Sunday was a catch-up-on-sleep day and a finish-up day, seeing everything that I hadn’t gotten to see and do in Oxford before leaving. The students will arrive tomorrow, and I will be busy just trying to keep them awake until a decent time at night. I doubt they will sleep much (or well) on their flights.
They are all scheduled to arrive 7:00-7:30am. That means, in order to meet them, I have to be up to catch a taxi at 6:20am to take me to the Gloucester Green bus station in town so I can catch the 6:40am X70 bus to London. I'll meet the students, help them buy tickets, switch buses with them, and accompany them back to campus where they will settle into their residence hall and explore the city.
Having dinner at Peter's tonight. Peter is our students' host (and mine) during their time in Oxford. He has been incredibly accommodating and a wealth of information about all things Oxford!
An update to the previous post...
Peter was kind enough to enough me (and my mom) to his house for dinner. “To see a typical British household in action,” he said. And I’m so glad that we went.
I wondered if I was dressed well enough, but when I saw his manpris and Nike t-shirt, I breathed a sigh of relief. He and his wife Janet had cooked an incredible meal, along with help from their daughter Sarah (the middle child and younger of 2 daughters). Sarah finished her undergraduate program last spring and is preparing for graduate studies. When we arrived, their son (whose name I would remember if I had typed this a week ago) was playing acoustic guitar like nobody’s business. He was amazing! And of course I was green with envy when he told me he’d only been playing 2 years.
We had a great chat about the differences between standardized testing in the U.S. and in the UK and how the university application process is not centralized in the U.S., thus students have to complete numerous applications to as many different institutions and pay just as many application fees. They thought that was a ridiculous waste of time. And you know, I agree. Flashback to fall semester of 1990, when I couldn’t bear to complete another application (sorry, Tusculum College and Coach Botta) despite the promise of a full academic/athletic scholarship that waited at the other end. I just couldn’t make myself write the answers to those three essay questions.
They asked about our upcoming trip to Orkney and told about the wooly hats that a cousin (or friend) had brought them after a visit to Orkney last year. I was surprised that such incredible places are just a short distance away, yet many people within the UK don’t do much exploring within other parts of the UK. I suppose the same can be said for people who live in our little corner of the world and never visit some of its most beautiful/historic/significant locales.
It was going on 9:00pm before I remembered my 5:30am alarm. Peter drove us back to campus, and we snuggled into our rooms for a good rest (of course, Mom got to sleep longer than me).
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