Introducing Home Away from Home

Here at St Catz, I live in a small suite with my roommate Yae Na who is a sociology major from Harvard. She's hard at work at her desk here :)

Behind that curtain is our bedroom:


You can see that Yae Na is showing me up in the decoration department, except for this calendar I bought on Tuesday at Blackwells with one Charlotte Martin who I LOVE. Every month has a picture of a precious piglet in some kind of artsy black and white photo wearing sunglasses or something. Isn't it adorable?


Yae Na and I also have our own bathroom with the tiniest sink I may have ever seen. Anyway, I live in 5.27 which stands for Stair 5, room 27 which is how you express where you live or where you work. That is, even though the building looks the same on the outside and all the stairs are connected, you have to go outside to get from one to the other and some are actually secretly offices and not dorm rooms at all and you would never know from the outside!

When I go outside, I find myself in the snowy quad on the other side of which, someone has made a snow man:


At Jesus College, Charlie showed me the toppled snow phallus on her quad which was funny. She thinks staff knocked it over because all the parents are dropping their kids off this week for the beginning of term.

This week is called week 0 so there aren't classes but returning students have "collections" which are a kind of exam that's taken at the beginning of term supposedly after revising over break. (I'm going to start posting an Oxford term of the day because there are so many different words for things. This post has a few in it...stay tuned!) So because there are no classes, we visiting students have time to settle in and see the town. Here are some pictures of Oxford town centre:




Covered market:

After walking around by myself, I met up with Charlie who helped me pick out a European cell phone and the pig calendar or as the English would say, a swine calendar. Here she is in Blackwell's enjoying an Earl Grey tea while we caught up about our lives:

Here we are together, reunited at long last:


Yesterday I went to town with Erin and bought groceries. She bought rainboots too and I wanted to take a picture but it was snowing and we were cold so I didn't. I'm sure she will feature in another post eventually.

When I got back I unloaded my tea and milk and sugar and my new mugs and attempted to make a nice hot cup of English tea. There is a kitchen on my floor and all kitchens come with a kettle and a toaster. Nice! The English love their tea and toast. Unfortunately, our kettle is broken or I was using it wrong so I had to resort to inferior microwave tea which proved quite complicated. Do you see how to use this microwave? I just pushed buttons until it would start:


Microwaves are one of the many things I didn't expect would be that different!

Here I am enjoying my tea anyway:

Oxford terminology recap:
collections: exams
stair: building is the equivalent except it's not quite accurate because the stairs are connected to each other, you just can't get from one to the other without going outside like you could in a hall.

Quiz yourself:
If I live in 15.2B, where do I live?

That's all for now!

Cheers!