Food, flowers and more food

Hillary term has come and gone. Everything happens so quickly here. I'm already into the second week of my six-week Easter Holiday. Before you start asking how they expect us to get any work done here, I should add that it's "officially" holidays, but that just means no lectures. I still have plenty of reading and other work to do.

So what has happened since my last post? Besides the continued work, I had a number of interesting nights out with my course-mates; now officially known as the "LingPals". On Friday 17 we went to a Thai Restaurant for Maryanna's birthday. After that we went to a Greek party at St Anthony's college.

This term we had an addition to the LingPals in the form of an Italian visiting student, Daniele. He is working on his PhD in Italy but came to Oxford for a term to learn about the form of syntax taught here, LFG.

As a visiting student, he didn't belong to a college so we all made sure he could see as much of our colleges as possible. I invited him to a Formal Hall dinner at Worcester in the last week, but this turned out trickier to organise than I imagined. We have to book a week in advance because Formal Hall only takes place four times a week and there is a limited number of places. 8th week only had three formals, excluding Sunday, and booking opened on Monday of 7th week. By the time I got onto my computer at 10.30 that morning, Wednesday was already sold out and Tuesday and Thursday filling rapidly. I was able to get us in on Tuesday by agreeing to be part of an "exchange" with Lincoln college. The catch was we had to eat at Lincoln on the Thursday of 7th week. In addition, one of the LingPals, Camille, invited us to a Guest Night at New College on the Friday of 7th week. As a result, I ended up going to 4 formal dinners in two weeks (one at Lincoln, one at New College and Two at Worcester - the second Worcester one I went to by myself, but that's another story).

Lincoln Formal Exchange

New College Guest Night

 LingPals at New College afterparty

Worcester Formal Exchange

The upside was that I didn't have to cook for about a week.

The weather has been starting to "warm up", by which I mean low double figures. Although the last couple days have even been hitting 16 and higher. It's also been sunny and so perceivably warmer. The daffodils started flowering at the beginning of March and I've seen a couple odd squirrels around. I'm excited to see what Worcester College is going to be like in Spring. It occurred to me that this will be my first Easter at spring time. In a way, this is actually more significant than my first winter Christmas, though I hadn't really thought about it much.

On the Sunday of 9th week the Worcester MCR (postgrads) had an Easter egg hunt. Once I'd gotten over the fact that the eggs were not Beacon marshmallow eggs (you can do a hunt without marshmallow eggs? O.o) it was great fun. I ended up joining "the German team" which consisted of two Germans, a Dutch girl, me and another guy. We had clues that we had to follow to figure out where the eggs were hidden. Although we were one of the last to set out, we were actually the first team back :-)

This Monday and Tuesday we had farewells for Daniele who's now back in Italy. He made us real Italian food on Monday night and we went to the LingPal's favourite pub, the Royal Oak, on Tuesday evening where I learnt that they serve lemonade in pints O.o. The food included yummy pizza made from scratch and pasta in the colours of the Italian flag :-)

Italian Flag Pasta

Master Chef at work

Pizza :-)

Pasta or pasta?

Well that's all I've got time for. I'm heading up to Lancashire today for a 21st birthday party and ceilidh. Thanks again for reading my updates and supporting me.