Leaving Oxford

“Tea of Coffee?”, flight attendant asked me during my flight from Heathrow to New York. “Coffee”, I said and smiled. How could such a simple question be so meaningful? I was leaving behind the English culture with all its traditions, idiosyncrasies and love for tea. Plus, I prefer coffee anyway. Black. No Sugar. It’s my own version from James Bond’s “shaken not stirred”. While I did enjoy a vodka-martini during the farewell dinner, the English beverages, as well as their culture, werejust not my own. I did speak the language. But no matter how long I stayed in England, I could not ever become English. That’s why, ultimately, it felt so great to come back to the States. It’s where I belong. It’s where home is.

Speaking of home, I do wish I had more time to be in New York. I flew in at night, and had to leave the following afternoon. For once, I slept in my own bed and then it was time to move on to new adventures. When my parents asked me about Oxford, I think I gave them too harsh of a description. It’s so easy to focus on what’s different, what’s unorthodox, or just makes no sense. For 10 weeks, I tried to fit in at the most prestigious and among the most selective places on Earth. While my credentials told a respectable story of an American student studying abroad for one term, the task of trying to fit in is a difficult one. It’s easy to focus on the challenges and forget the rest. Th etruth is, I had a great time. It was not an easy decision to go, but without a doubt, it turned out to be the right one.

The last week at Oxford was terrific. As I mentioned I finished the work on Thursday night and I was flying to Monday, which left me with a bit of free time for my own enjoyment. I took a lot of pictures on Friday. They were filing a movie, right next to the Radcliffe Camera. It’s called The Golden Compass. The preview is already available online. I’m definitely going to see it when it comes out, just to watch a a few dozen extras run by Brasenose college in one of the shots. Didn’t see Nicole Kidman. On the bright side, I did talk to a few extras. They were all bratty kids convinced they would become big movie stars someday. “I’ve already been in six movies, with so and so”, they told me. I wasn’t so sure about their future fame, but I was convinced they would grow up to be complete assholes.

Friday night, we went out to Pink Giraffe, a Chinese all you can eat restaurant. This marked the beginning of overindulgence. The previous day, I had three cups of coffee while finishing up the paper. Then I ate way too much at the buffet. This was followed by too much alcohol back at the Stanford house. Afterwards, I smoked a $20 Cuban cigar. All of a sudden, all of those things hit me at the same time. It was pleasant, but undoubtedly unhealthy.

The next day I was going to see Phantom of the Opera at Her Majesty’s theatre in London. But I slept through my alarm. When I got up, I literally RAN down high street, barely catching the tube. Everything turned out to be great. I really enjoyed the performance. Then went to the infamous Regent Park. Throughout the day, there were formations of airplanes flying in the sky. I saw one circia WWII bomber. Still not sure what was going on. The way back to Oxford was rough, all the tubes were coming in full. I got about around 3 in the morning, just in time to say goodbye to a few people with early flights.

Sunday was more exploring of Oxford. Finally went up University Church. It was a gorgeous day, you could see for miles. Then checked the the Natural history museum. At night, said goodbye to my cousin. Packing was a pain, I waited until late night to start and did not finish until 5am. Then with a few hours of sleep, I got up, dropped off books at the public library, had my last meal at the Magdalen salad bar. It started pouring very heavily as I waited for the bus to the airport. 10 weeks ago, I came into this place, not knowing what to expect. I don’t usually become sentimental, but over the term, I got attached to the place, the architecture and the people. I came in to nothing, and yet at the end, I was leaving a lot behind.

Why I now hate flying with a passion.

Another day, another flight, another horrible, never-ending frustration.  For the past two days everything could go wrong with air travel, did.

Flight from Heathrow to JFK: initial delay because Heathrow did not have enough flight attendants available, then two passengers were kicked off the plane because they were deemed too drunk to fly, then another hour delay because British Airways had go through all the loaded luggage to return the bags of the drunk guys. Random search. Lost another hour because weather conditions made us take a longer route. At JFK: huge line at passport controls, then the luggage carousel jams, another hour there, then huge line at customs.

Flight from JFK to San Diego: Initial delay because the plane arrived late. This we had to wait for half an hour because international flights got priority for the runways. Eventually we started to taxi and were 20^th in line for takeoff. The planes get out of JFK roughly every minute, so I thought we’d be in air in no time. Not quite.  While we were waiting, the weather conditions due West got so bad that air control stopped letting out planes headed in that direction. It took another hour for the pilot to file a new flight plan. Eventually we headed out south, going by Atlanta and then turning west on our way to San Diego. It’d be faster to drive already.

I was going to write about the emotional departure from Oxford. And I’ll do that in a next few days. I had to capture my frustrations while I had them in me. Right now I’m writing from a BALLER apartment in San Diego. It’s a one bedroom place, and I have a roommate but the place is huge even for both of us. I stepped out on the balcony, size of my room at home and I saw a swimming pool and a gym. It’s going to be a good summer. I’ll enjoy staying in the same city for a while. Work starts tomorrow.

Last Post in England part II

I don’t work well under pressure. I don’t work well without the pressure either. This might just imply that I don’t work well at all.
Last Monday, I did a 15-minute ethnography presentation not having slept much the previous night. Then I thought I would rest
for a few hours and write the 10-12 page research paper on the same topic as the presentation. The paper was due Friday but I wanted to get it out of the way early to enjoy my last few days in Oxford.

I ended up going to Ben’s cookies (check that off the Oxford to do list) took a short nap, and went to dinner at Corpus. I’ve been out of money on my dining card for a long time, but some people preferred to cook this term, so I was fortunate to take advantage of that. You can also buy wine with your meal points. The weather was good, we sat outside and enjoyed ourselves. No work done that night.

Then Tuesday night was farewell dinner, mixed feelings on that. The restaurant was pretty good and I did get a vodka-martini (check off the to do list), but it lacked in some respects as well. Went out to a pub that night. No work done.

All of a sudden Wednesday I realized I still hadn’t started the work. I found 12 relevant articles on JSTOR (we were supposed to have exactly that many sources) and proceeded to make comments on them in a word file. Little did I know that Wednesday night would bring. Not only was it not productive, it was literally counter-productive. There was a party happening downstairs, people were finishing up. The amount of alcohol was truly truly impressive. Never seen so much outside a liquor store. Went to sleep at 5am. No work done. Overnight, my computer spontaneously restarted and I lost all my articles.

Thursday was the day. I woke up around 10 in the morning, not feeling too great after the aforementioned excesses. Went out, got myself a cup of coffee and a coke. Except for a quick lunch, I didn’t get up from the seat in front of my computer until 11pm when everything was written. Decided to go downstairs to check on how other people were doing. Then some folks started to come back from partying, and the drinking resumed. Went to sleep at 5am. Paper is finished.

To be continued.

Last Post in England part I

LC, who works at GA where I’ll be this summer: “Will you need a bike while you are here?”
MR “Do most people get a bike?”
LC: “Yes, but only if they reply that they want one, do you want one?”
MR: “Sure.”

Just a week from now, I’ll be starting my work at General Atomics in San Diego. What a change that will be from Oxford. I don’t really get all sentimental, but I’m already starting to miss this place. And I’m still here.

Had my last tutorial today, that’s all done. Now the only thing that separates me from being a senior is a 10 page research paper for ethnography. I just need to sit down and write it. Soon. Then Thursday is for the Bridge, Friday for the Pink Giraffe deal and Cubans, Saturday is Phantom of the Opera, Sunday is for walking around Oxford.

To be continued.

Week Se7en

I approach a man sitting all by himself in a trendy coffee shop, cursing myself for having to conduct interviews for the ethnography class.

MR: “Excuse me, I’m a student here…and I’m conducting interviews about football violence”
Man: “You see, I study Egyptian hieroglyphics, so hieroglyphics – yes!, football – no!”
MR (slowly backing away): “Thanks…good luck with that”.

That’s the life of an amateur ethnographer. All of a sudden I’m completely overwhelmed with work. I realized from that start that all the classes here are very back-loaded. I guess it’s like my normal week at Stanford: every hour of every night is planned out. And if I don’t finish something when I have to, sleep just goes out the door. I’m also back in my “normal” 4am-11am sleep schedule. Oh well, I’ve done this all before. Easy.

We went to Windsor Castle on Friday. As the audio guide correctly summarized it “it looks exactly how you would expect a castle to look like”. The weather was nice, and beyond the castle, Windsor turned out to be a pretty hip touristy town. Tried Cornish pasties for the first time. Visited the state rooms in the castle. Not much else to report. Picture here:

On Sunday I completely my last photography assignment for the OxStu – the cricket semifinals. I still haven’t figured out what was happening, oh well I guess it’s just not meant to be. I do need to make a list of things to do here before I leave. Taking pictures should certainly on the list: Magdalen College with its tower, and its own Deer Park, as well as pictures of Oxford at night. This ride is going to be over in 12 days. And in 13 days, I’ll already be in San Diego starting my job. I should have made more time to travel around Europe, somehow. I feel like I’ve explored England pretty well, although trips to Dublin Edinburgh, York and Brighton are missing. Oh well, can’t do everything. I can take the pleasure in knowing someday I’m going to need to come back.

There are so novel ideas I have encountered in the past seven weeks, it’s probably going to take me the entire summer to analyze the experiences. One thing I can tell right now (and I never thought I’d say this), I miss Green Library. The search system, OLIS (the equivalent of Socrates) is terrible. You can’t sort results by anything. All libraries have short hours when they’re open and you can’t borrow books from most of them! I’ve been writing a paper in Pissarro for my Oxford as the City of Work of Art class, so I had to go to the library and stay there for hours and hours reading the appropriate books and making copies of the necessary pages. And they didn’t want to let me in because they were confused by my visiting student card.

After all, it’s all about how you organize information. The knowledge base is so vast. I believe the organization of currently information is as important as research and acquisition of new knowledge. What use is publishing a paper or a book if it’s going to be difficult for others to access? Until very recently, the organization methods have used classifications. Books were organized by subject, clothes by size, e-mail by folders. And while effective, the method has had a difficulty adjusting to the overabundance of available knowledge. When your subjects or folders become too bast, you need to create new subfolders with further subcategories. The process continues until you’re faced with an overwhelming hierarchical system, at which point it becomes impossible to actually find what you’re looking for.

This is where the idea of search comes in. Google provides an amazing example of it with gmail. The e-mails are all stored in a giant box, and to retrieve a particular message you search for it. Yes, there are labels and filters, but all of those apply the same search-algorithm to the meta-data. this organizational method is become increasingly trendy: who needs folders when your every file is carefully tagged with searchable information. I, however, would like to provide a word of caution against this emerging method: to me there’s on serious disadvantage. With folders, you can quickly glance over the list to see what categories are available to choose from. With search, there’s no such option. In a sense, you have to know what you want to read before you can read it. You’ll never read an old e-mail you forgot about because there is no way for you to ever access it. You’ll never accidentally come across a useful article because by searching for something specific, you’re limiting yourself to what you already know exists.