Easter Break in Ox

Between Hilary Week 9 and the start of Trinity term, I had a little under 3 weeks to hang around Oxford and write 2 more summatives.



I had to prepare all the ethics forms for my thesis and work on my summatives for my last two classes. I had decided I would try to complete the two 5000-word essays before I went on vacation since I would be coming back on a Friday and the essays were due the next Monday morning. By the end of this period (once my essays were planned out and all stats were figured out), I felt like I was in a writing marathon, writing over 1000 words a day. My essay for Digital Era Government and Politics was on the question of if the Internet has changed agenda-setting and the framing of politics. Though I had done some reading on the subject for the week we studied this in class, I was pretty much starting from scratch. My essay for Digital Social Research was a continuation of the formative essay I handed in during Week 7. I still had to write a longer literature review, adjust my code in order to have my data print in a nice spreadsheet, and analyze all the data. In short, this study looked at the most popular YouTube videos in a bunch of countries and determined how often people watch videos in their own language or in English, how often they watch Western media, and how these stats differ between countries with advanced or developing economies.

England had a heat wave (temps in the 60s) for about a week, so I spent a lot of time studying outside. The first picture was taken in the gardens of Balliol College at the tables outside the college buttery.

We brought in the first day of spring by taking out ice cream from G&D's, Oxford's famous ice cream chain that sells real food as well. It happens to be the only shop I know of here that sells bagels.

Oxford was host to some sort of dance festival early over the break, so I went to a hip hop class that was being offered. I also attended a free outdoor aerial dance show held on the Oxford Castle grounds - the Danse des Cariatides by Compagnie Retrouamont.  The dancers all wore white and danced on walls and on a cable hung between two buildings. The music had a Spanish/Middle Eastern feel. In one dance, dancers moved in front of lights on the ground to make images on the wall, while another dancer moved across the wall.

In another dance, dancers flew across the wall and videos of the dancers doing this earlier were shown at the same time.

In the last dance, the dancers were attached to wires hanging above the crowd.

The older sister of one of my friends came to town over the break, so the usual Friday night dinner crew went to meet her and have dinner at our usual restaurant. She noted the high level of nerd-dom at the table lol. We did this again the next week when one of the dinner crew members had his mom visiting Oxford.

There was a chocolate festival on Broad Street one weekend, and you were able to smell chocolate as you approached the area. There were so many options with items like truffles, fudge, fancy chocolate bars, Easter chocolates, fudge, cupcakes, and a variety of other baked goods. One stand was promoting "slow chocolate." They gave out two small pieces of the same fancy dark chocolate. One chocolate you had to sniff before eating, then let it basically melt in your mouth. We were told to eat the other piece in about 7 seconds. You really could taste a different flavor when eating it slowly, and it was less bitter that way.

That same weekend, Gary, one of my friends from the St. Cross main site, held a going away party in the college bar since he was going home to Hong Kong the next day. Gary could always be found in the college library or common room. He was on an intense certificate program for people who want to be diplomats, and the program ended in March.

I went punting the next day with some girls from the college. St. Cross has rights to one boat at the Cherwell Boathouse, and college members can book the punt for up to 4 hours. You then get a pass from the college to bring to the boathouse in order to take a boat out for free. Since our college staff don't work on weekends, you have to plan in advance to book a punt for the weekend. We booked a punt for late morning-early afternoon so we could have a lunch picnic. Rhiannon from Wales had a real picnic hamper, and we parked our punt on the banks of the river in the University Parks to have our picnic.

Nikki, my Chinese classmate, invited a group of us to her apartment one night to learn how to make Chinese food. Our menu for the night consisted of prawn crackers; red bean spring rolls; beef, carrot, potato, and rice noodle spring rolls; chinese leaf, mushroom, and black mushroom egg dumplings; beef, dried mushroom, and dried vegetable dumplings; and sesame rice balls for dessert. It took hours to make all of this stuff, and we didn't even make the rolls and dumplings wrappings from scratch.

Making prawn/shrimp crackers was really cool. Before they are fried, they look like pieces of opaque pink pieces of plastic. They puff up right away when in the oil and sometimes curl up. You move and flip them around with chopsticks to make sure all parts of the cracker puff up. Rolling the spring rolls was really easy once I got the hang of it, and the red bean paste rolls were delicious. Making dumplings was a much harder task, as you had to try to make them stand up on their own and make sure the sides were fully sealed so nothing would come out when boiled. We had a ton of extras at the end, so I took some uncooked spring rolls and dumplings home to fry and boil myself for meals.

A few days before I left for vacation, David, one of my friends from Pep Band who is studying in Madrid, came to London with 2 other Hoyas during his break. We went to the British Museum and Harrods. We spent a lot of time in the pet section, which had ridiculous outfits and snacks for your pet, and they even had a doggie treadmill with a TV showing dogs. Apparently there is little ethnic food in Madrid, so David was really intent on getting some good food in London. We found a great little Lebanese restaurant, Al Arez, across the street from Harrods with cheap and tasty shawarma and baba ghanouj. Instead of giving chocolates or mints with the check, this place gave small pieces of baklava! We went to St. Paul's after our late lunch, but it had just closed to tourists, so we walked across Millenium Bridge and over to the Tower Bridge.

The boys then wanted to find a pub, so we went over to Leicester Square. I made David try cider and black (cider mixed with blackcurrant cordial), and he loved it. After the boys attempted to find discounted theater tickets (unsuccessfully, since everyone was off and visiting for Easter week), we got dinner in Chinatown. We walked to Piccadilly after dinner so I could send them towards Westminster so they could see the Parliament building at night, and I headed back home to work on my essays.

The weekend before Trinity started, I went to check out the folk festival crafts fair at the Oxford Castle. I had assumed it would have been a British folk festival, but the performance when I was there seemed to come from Latin/South America with the colored and flowery costumes.