It seems very surreal that this journey is only five days away...I say this because I have been waiting since March to embark on it, having received this scholarship about four months ago. In all honesty, if I were to have won a one-night stay at the Drury Inn in Marion Il or a pair of tickets to The Redneck Yacht Club here in southwest Florida, my anticipatory bug would have been biting me the entire time as well. But Oxford!? Oxford!?!? Please understand that I am not tooting my own horn here, but merely expressing my still-overwhelming disbelief that I could have possibly secured this opportunity! Anyways, the wait is now but a memory, and the many stages of planning are underway.
By the way, the scholarship I received is to study literature at Exeter College, one of the many universities within Oxford. There I will be focusing on Romantic era literature such as Wordsworth, Blake, and Keats, as well as Modernism, with the likes of James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, and Henry James. The largest part of planning by far has been the pre-reading assigned. A total of eleven books have graced my apartment for about two months now, and as the time gets closer, the more nervous I get. Even though I have the majority completed, I do have quite a bit of reading for the next five days. I am guessing Sparknotes will be playing a large role, as Wordsworth's 300 page personal ramblings of life, childhood to late adulthood, cannot uphold my attention for a fraction of those pages.
Aside from reading, the rest of my planning has been pleasant, at least what I have done so far. I, as well as many others, view myself as a procrastinator, and that is exactly what I am. I'm sure I will buckle down on Tuesday or Wednesday, and anything I forget I will pick up there. This has been quite the experience already, and I am anxious to get the real thing underway!
Here is a short list of things I hope to see and experience outside of doing the school thing:
- The Beatles. Only joking. I am planning to travel to Liverpool and London to do a pilgrimage type-o-thing.
Anthing Beatles related, I plan on finding it.
-The Globe Theater
- A true Futball game
- Lewis Caroll's handwritten Alice In Wonderland
- The original Magna Carta
- A Brit with bad teeth
- and many, many more!
One more thing, thanks for taking the time to check out my blog! Keep coming back, as I will be posting each day (hopefully) with pictures and commentary!
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