England Day 1

So, I generally use this blog to convey funny anecdotes from my life, but I'm on vacation and usually try to journal what I do each day when I travel, and I thought, why not do it here?

 Our trip (as most do) started at the airport. My mother kindly dropped us off, which was a leap of faith since we were flying standby. After going through security, we still had 1.5 hours until the plane left. When the gate agent arrived at his desk, we went up to let him know we were standby, and Ben asked how far down we were on the list. "Pretty far" the gate agent told us. Ben and I freaked out a little at that point. Through the extreme generosity of friends, we had these cheap tickets, but had to fly standby. However, we found out an hour later that the gate agent was messing with us, and we were the second couple called to the desk! As an added bonus, we were able to sit in business class.

Business class was as wonderful as you've heard. We had an amazing British stewardess who kept refilling our glasses (beer for Ben, champaigne for me!), and would often say "cheers"when she served us, in the most endearing way. She recommended that, when we arrive, we should try to stay up until nightfall in order to avoid the worst of the jet lag we would encounter. We did our best to sleep through the night: I got about 5 hours while Ben got only 2 or so. We arrived a bit early and couldn't get Cole's number to work (Cole is our host in England), but eventually he walked through the doors and we headed home to Oxford.

We dropped off our things at his place, which is a house, but each room has an individual lock, and there are two shared kitchens and bathrooms. We changed, and then headed out on the town. This city is awesome because you can walk just about everywhere, and it's all so beautiful! And my dad will enjoy this: our room overlooks the field where Roger Bannister first ran the 4-minute mile.

The university is intermingled with the shops and things, so Cole pointed out all sorts of colleges with beautiful arches and spires, most of which I'll have to ask him the name of again. We walked by the famous Radcliff Camera library, then took a tour of Christ Church, which was so amazingly beautiful, and - bonus - was the location of Hogwarts in the Harry Potter films! So we went through and pointed out areas we thought we rememembered from the film. Most of it appeared smaller than it looked in the movies, but still surprisingly recognizable.

We stopped for some meat pies, then a delicious cookie (best in England, according to Cole, although my orange-chocolate-chip one was a little strange). We also got our cell phone working, and saw some other places...it's a bit of a blur. Silly Ben wore shorts though and no jacket, so we cut off our tour a bit early to go home and get warm. Shortly after calling family members on skype, Ben looked and sounded like he was about to drop dead, so we decided on a nap. We managed to wake ourselves up after about 90 min, through some miracle, and it actually revived us nicely so we could stay awake until it was actually night time. So, we headed out to a pub around the street (Oxford Blue), to watch the soccer game with England versus Germany. It was a pretty exciting game with lots of goals scored at the beginning. England appeared to have won 3-2, but apparently the score is an aggregate with another game so really they lost. Too bad, but still fun.

We ate cheese fries and bangers and mash, and Cole's friend Leah joined us. After the game, we played Taboo, a game offered by the bar. It was funny because we group of Americans (and one Romanian), had to skip many of the cards with "British-isms." It was boys versus girls: boys won, but fun for all.

Random note: one of the differences here that we've come accross, is that the faucet is always split between hot and cold heads, so you can't adjust the temperature - your left hand burns while your right hand freezes! So funny :)

Lots of fun plans in the next few days: stay tuned!