La Ville-Lumière

After finishing up with the trying academic labors of the last two weeks of term here in Oxford, I will be off to visit Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, and then Paris, la Ville-Lumière, the City of Lights.

I've been to Paris before. The summer before college I went on a trip led by my French teacher that wound its ways through Europe and allowed us to spend a few days, including le 14 juillet (the French independence day), in Paris, the most brilliant city I've ever known.

But I'm returning because, ever since I left it behind in Europe and went to live in cold, blustery, dark New England to learn about stuffy, uninteresting things, I've longed to go back. I imagine--I know--that I am not alone in feeling that way. It's a sort of neverending village, filled with street vendors, singers, painters, booksellers, and, well, annoying tourists too. But this time I'm going to try to resist joining the ranks of the fannypack-wearing, sunscreen-nosed American visitors. I'm going to take in the sights not as the main event of the trip but rather as a consequence of wandering and tasting Paris for what it is--which is far more than a dizzying hike up the Eiffel or a stroll through the Louvre in search of the (utterly disappointing) Mona Lisa.

Here's where I'll be staying for my four nights: St Christopher's Paris. It's been voted the best hostel in all of France, which hopefully means it will be better than the average stay in a hostel...

A Picture Worth a Thousand Years

All Souls, Oxford

What's Missed, What Will Be Missed

What's missed:

• Free refills
• In-N-Out
• Netflix
• Non-military time
• Eating and drinking in the library (at Amherst, anyway)
• $5 movie theater tickets
• Talking in dollars, bucks, and cents, not in pounds, quid, and pence
• Wal-Mart
• Good pizza
• Ceiling fans
• Crossing streets safely
• Hearing "you're welcome," not "cheers" 
• Fanta

What will be missed:

• The cheapest flights I'll ever know
• Trains
• Old men with pipes and old women with dainty hats
• Pubs instead of seedy bars
• Gourmet Burger Kitchen
• Coke with real sugar, not high-fructose corn syrup
• The Alternative Tuck Shop
• Living in a medieval city
• Clean linens each week
• Being an hour from London
• Never fearing that the library won't have the book I'm looking for

'Far hence, amid an isle of wondrous beauty'

This weekend I left Oxford and flew to Dublin, where I rendezvoused with two Amherstians-in-exile. It was quite the adventure.

I have to say, contrary to Whitman (who must have been in America when he wrote the line in the title), Ireland is not far at all: the flight takes about an hour from London, in fact. But maybe he meant it in another sense, that Ireland is a place far from everywhere else, an island not just as a geographical fact but as an idea, as a feeling. That it is, though I'm not sure my three days in Dublin suffice to certify me as an expert, or a poet for that matter.

So this is how the trip went:

The first day we enjoyed a good breakfast before setting out for the nearby coastal village of Howth. There we walked around the harbor shops (which smelled something like Fisherman's Wharf) and then to the outermost reaches of land where we had good views of the village cliffs and of Ireland's Eye, an island where the famed Book of Kells, now on display at Trinity College (Dublin, not Oxford) was stored by monks more than a thousand years ago. We also wandered up the hill into the heart of the village and sat a spell in Howth's parish church and listened to the children's choir practice.

After the sun went down, we dined at a restaurant called Deep, where the seafood-lover in our group was appeased and the remaining two of us managed to find huge gourmet burgers. When we returned to the city later that night, walking through some drizzle, we found a downtown pub, and, sipping a nice, sugary Coke, listened to the entire pub sing and clap to various loudly-played '90s pop songs. Pop and pop. When we left the rain had turned to humongous globs of snow.

The second day, after the snow had come and then completely gone, we explored Dublin more thoroughly. We saw the River Liffey that juts through the city and is crossed by a series of beautiful bridges. For lunch we went to the Brazen Head, the oldest pub in Dublin (it's about a thousand years old), and enjoyed some delectable pub food (which tends to be an oxymoron here in England but definitely is not in Ireland) and then some live Irish music by a traditional acoustic band, which included a woman playing the bodhrán (an Irish frame drum) and a man who played a mean set of spoons.

Before going to the small but passionate Immanuel Church Dublin, where we enjoyed some wonderful worship and one of the best Old Testament sermons I've ever heard, we heard evensong at Christ Church Cathedral, the Church of Ireland cathedral in the city. If you've never been to an evensong in a cathedral, it is well worth the hour. The incredibly beautiful music is surely just a small taste of what we'll be able to enjoy and take part in for eternity in Heaven. Anyway, for dinner we ate at an American restaurant, where I had some really good chili, and then called it a night.

The third day I ventured into the city by myself before catching my flight back into London. I decided to spend my few hours seeing Dublin on foot and leisurely. I strolled through a few open markets and saw the first maternity hospital ever built. It was a relaxing time.

To see my few photos of the trip, click here.

Les Voyages

It's strange to think that the first of my two terms here in Oxford is already more than halfway over. But it means that there are some fun travels coming up, and I thought I'd share them.

This weekend I'm off to Dublin (flights are incredibly inexpensive!). I've only got a few days there, so I'll have to return some other time to see the north, where the Hendren side of the family finds its ancestral county (in Armagh).

Then, after 8th Week, the last week of term, I'm taking a train up through England and into the wily country of Scotland. I'll see Edinburgh and maybe some of the Highlands. And next it's off to Paris for four days--Paris!--before taking an 18-hour flight back to the U.S. for a month of vacation.

Who knows what next term holds (besides a brilliant explosion of spring color in Oxford, I'm promised). But I do know what the next few weeks and months will be, and the prognosis looks very, very good.

Weekend Hijinks

Here's a few photos of the weekend. Two good friends came in to Oxford, one from Dublin and the other from Edinburgh, and we met up with three others already in Oxford. It was an absolute blast.

Being touristy in St John's College. 

From left to right: Alice '08 (studying English in Harris Manchester, Oxford) , Megan '11 (studying politics this semester up in the U. of Edinburgh), Jen '11 (studying politics and history this semester in Mansfield College, Oxford), Jes-c '11 (studying all sorts of things this semester in University College Dublin), and moi.

Eating our sandwiches from the Alternative Tuck Shop outside the Bodleian Library (which is my daily lunchtime routine.) Jerry '11 (studying economics and philosophy for the entire year in Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford) was our sixth member.

Taking afternoon tea in the posh Randolph Hotel, across from the Ashmolean Museum.

I was especially fond of the scones, clotted cream (a strange dairy product), and strawberry preserves. What you can't see was the slobbering.

An Oxford Lesson on the Two Hedonisms

. . . for the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.
(Romans 14:17, NKJV)

I'm no pioneer, and Oxford is no frontier. If anything, I'm comfortably situated in what is one of the great anti-frontiers of the Old World. At its foundations this place is a medieval city, with its cobbled roads taking the same winding paths between walled colleges as they did 800 years ago.

But it's easy to feel sometimes as though Broad Street, neatly trimmed as it is with its old bookshops and pubs and the edifices of the great Bodleian Library, is a kind of Oregon Trail. You wander down its length and find a crossroads at Magdalen and Cornmarket and George. You're forced to make a decision, and all the while you're thinking, "Will I really be able to 'caulk the wagon and float' over that massive puddle I'm about to step into?"

OK, OK, I exaggerate. But it is true, though, that even in a place so grounded in history and so steeped in culture and learning as Oxford you can find yourself trying to reinvent the wheel or fashion a canteen out of cow intestines (which, conveniently, can probably be found in the Covered Market).

(I've gone too far, haven't I?)

Well, my point is, being away from home, and especially in another country entirely, necessitates growth. It inevitably means facing a certain kind of adversity and adapting to it (those are two very Latinate words, and I apologize; though in my defense, I'm not attempting to write poetry here).

As humans, we take varying stances on change. Sometimes we open our arms and embrace it, either by unfolding our once-stubborn arms or just keeping them wide open all the time. Or sometimes we keep our arms folded and forcefully shake our head at change, or maybe even shake a fist at it. Most of the time we do a combination of those things. But it's also human to face challenges by not facing them, by either denying that the challenges exist or self-medicating so that the feeling of change is felt only minimally.

Really, our world is full of promises of self-medication. Coffee, caffeine, alcohol, sedatives, junk food, bad music. We plug ourselves into an iPod, turn up music that is itself likely telling us to self-medicate by other methods, chug our Coke or coffee, eat our comfort food while plopped down in front of a TV that's piping profane and moronic things into our ears and flashing images of sex, consumption, and divisiveness into our eyes. When we're feeling blue, we reach for chocolate, or we turn on a movie. I don't mean to sound like some cultural critic, but I'm just saying that if you look around, and if you look at your own patterns, you see that we're all choosing over and over to sate our hunger and thirst with the products of the world.

This impulse is even stronger, I think, when you're away from home. We do things on vacation we would never do among friends and family. It's the old "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" line. Except that it's not just in Sin City (as if there isn't sin outside of Nevada!). Now, this isn't to say I'm having some wild time in Oxford, doing all sorts of things that I'm ashamed of. But something can be wrong even if it is mild and seemingly innocent.

It's wrong because our sustenance should come from the Spirit. As the verse way up there says, "the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit." That means setting down the Cadbury milk chocolate bar (not that I've ever had any...) and picking up the Bible. It means logging out of Facebook and logging in to prayer. It means, ultimately, realizing that nothing man-made will ever sustain the soul.

See, I've gone from sounding like some lefty critic to sounding preachy. I say it only because I've learned it, and at Oxford you haven't truly learned something until you've written it down.


(I'm about to start working through the writings of John Owen, a 17th-century Christian pastor who wrote extensively on temptation -- as soon as I get a chance to bring over the twenty-three volumes of The Works of John Owen from the library. In the meantime, I'm familiarizing myself with John Piper's so-called Christian hedonism, which you can read about here.)