thick wood paneling, classical paintings, and a row above the main dining room floor for the professors (fellows). They served us a three course meal, which was remarkably tasty. One could feel the tradition and solemnity of the place, and it felt like a serious meal. Afterwards, we toured the darkened and deserted cloister-style courtyard. Truly magnificent, and very romantic... This seems like a wonderful place in which to fall in love. As it is freezing cold here, we warmed up with coffee in the common room and then went to one of the college pubs for some round of Green Goblin cider and deep conversation with German economic grad student about flaws in neoclassical economic theory, supply and demand in media markets, and Missouri. I also met a british student studying American history: he told me he was writing his doctorate on isolationists in the US from 1945-1965.

I don't really understand the British.

Scenes from Newark Airport:

-The Virgin Atlantic staff, long red ladies in uniform sitting on the floor facing the windows, watching the planes and texting on their cell phones.

-Malaysian Air crew in purple-blue floral print, quieting arriving en masse to board the plane.

-Swedes and Malaysians on a flight to Stockholm, East and West in tight proximity.

When I take off on a international flight, my world gets a lot bigger. The map in front of me zooms out and I marvel at how far away the places seem at 40,000 feet. Suddenly it is all very large, complicated, unknown, and exciting.

The crew approaches with a special meal, playing marco polo in the back of the plane. When they find its recipient, the ultra-Orthodox Jew accepts and explains Kashrut to the Malay Muslim stewardess. Israel comes up, as does racism in Malaysia. I wait for the sparks, which never occur. I jealously observe a wonderful point of rare cultural contact and diplomatic decoding of the other. Suddenly, the world is smaller, manageable, and concrete again. Split hooves, chewing cud, and we’re off to Europe. I take Tylenol PM and wait for the meal to arrive.