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

It's been another not-too-exciting week, but I'm still having fun!

Last Friday we went to London to see the play "The Woman in Black." It was actually fairly frightening. It's just two (well, three, sort of...) actors. One is the old man and one is the actor, and they are together reenacting an experience the old man had. The actor plays the old man and the old man plays all the other characters he encountered during the thing. There is also a woman who is a ghost and kills people. She did not get to come out and bow, therefore she is really a ghost and because I saw her she will kill my firstborn child. Scary. http://www.thewomaninblack.com/

I spent Saturday being very very very lazy, and Sunday writing my paper in the most productive day I've had in a while, maybe in my life. I rolled out of bed at 10, had a draft (minus intro and conclusion) at noon, and had a final, revised, edited paper sent to my tutor by 6.30 pm. It was pretty amazing.

Monday I met with my tutor as always. I'm getting better at having discussions and asking questions to get more out of my tutorial. I got (aka asked for) my topic this week: conversion of western women to Islam. I couldn't find any good sources ANYWHERE in Oxford. There was an anthology I had found at Stanford before that I don't think exists in Oxfordshire County. And I can only get fragments on Google books. I was having a very hard time, so I tried to find some articles on JStor with the Stanford proxy that is letting me access it from Oxford, but there wasn't much there, either. I was very frustrated. THEN I remembered that Stanford has access to a lot of books as eBooks, and BAM. I found the entire book in eBrary, which I can access again with a Stanford proxy that pretends I'm on the Stanford network. AND this means I can do work in my room instead of sitting in the library. From now on, I'm first checking if the books I need are on eBrary before I schlep my way to the library. This discovery may have been the highlight of my week.

Other than that, I went to my choirs and bellydancing this week and had fun. I had my midterm for my soccer class and that was NOT fun - there was a lot of stuff we didn't talk about that he just expected us to know about soccer. I'm not too worried, though, because everyone thought it was pretty hard so it will probably be curved. And I decided I'm writing my essay for that class on soccer as an English religion, which I'm interested in and will probably therefore write a good essay about. The midterm is only 15%, so I'll be fine.

Today and tomorrow my friend Ashley and I are locking down plans for after term ends. I think we're going to go to Portugal for 4 days, and then I'm going to head to the Netherlands to see my cousins and aunt, and my friend Natalie. And then I'll be back to London to see my friend Claire, who I haven't seen in years. I'm not sure what we're going to do, but it will be nice to catch up.

Sunday is Halloween, and we all came up with costumes long before we were sure that Halloween was a big deal here. I'm going to be Cleopatra, Alex is a unicorn, Muthu is Sherlock Holmes, and Andrew is Ziggy Stardust, an alterego of David Bowie's from Mars. And we found a part ("bop") to go, so now we won't just be wandering the streets of Oxford in full costume.

I think that's about it from this week. More updates after Halloween :)

Stanford Daily column

I wrote the inaugural column for the Stanford Daily's new column, "Foreign Correspondence" - read it here!

http://www.stanforddaily.com/2010/10/28/foreign-correspondence-an-odd-jump-across-the-pond/

It's been not much of a week. I've spent most of my time doing reading for this week's essay. I've read a complete book, most of another, and half of a third...they're all in different places, so I have to go to different reading rooms and sit down and take extensive notes, because I won't be able to reference the books this weekend while I write. It's so frustrating!

I went to student choir again, that was fun, and I had bellydancing, and then last night was the first night of the fun choir. We sang the Glee version of "Don't Stop Believing" and an arrangement of "Halleluja" that I had done in high school. There were a lot more people there than I expected, including two girls from the House, and I had a ton of fun. I'm excited to go back next week and do more!

That's really all that's happened this week. Friday we're going to London to see "The Woman in Black," which is apparently very scary! And then this weekend I'll just hang around and write my essay. We might go to an Indian buffet on Sunday and make a Mexican meal one night, too. Next week I start having soccer class again...hopefully I won't forget to go for this week.

That's all...
Aisha

Bath!

This weekend, five friends and I went to the town of Bath, famous for the ancient Roman baths for which it is named. We took a bus from Oxford on Saturday morning, which took about 2 hours, and we left Sunday evening. We stayed in a hostel that was above a restaurant where we got a discount.

Bath is a beautiful, beautiful town, though there is not a ton of stuff to do. We saw the Bath Abbey, which is really pretty, and the Roman baths, which are very impressive. You can no longer bathe in them, but at the end you can sample a glass of the spring water; it is warm and very metallic tasting. Apparently it has healing properties, but I wouldn't drink it all the time.

We went twice to Sally Lunn's, an old tea house with "world famous buns." The buns were fine, but the toppings were delicious - lemon curd, cinnamon butter...yum. The house blend tea was also yummy.

We spent a lot of time just walking around Bath, exploring and looking at random things. We had dinner in the restaurant under our hostel, then went out again for a little while.

In the morning, we grabbed breakfast, then walked over to the Royal Crescent and the Circus, two areas with giant green spaces in the middle and housed curved around them. We found a park with a small aviary and a playground and ice cream truck. We all got Flake 99s, which Tara had told me to get: a soft-serve vanilla cone with a flake candy bar stuck in it. It was delicious!

Afterwards we really just killed time walking around Bath and going to Sally Lunn's for the second time. When we left, there were problems with the bus, so we were a little late, but it wasn't that bad.

I met with my tutor for the second time, and he seemed happy again, though he's trying to figure out how to grade that's on the Stanford scale.

Lastly, I got into the singing group I auditioned for! I'm very excited to start rehearsal this week :)

My soccer class is cancelled this week since the professor, the head of the Stanford Bing Overseas Studies Program as of this month, has to go back to Stanford for meetings. That means I only have my extra-curriculars this week, which is great, because it's just in time for the tutorial paper I'm most interested in: veiling issues in the West. Tomorrow I dive into the library and begin!

Not all that much has happened since the York return. I've been to class, started a new tutorial essay.

The big events of the past week are the extra-curriculars I'm doing. Monday night is the Oxford University Student Chorus, a non-auditioned classical choir. The first rehearsal was GIANT, probably over 100, but I'm sure it'll go down when people think the music is too hard and free drinks aren't offered after rehearsal. We're performing Bach's Christmas Oratorio in the last week of term. It's a little hard, but super fun - I like giant choral classical pieces, and we'll be doing it with full orchestra!

Tuesday nights is belly dancing through a non-university group, the Oxford Middle Eastern Dance Society. It's 40 pound for 10 classes, which is still a great deal even if I have to miss one or two classes. We worked on shimmies for the whole hour, but it was a lot of fun. And I managed to convince my friend Andrea to come with me, so I wasn't alone like I was at the student chorus.

My last activity is still up in the air: I auditioned today for the Oxford Singers, Oxford's only non-classical and non-a capella group. The audition seemed to go well- they liked my song, were impressed by my range, and seemed bummed that I was only around for one term. Hopefully I'll find out about that soon. That one meets on Wednesday nights.

So, that's my term, plus the soccer class and my tutorial. It's shaping up to be a nice schedule!

York

So, this weekend we went to York for our Bing trip.

We stopped on the way there at Hardwick Hall, an old house that was important in some way or another. The coolest part was the initials of the woman who's house it was on top of every tower.

Then we drove to York and went to the York Minster, which was a pretty sweet cathedral. Our tour guide was this adorable old man who made cute comments and said really random things. We got to hear about all the times the Minster had been on fire and other disasters. Then we toured the underground part, where they talked about the history of the Minster since Roman times, when it was a Roman basilica (a basilica was a Roman place of law).

Then a couple of us walked around York for a while, just exploring. My friend Alex had been on a dig there two summers ago, so she knew different places around. We got really good Cornish pasties, walked by the river, and went to a pub that had a cute little poodle in it. Then we went to our hotel, where we had a three course buffet with carved meats and stuff. It was pretty cool. I actually roomed with my freshman year suite-mate, Melissa, because we both have singles in the Stanford House.

The next day we went to Castle Howard, this pretty impressive huge house that the Howard family still lives in. The recent (2008?) movie of Brideshead Revisited was partially filmed there. We walked around the giant grounds, where there were peacocks roaming free. We saw the polar bear walk (I'm not sure why it was called that), the Temple of the Four Winds, and the ornamental vegetable garden. We also toured the inside of the house.

The final place we went was the Rievaulx Abbey, which is this GIANT ruined abbey that was destroyed by Henry VIII. It was really cool to walk around it and see all the different parts and figure out what they used to be. After that, we came back to Oxford.

On Sunday, I wrote my tutorial paper, and today I met with my tutor to discuss it. The paper was on feminism and feminist theory in the Middle East and how it translated from Western feminism. He had given me one essay to read and suggested some more, so I read two articles in depth and wrote about them. Even though I was super freaked out and wasn't sure I really knew what I was doing, he seemed to think I did a good job. Next week, my paper is on Veiling: normative (Islamic) practices and other's views on it. Again, he didn't really give me a big syllabus, but instead told me to go browse the Islamic Centre's library and find some books that interest me. Even though that's intimidating because I don't necessarily have the knowledge to find books, I guess any books in the Centre would be good, and I'm really getting a change to read what I want to read. So I think I'll head to that library tomorrow, look at those books, and maybe request them at the bigger library for the rest of the week, where I have more space to spread out and read. It's so frustrating to not be able to check out books!

Well, that's the update up til now. We're planning some trip for this weekend, maybe up to Edinburgh, so I'm excited about that!

York pictures:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=288665&id=725549275&l=9e67c81453