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.
Loisaida is a term derived from the Latino (and especially Puerto Rican) pronunciation of "Lower East Side", a neighborhood in Manhattan, New York City. Loisaida Avenue is now an alternate name for Avenue C in the Alphabet City neighborhood of New York City, whose population has largely been Hispanic (mainly Puerto Rican) since the late 1960s.
2 comments:
Of course they're interested in you. Your work is more interesting than their high brow theses.
sounds great--especially for someone
who as a little boy thought he was a knight, or wished he could have been
born in medieval times to become a
knight! Enjoy every moment and keep writing about it.
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