Paul the Football Goalie

As you may or may not know, Paul has been the Templeton College football goalie this season. You can see him in action near the goal on the right. Paul's wearing the light colored shirt.

I didn't go to any games this season except the last one, which they won against Magdalen College 6-3. It was really cold and blustery on the field ("pitch" as they say here), but I braved the chill to take a few pictures and support the team (though they didn't have any benches to sit on). Note the "colorize" feature i used on the camera :) )

Mardi Gras at Templeton

Mardi Gras isn't exactly celebrated in England (though they do have "Pancake Day" on the same day), so Paul's college held a Mardi Gras theme guest dinner this weekend. We got masks for the event, which featured a champagne reception followed by a dinner of jambalaya, catfish and American cheesecake, with dancing afterwards.

Here's us with our friends Vinita and Varun - can you guess who's who with the masks? haha! (Thanks for the blinking beads, Mom!)


And here's Paul with some of his classmates at the afterparty. You can't quite see it, but there was a big chocolate fountain in the back!


We enjoyed being out at the Templeton campus, as it's far enough from the city center that you really feel like you're outside of the city. Oxford is small enough that we can still see the stars at night (unlike Chicago!), but it's still very urban feeling.

On Saturday night we went to visit our friends Brian and Mikki, who live in a 400 year old cottage about a 20 minute bike ride from our flat. I can see why the like the place, it's really cool to be there. They've got a thatched roof, and all of the doorways are about 5'8", so the guys have to remember to duck when they walk between rooms! The village is called South Hinksey, and the cottage used to be the village bakery. Brian and Mikki told us that if they have something delivered, they can either give their address, or say "the old bake house in South Hinksey". Pretty cool, huh? Though, I do not envy their commute into town - you have to carry your bike up about 50 steps to get over the railroad tracks! It's good exercise, though!

This week my boss comes back from paternity leave (men get 2 weeks here!), so that will be another adjustment at work. We were talking to some friends from Saudi Arabia at the Mardi Gras dinner, and learned that there, you get one paid day off for paternity leave. In the States, you legally get zero paid days off. I won't get started on what people get in Scandinavian countries, but in the UK anyway, it's pretty darn good compared to what you get in other parts of the world.

Paul is going to some sort of business fair tomorrow, so we'll see if he finds anything interesting. It's hard to think about a job when you're doing school work for something like 80 hours per week!

Why MBA students are not professional athletes

You might recognize someone (wearing red) in the Hertford M4 boat. Pictures here:
http://www.bigblade-photos.com/rowing/events/2008/ot08/rowingon/Hertford%20M4.html

NHS advice to wanna-be fathers

I was looking through the NHS website the other day, and came across this sound advice for any man who wants to become a father...

"make the decision to quit the fags today if you want to make a baby."
From:
http://www.nhsdirect.nhs.uk/articles/article.aspx?articleId=1909

I think something was lost in the translation...for those of you who don't know, a "fag" is what the English call a cigarette! Sure sounds funny to an American!

Biking the Isis

There is a river that runs through Oxford. Before it enters Oxford, it is called the Thames. When it leaves Oxford, it is called the Thames. But in Oxford, it's called the Isis. Why that is, I'm not sure, beyond some sort of snobbery. Either way, it's a nice place to take a bike ride.

We decided to try biking down the river path a couple weekends ago, soon after flooding had become a problem around Oxfordshire. It was the first glimpse of sunshine we'd had in a whle, so we felt we had to take advantage. However, we only got about as far as Iffley because the field we were supposed to go through was flooded with about a foot of water!

Here's Paul on his bike, with typical English winter weather in the background. We have a partly sunny day about once per week, and this was one of them.


This picture gives you an idea of what the bike path looks like as you head south from Oxford. You pass by a lot of cute villages and a few pubs!


At certain points along the river, there are lots of swans and ducks. Normally swans are territorial, but when children are regularly brought along to throw bread at them, they congregate and pay more attention to the good eats than they do to each other. Here we saw a family of swans (you can see the gray teenage ones).


And here's a neat house with a thatched roof that we saw in Iffley.


Also in Iffley is an old Norman church, built in 1170, called St Mary's. Neither of us had ever seen a Norman church before, and we had no idea it was anything all that special until we went home and googled it!


So that's kind of what it's like living around here. The more you wander around, the more random old things you find.

Weird Veggies

We are still getting our weekly vegetable/fruit box delivered, only as the winter has gone on, some of the veggies have gotten weirder. Here's an example of some we got this week: kohlrabi and jerusalem artichokes:



I still don't really know what to do with kohlrabi, but the jerusalem artichokes are delicious! You can either fry them up with some butter, or make a creamy soup out of them.
They're also known as "sunchokes", though they're not at all related to artichokes. But, they do kind of have that lemony flavor like an artichoke, and that's how they get their name.

We also got some celeriac last week, which really looks weird! Unfortunately we didn't get a picture, but you can click here to get an idea. We had to call the company up for that one since they didn't leave their usual packing list with it. It did have a nice celery flavor and cooked up nicely in a veggie stir-fry.

Who'd have thought that moving to England would lead to culinary learning?

Ashmolean Adventure

So something pretty neat happened today that I totally didn't expect, and it could only happen in Oxford. Last night I received an e-mail from Amanda inviting me along to see the special prints collection at the Ashmolean Museum. I wasn't really sure what was involved, but figured a bit of culture wouldn't hurt. Apparently she and her mom (who's visiting from the States) went there a couple days ago and found out that if you book an appointment, they'll let you in to see these special collections for free.

I met up with Amanda and her mom at the museum, but on the way there I ran into some colleagues from work. The two of them are from central Russia and are working on our company database for a few months before they go back to Russia. I spotted them examining a map, and stopped to see if I could help them find where they wanted to go. Turns out they had just planned to walk around Oxford, so I invited them along to the museum in the off chance they'd let some extra people into the print room. I'm so glad I did, because 15 minutes later we were all in the print room looking at original sketches from Michaelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael and (no not Donatello), Rembrandt. Pretty crazy! It was so cool to see their little doodles and sketches. I think the most impressive was Rembrandt's portrait of his father. It was just a sketch with a little color, but the detail was so lifelike! The woman running the place had to use special gloves to take each of the sketches out, and didn't want all of us looking at one picture at the same time since just breathing on them could damage them!

We could have stayed longer and looked through pretty much whatever we wanted to in the rest of the collections, but I think we all were ready to move on. I'm so glad Amanda invited me along because it's not the kind of thing I'd go looking for on my own, but it's really cool to see.