sunday in oxford town

So far this has been such a lovely day!  Stephanie--a friend of mine from my literature class--and I went to St. Ebbe's this morning for the 10 am service.  St. Ebbe's has been the beloved church home for two of my friends who have gone to Oxford, and I loved attending last year when I visited Laura Inglis in Oxford.  The service today was just like I remembered: casual, warm, welcoming, and full of music.  We sang a Christian version of "The Bare Necessities," the same song that's in Jungle Book.  It was brilliant!  I think I laughed the whole way through.  To close we sang "O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing," which has many humorous memories for the Greens and Roes.  Vaughen Roberts is their minister, and he preached an excellent sermon on John 5:1-15.

Stephanie encouraged me to stay afterwards for tea and coffee, and we ended up chatting with an Australian family that's moving to Brussels to become the vicars of a church there.  I was too shy to go to the church picnic afterwards, so Stephanie and I went grocery shopping in Sainsbury's behind the church.  We were coming out, walking past St. Ebbe's, and on our way home when I saw Joe Martin, the former L'Abri worker I knew from St. Ebbe's.  I stopped to say hello... and before I knew it I was walking to the picnic chatting about Swiss L'Abri with him!  Oh, L'Abri community...

The picnic was lovely.  Stephanie and I were so engrossed in conversation with members of the church that we didn't start eating until most people had finished.  Afterwards we sat and talked in the shade with an Oxford alum who had gone to Japan as a missionary for several years.  We didn't head home until 2 pm, a full 2 hours after I'd expected to be curled up in my room reading Mrs. Dalloway!  Stephanie and I are going back for the evening service.  A day of St. Ebbe's... little else could be better.

along the river cherwell

Yesterday was absolutely beautiful.  I arrived home [more about that later] and packed a bag with books and a scarf to use for a blanket.  I wandered down High Street to Magdalen College, my favorite of the Oxford colleges.  C.S. Lewis was an undergraduate at my college [University College, better known as Univ], but he worked at Magdalen as a don for many years.  Behind the beautiful college is a path called Addison's Walk that winds around deer parks and along the River Cherwell [where Wind in the Willows was set].  I was allowed in for free since I'm a student at Oxford, and from there I walked deep into the college grounds until I found a secluded corner near the water in the Fellows' Garden.  It was positively idyllic!  I spent the afternoon reading and writing a letter before heading back into town to stay at Blackwell [the best bookstore in the world, and perhaps the largest] until it closed.

in the cotswolds and over to wales

After classes finished on Thursday I decided to go visit my friend Margot from L'Abri.  She's just started work in the Cotswolds [classic English countryside!] as a vet; she's taking time off work at home in Australia to do a bit of adventuring.  And adventuring she is!  She has a cute little house that backs up to an enormous field and rolling hills in the distance.  We took a walk through cow pastures that evening as the sun was setting and explored the graveyard of her tiny village church. 

The next day Margot had work from 9 am to 7 pm, and it just wasn't practical for me to go with her to the surgery or out in the country.  So she took me to the train station... and I went to Wales for the day!  It was only about a 1.5 hour trian ride away, or it would have been if the train hadn't been cancelled that hour from the little train station near Margot's village.  So I got a ride with a woman who offered to drive us into Bristol; the other two people in the car were a neuroscience PhD candidate and a high school boy going to art school.  Because none of us knew where we were going, I did the navigating in the front seat.  The irony! 

Wales was charming.  I got off the train and had no idea where I was or what to do, but after some people figured out my accent they were able to direct me to a tourism office.  I got maps and a book of walking trails around Cardiff, the capital, and then tried to get a bus out of the city so I could go hiking.  But public transport is bad out of the city, and so I ended up just exploring Cardiff.  There's a castle in the center of the city, surrounded by a beautiful park and dozens of botiques, music stores, cafes, and jewelry shops.  I spent a couple of hours there and then walked about a mile to the bay, where I bought an ice cream cone and sat on a stone wall.  Eventually I caught a train back to Margot and England, a delicious dinner, a cozy couch, and news on the TV of another outbreak of foot and mouth disease.  Margot the Vet is glum.

one more week and then...!

And then I board a plane bound for St. Louis, where my entire wonderful family awaits me at my grandparents' house.  I can't wait to get back to them.  I don't know what's made me so antsy all at once, but my hunch is that there's been so much transition and so much thought processing this summer.  I want to stop.  I want familiar.  I want to be around the people that know me the best.  To just sit and giggle with my sisters.  To sip tea with my mom.  To cook with my grandmother.  To watch football on TV with my grandfather.  To play with my little cousins.  To teach Eric the best card game ever invented.  To get a bear hug from Daddy again...