one day at Oxford, England

The train ride from Scotland to Oxford was pretty long; I was on the train most of December 7th. But this brings up an important element to all these journeys -- the books I´ve been reading during all these plane and train rides. My godparents suggested several books for me to read which I ordered from Amazon while I was still in Wuerzburg. I brought along one great book Truman, by David Mccullough, which one the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. It´s a really wonderful book; in my opinion, Truman is one of the most interesting, significant, and human presidents in American history. That book really affected me, how I feel about leadership, about people in general, and how to lead a full life. Truman accomplished an awful lot in his life, and he didn't even have a college education.

I´ve also been reading books in the Sharpe series by Bernard Cornwell. This series, suggested to me by the infamous Pat Barry, are about a gruff British infantryman in the Napoleonic wars; sort of like the Patrick O'Brian series, except on land. I also ended up reading a rather silly book called Prep by Curtis Sittenfield, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, Saturday by Ian McEwan, the very interesting Crisis of Islam by Bernard Lewis, and a little bit of Barry Gordon´s Intelligent Memory. As you can see, inbetween visiting all these places, I had a lot of free time to read.

But anyway, that evening I arrived in Oxford to Jamie Butler, who had fallen asleep waiting for me in a plastic chair at the train station and had to be awakened. Soon he was showing me around; we slipped into a few of the colleges that were closing just as we arrived. There are 39 different colleges at Oxford, all with their own traditions and history. Jamie is at St. Catherine's, which is one of the newer ones. I think some of the colleges he showed me that night were Christ Church College and New College. Jamie is at St. Catherine's College -- you can see their coat of arms to the right.

Afterwards we went to a great bar packed with students, and then we met some of Jamie´s American friends for dinner in the dining hall of St. Catherine's. Usually, all the students file in after the dons and then can't start eating until the dons have or something like that, but by that night, unfortunately, Oxford had already finished classes and exams, and most people had left, other than the teems of prospective students who chatted nervously. It was an interesting experience -- we were served a three course meal by waiters -- and then we went out to a club.

At the club we were with two of Jamie's friends from the lacrosse team, both Americans, one at Gettysburg College and one at Boston University. You can see them in the picture with Jamie on the right side. A pretty wild group. We stayed out late, but Jamie and I woke up at 5:00am -- he was flying back home for Christmas break, and I was taking a bus to a London airport for the next adventure. It was a great bus ride, early in the morning, Oxford students around me talking and reading books. Finally, I got to the airport, boarded my plane, and flew to Florence, Italy.