Home Across the Sea

Well, I have arrived. This is a picture of The Vines, the house where I'm living for my time in Oxford. It's about a 3o minute and one huge hill walk to City Centre. Apparently that's where everything is.

Today is my first real day here. I woke up around 8:15 to the sounds of 2 of my 3 roommates (Adam and Travis) gearing up for a morning run and of course I couldn't let them show me up ;0). We did just over a 3 mile loop in the residential areas around the downtown area of Oxford. Mom, the weather would have been ideal for you. It was probably around 40 degrees and drizzling (which I'm getting the impression is everyday here).

After the run, we took showers and I had some yogurt before one the roommates who went running with me (Travis) and I walked back into Oxford to see what there was to see. We had neither an agenda nor schedule, so we just poked around for a while. I found the Oxford bookstore, however, and it had some really cool Oxford merchandise inside ;0). I'm sure I'll visit it again before I go.

The next thing on my schedule is a fun and games get together at The Vines at 2:00 PM our time (that's 9 AM EST for those trying to figure it out right now). The students with this program staying at the CCCU's other house (Crick) will come over here for touch football and/or card games followed by hot soup.

At some point today, I'm going to need to go grocery shopping. The food situation here is as follows: All 36 of us living in this house have been split into 6 groups of 6, each group having their own small fridge and cabinet to store food. We are given about 160 pounds a month (yes, I've already worked up a weekly budget excel spreadsheet for all of this) to buy all of our own food at the grocery store. The Junior Deans in the house (which are a lot like RD's) were kind enough to start us all off with some snack stuff/bread and cereal per group of six, but I'm going to need to start fending for myself before the week is out I think. This will be the first time I've ever done regular cooking, so if anyone has ideas for quick, easy and most importantly CHEAP dishes, please let me know!