Brief Update + Oxonian Dream

Brief is a good word.

I’m going to be brief.

I’m getting paid 10.000 kr a week (about £55), which I am SO thrilled about! It’s exactly the salary I was hoping for :) Now all I have to do is arrive. I’m thinking I might send Anna and her granddaughter a postcard of Reading… but Reading’s really rubbish, and all the postcards are of how ugly it is when really, there are SOME nice bits. So I think I’ll just go take a picture of it myself.

I got a postcard from Gin the other day. She’s 19, Italian, and just about to start studying French and Norwegian in Milan. When she gets a bit better I plan on jabbing her with random outbursts of Norwegian.

Really, it would make more sense to do that with Tone. Who is in Wales. Who I will meet soon. Happy! Jeg gleder meg til å se hun. Shit, I need to practise…

I spent the last few days in Abingdon, lazing around my Aunt’s house. On Sunday I went to Oxford with Kazuko, which was seriously awesome. I mean, I can’t even count the number of times I’ve been there, but we just got so much done in one day! Cornmarket, Carfax Tower, Christ Church Meadows, Dead Man’s Walk, Botanic Gardens, Magdalen, Cream Tea in the Grand Cafe, St Mary the Virgin, Radcliffe Camera, Exeter, Blackwell's, Boddles, Turf Tavern, and tourist-shopping on the Broad. Say WHAT?

The 1733 ‘New’ Building, where C S Lewis - author of, amongst other things, “The Chronicles of Narnia” and close friend of J R R Tolkien - had his rooms.

Kazuko and I with our drinks in the Botanic Garden.

I thought the bottles were so beautiful!

The stunning view from my college’s garden, onto my favourite building in Oxford – the Radcliffe Camera, an enormous reading-room for an enormous library!

 

Radcliffe Square with the Camera in the front and St Mary the Virgin in the background (L) and Kazuko tries a Pimms in the hidden Turf Tavern (R)