travel!

I've made all my plane bookings for my post-Oxford travel, and I'm very excited!

Another girl from the program, Ashley, and I are headed to Portugal on December 10. We're going to spend 4 nights in Lisbon, with maybe a day trip to a small, cute town nearby. Then we both head back to London, Ashley to go home, me to catch a flight to Amsterdam. I tried getting a flight from Lisbon to Amsterdam, but it ended up being just as cheap and as easy to fly back into London - I know, it doesn't make much sense, but there you have it.

I'm staying in Utrecht, Netherlands until the 17th, seeing my friend Natalie and my cousin, who could potentially give birth while I'm there!

Then I fly back to London, spend a couple days with family friends, including their daughter, Claire, who is getting there on the 17th as well.

Then on Decembe 21 I fly home! I can't believe that's in 7 weeks...or that in 2 months I will have already started classes back at Stanford.

Oh, and I don't remember if I mentioned that I'm going to ROME from December 2-7...that's right, I'll turn 21 in Rome with my friends. No big deal. We rented an apartment which was cheaper than a hostel and now we get to cook for ourselves if we want, and save our money for giant Italian dinners. It will be good :)

ahmed's, soccer, and a novel

I forgot the best part of Halloween! After the pub, we went to Ahmed's, the kebab van near the House that we go to probably 5 times a week at night when we're hungry. The last time we had been, we had finally introduced ourselves to Ahmed and his friends/sons/nephews. This time, though, Alex and I spoke to him in Arabic! Alex was in Arabic with me freshman year, and spent this past summer in Jordan on a dig. It was really fun, I actually remembered Arabic, and he was very impressed, I think. He's from Morocco! So I will be attempting Arabic with Ahmed whenever I remember.

For my soccer class, we have to go to a Premiere League and a non Premiere game, so tonight we went to an Oxford United game, which is the local Oxford team, not the University. There were a lot of empty seats, so we sat one row from the bottom. It was a good game, though the other team won. Oxford kept taking the ball right up to the goal, then missing shots or fumbling the ball. It didn't help that their goalie was like 6 foot 7 or something ridiculous like that.

Finally, I've decided to write a novel!

I'm doing National Novel Writing Month - NaNoWriMo. http://www.nanowrimo.org/
It's a non-profit that organizes this every November. People can make an account and write a novel. The goal is 50,000 words between November 1 and 30. If you finish you get a certificate from them and the pride that you wrote a novel.

At the moment, I'm still not sure what my novel is about, but it's currently at 602 words. I'm not sure if I'll make it to 50,000 by the end of this month, but hopefully by then I'll have something that I want to continue writing and editing until it's actually something I'm proud of doing. We'll see how it goes!

Halloween!

Not much of an update, but I wanted to share my Halloween with everyone.


This is a picture of me and my Oxford family on Halloween:


We are dressed as: Cleopatra (me), Ziggy Stardust (Andrew), a unicorn (Alex), Cho Chang from Harry Potter (Andrea), and the rapper Kanye West (Muthu).

We ended up just hanging out and then going to a pub in costume. Other people were there in costume, too, so we didn't feel like crazy Americans.

Remember that you can always see my pictures here: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=285952&id=725549275&l=efc6a86b0d