I love driving. I especially love driving for long distances, like on a stretch of highway. This is a good thing, actually, because I end up driving a lot: traveling between home and school, driving the hour trip to my sister's house on weekends, and the half hour drive it takes to get pretty much anywhere from Cedarville. I'm not a person who gets bored very easily, and I amuse myself when I'm driving by singing along with my iPod, getting books on CD, or just daydreaming. I enjoy the daydreaming the most. I don't think I ever get so much good thinking done as during the five hour drives from Cedarville to home. So I thought it would be strange coming here and walking everywhere. To my delight and surprise, it is not. I have come to love walking!

Now, naturally, there are times when I miss having a car. A good example is bringing home groceries. It doesn't take more than a milk carton and a couple cans of soup to make your arms sore when you're carrying your groceries home. But this is a cross I am willing to bear, because the rest of the satisfaction I have received from exploring this city on foot has so been worth it. Oxford is unlike any city I've lived in before. At home, it's just not really possible to walk to a bookstore or movie theatre or even a coffee shop. Here, it's the most convenient method of transportation. And it's given me some interesting experiences.

Take Monday, for example. I had a meeting with my Creative Writing tutor around 10:00 in the morning (amusingly, in a Starbucks that was located inside of a Borders. It was very American). After that, I realized I didn't have all that much to get done that day, so I decided to do some exploring. And explore I did! Oxford is small enough that after a week and a half of living here, I can find my way around the downtown area without too much trouble. I didn't have any definate plans for where I was going, so after making a necessary stop at my college, I decided to walk down the first major street I saw. One of my first stops was a beautiful church, called St Mary's. It looked pretty and the door was open, so I walked inside. I made two delightful discoveries at St Mary's. The first was that for a small fee, you could climb a painful amount of stairs and climb up a tower that overlooks the city. It was a wonderful photo opportunity.


Secondly, I was looking at some of the plaques inside the church, and found out that this church is where a historical figure was buried: Amy Robsart. For those who aren't familiar with Elizabethan history, Amy was the wife of Sir Robert Dudley. This was unfortunate for her, because Queen Elizabeth and Sir Robert were pretty tight. After Amy's mysterious death, people suspected the Queen and this (among other reasons) made it impossible for Sir Robert and Elizabeth to ever marry. I recently read a Philippa Gregory novel in which Amy was a main character, and I did some research about her after the read. I am still thrilled that I just randomly stumbled across her grave--in America, you have to go actively searching for things like that. Here, it's sort of impossible to escape. I love that!

Although I had no plans for the day, I was out from about 10:30 until 5:00. When I saw something I wanted to visit, I did. I stopped by several churches (including the one where John Wesley gave his first sermon), visited the botanic gardens, went to a couple of bookstores, a tea shop, and several boutiquey type places, and took a tour of Oxford Castle. And most importantly, I had a perfect moment:
The weather cleared up later in the day, but early on in the morning, it was gray and foggy. The weather would have depressed me in Michigan or Ohio, but here, it just seemed so perfectly English that I was enjoying it. Right after meeting with my tutor, I had to stop by Christ Church to drop off some paperwork. It's an absolutely stunning college, built in the 1500's, and it has this wonderful courtyard to walk through right as you enter. As I was passing through, drinking my coffee, the bells started to chime. The location, the weather, the sounds--it struck me that this was exactly the picture of England I'd had in the back of my mind. It might seem silly now, but I was so thrilled at the time, that I actually got goosebumps. And I knew that right then, that had been my perfect Oxford moment.