St. Gile's Fair, Lectures, & Groceries

Today was the first day of lectures. I was expecting it to be rather dull but the 2 lectures went by rather quickly and the content was rather riveting. The first one was an overview of the British education system, which seems like it would be an interesting topic to write my research paper on. They have what is called a National Curriculum which basically tells each teacher when, how and what subject to teach. It's quite a novel idea actually. The lecturer today used to be an Oxford don (teacher) previously, but now she is head director of one of the colleges. She has made us all very anxious by telling us that she can count on 2 hands the number of alphas she has given out in 22 years of teaching. Alphas are A's, just for your reference. All this is quite unnerving for those of us who are trying to maintain a GPA for when we graduate, but I guess we will see at the end of term.

After that I came back to the house and waited for my groceries to arrive. Yes, I ordered my groceries online. It was extremely convenient and the delivery fee wasn't too taxing.

This afternoon a bunch of us went to the St. Gile's fair together. They shut down a pretty major road to hold the fair, I believe it lasts until tomorrow evening. Apparently at fairs they have American Donuts, which I'm guessing is our equivalent to funnel cake. And cotton candy is called candy floss here, which in my opinion is just some way of making it sound more hygienic (doesn't work). They had the typical fish and chip stands, along with hot dogs and hamburgers. I'm not sure that the rides are terribly safe considering smoke jets out of them after every use. I think that 75% of Oxford's overall pollution probably comes from this fair.. it's rather nasty.

All in all another enjoyable day. I think my excitement is starting to die down now and I'm really getting comfortable moving about the city. Tomorrow a couple more lectures and then some paper writing. Until then!