For two of those three days I barely made it out of my PJs, but on one of them– the only sunny one this week, in fact– Kirsty and I went into central London to explore. Mostly that meant a lot of walking around, which seems to be my default travel activity. I thoroughly enjoyed it. On Christmas Eve I made my way to Heathrow to rendezvous with the Farnhams, who were there to pick up Kezia after her flight back from Kansas City. A few hours’ drive and a grocery store stop later, we made it home to Polzeath, and I haven’t budged since. We’ve been celebrating Christmas (of course), playing games, watching movies, and eating loads of chocolate. They’ve basically adopted me as one of their own for the week, and it’s been wonderful!

Most everyone is out shopping this afternoon, so I’m attempting to catch up on life and maybe write a post or two about Israel (but not making any promises! we’ll see what happens).

The journey from England was relatively painless, with the exception of screaming children on the airplane, long waits, and dehydration. I left my flat in Oxford at ten till 4am, and by 10:15 had made my (cold, sleepy) way through London to Gatwick Airport. Nice place, but the English don’t seem to believe in public water fountains or electric outlets, so it was an unproductive and thirsty wait. The EasyJet check-in line was enormously long, which is no big deal, but it gave me ample time to eye the luggage sizing bins and watch as person after person ended up having to check their carry-on bags. It was a bit disconcerting, and by the time it was my turn I was almost positive I would be doing the same; I had forgotten to check the dimensions of my pack. Thankfully, it slid right in with plenty of room to spare.

The flight was forty-five minutes shorter than it was supposed to be, which is always a nice thing.  The guy next to me on the plane was, like me, planning on crashing in a hostel in Amman, so we decided to team up for the evening. Also, I saw the Alps for the first time; even from above, they’re gorgeous! I only spent twelve hours in Amman, and half of those were sleeping, so I don’t have much to say. Jordanians have a reputation for friendliness, and the ones I ran into were indeed quite friendly and helpful and knew at least a little English. Downtown seems to be a lively place in the evening. Got food at a street restaurant sort of thing; it was great. Finally got a hold of some drinking water around 10pm.  My sheets had definitely not been changed, but the bed was comfy and I slept like a rock (except at 5:30am when I got my first muezzin-over-loudspeakers experience).

My border crossing at the King Hussein Bridge went rather like all the other accounts of that crossing that are out on the internet already, so no use rambling about boring details. Suffice it to say that it was a really beautiful morning, everything went smoothly, and I got to the Old City at about 11:30am.

That’s all for now. Karen is in Scotland, Hannah is hitting up Paris and London,  and Travis is in Germany, so if you want more Oxbridgerish travel news, check out their blogs!

I cycled into college four minutes before the tutorial was supposed to begin, frazzled and stressed about leaving town that afternoon, and not at all caught up on sleep. I curled up on the staircase to speed-read my essay, but promptly discovered that, for various reasons, I couldn’t access it. After a whole lot of frowning and attempted thinking, I remembered the topic. But unfortunately, my tutor found me there before I had managed to remember the actual prompt. Our meetings usually begin with me giving a two-minute recap of my argument, but as I had no earthly idea at this point what my argument actually was, that obviously didn’t happen. There followed an hour of me incoherently making numerous attempts to salvage a bad argument, based on an essay whose contents I barely remembered. I could give quotes, but that might be taking the embarrassment a bit too far.

It wasn’t my finest moment, to be sure, but– I’m done.

I’m pleased to report, however, that my first break in Europe has gotten off to a great start. I hopped on a bus to London, wandered around for a while trying to find the next bus, and rode it for seven hours to Newquay, a town on the north coast of Cornwall. It sounds like an unappealing thing to do first thing after the end of term, but in reality, sitting for hours doing nothing and saying nothing was just what I needed. Esther and I stayed up until 3am, chatting by candlelight and eating chocolate, and late this morning I woke up to sunshine and ocean! Esther had described the scenery to me plenty of times, but I still kind of freaked out when I pulled back the curtains. Think rolling headlands, beautiful blue sea, rocky islands, a little village of white houses, and a beach just below. Lovely family, lovely view, lovely weekend.

So I’ve been a rather dismal failure at keeping people updated on my life, with perhaps the exception of the photo blog. Rather than promising reform, I’m settling for a series of posts recapping Michaelmas Term. Check back for more over the next week or so!

That’s all for now. I only get 64 mg of caffeine out of this guy, and I need to make it worthwhile.

There isn’t much to be said about the traveling. It was easy and uneventful, and on the flight over I found myself seated next to a fellow Oxford-bound American student. That was nice. The exhaustion hit all at once on the bus from London, and despite my best efforts I slept for two hours in the afternoon. I don’t remember the name of anyone I met that day; I received my Bod card (library card/all-things-university card) and promptly left it in the IT office in college. Embarrassing. But I made it through that day without epically failing at anything else, and had virtually no jet lag afterward, so it all worked out.

The days since then have been full of wandering all about the city, meeting up with friends and making new ones, and sorting out all the logistics of Oxford– there are many. Oxford is beautiful. You walk and walk and walk and expect the architecture to revert to normal at some point, but it doesn’t (not that I’ve seen). And the weather has been gorgeous, so I’m sure that’s helped with the general impression. Everyone is eager to tell us that this has been the nicest stretch of sunshine and warmth since March, and that it will soon become wet and cold and nasty, and that the sun will set at 4:30.

Oh well, it will be easier to write papers that way anyway.

In other news, there are pictures on the photo blog! Not anything spectacular, just bits and pieces of everyday life here. I’m expecting to update that one more frequently and this one less so. It’s so much easier for me to take a decent picture and write a paragraph photo caption than to be an entertaining blogger. Plus it’s always more fun with something visual.

Check it out here.

Spontaneity and surprises are nice, but half the fun for me is the anticipation. Packing for a trip is an excuse to anticipate all sorts of things, while figuring out how to fit x stuff into x space in a way that is convenient, efficient, etc. A delightful little puzzle, it is. And for this particular journey, I get to factor in money, too (ditch the shampoo in favor of an extra bottle of Clear Care contact lens solution, that sort of thing).

I loaded up my bigger piece of luggage just beautifully. I’m pretty sure there was zero air inside. I even sat on it a couple times. And it worked; everything fit.

The most compactly packed suitcase ever

But I forgot to factor in weight, and it turned out to be a beastly sixty-six pounds. No good. So last night I set out to pack the rest of my stuff, like toothpaste and towels and school supplies, in the smaller red suitcase (courtesy of Maggie. Thanks Mags!), and also to get the big one down to fifty pounds. The latter task involved removing all my shoes, jackets/coat, and several clothing items. The pile of stuff for the red suitcase was big enough already; now it was huge. One look at it and I was stressed out and not at all excited to be packing.

You might be wondering why I wouldn’t ditch half the stuff and buy what I need in England instead of hauling it across the ocean. Good travelers pack light, yes? And, as the saying goes, you can’t travel heavy, happy, and cheap. But this isn’t really travel; this is moving. I’m not going to just be wandering around Oxford checking out the sights. We have to actually do real life there. Real life in England is expensive, especially when your bank account is in dollars instead of pounds. And so I’m willing to spend a couple highly inconvenient days on the road if it means my student loans are smaller in the long run.

All of the above means that I wasn’t very happy about the prospect of ditching anything on my list, so I was sitting there cramming my bag with a scowl on my face and a swirl of exchange rates and overweight baggage fees going through my head. My mom finally commented, “You seem a bit testy,” to which I roared, “YES I AM!”

Turns out that it actually wasn’t that big of a deal. When it was all said and done, the big one weighed forty-eight pounds and the smaller one  forty-nine (with no repacking required!), and I emerged as the winner of the bring-as-much-as-possible-without-paying-more-money game.

That philosophy might not serve me well in the end, but so far so good.

“What are you most excited about?”

First of all, school. Just being in school again will be wonderful. It will have been five months by the time our first term begins! I’m excited about getting my tail kicked, and learning a lot, and reading lots of books that smell good. And I’ll be studying topics that are interesting and important, topics that brought me to school to begin with (if indeed I can get the tutorials I requested. let’s hope that’s the case). Potential subjects: Middle Eastern Politics, War Ethics, Christian Moral Reasoning, Theory of Politics, Philosophy of Education, C.S. Lewis, others that I can’t remember right now.

But if you catch me on a day when I’ve been daydreaming about traveling, I might say that I’m most excited about our two five-week breaks. Of course, funding it will be… interesting… but we’re drawing up tentative itineraries nonetheless. I’m planning on jumping into the world of CouchSurfing, and hoping to be able to stay in a monastery over Christmas (wouldn’t that be SO COOL?!). Potential locations: Israel, Italy, Spain, Ireland, and Scotland.

Then there’s rowing and maybe climbing. I don’t know if I’ll really have time for both of those, but the idea is lovely, and some days I get awfully excited about it. And of course, there’s the not-being-in-America factor. I’ve been down with that plan for, oh, about nine years now. Also- living with friends, having our own flat, living in OXFORD!, packing*– I get psyched about all those things too. In terms of the bigger picture, I think that this season will serve to clarify and give direction to those aspects of my life vision and calling that have taken the backseat to schoolwork over the last couple years.

So in a nutshell, I’m most excited about… everything.

*One of my quirks. Environmental, not genetic. I’ve been the family car-packer since I was about 12, and I’ve come to enjoy the challenge. A wave of packing excitement overtook me this morning, in fact. A bit premature, I’d say, but I managed to sort through my closet productively nonetheless.

Don’t feel bad, I did it am doing it too.

So how do you make it through the day after? For me, it comes down to three things: 1) stay busy, 2) stay sensitive to caffeine, and 3) get enough sleep on the other nights.

Moms have it the worst, they really do. If they stay up most of the night, they get to spend the next day in the company of a cranky two-year-old doing the same mundane things they always do. Students get some adult interaction and demands on their intellect, at least. I find that if life continues to be demanding the day after, I can rise to the occasion, and sometimes I forget about being tired.

As for caffeine– I know you don’t typically plan an all-nighter weeks in advance, but if you’re coming up on a busy month (or the beginning of the school year, for that matter), STOP drinking it every day. Don’t even have it every other day. You need to be able to make it till 4 or 5am on a Mountain Dew and save the quad shot or the RockStar for the next day. You’ll feel so much better, and also save money, if you don’t have to dose yourself with 300mg of caffeine every time you stay up.

Lastly, and this is obvious, the impact of an all-nighter is reduced when you’ve slept enough the preceding nights. I have friends who prefer a series of nights with 3-4 hours of sleep, but I find that I do a lot better when I sleep 8 hours the rest of the week and save up all the not-sleeping for one big push. Each to his own… but my way is better .

My advice, in short: plan to make your life conducive to pulling all-nighters (ironic, isn’t it?).

And if you’re a poor caffeine-addicted, chronically sleep-deprived, and not-very-busy soul who stumbled into this nocturnal business by accident, I can offer no cure. But take heart, it will be over soon enough.

A person could claim that:

- the Abrahamic covenant is still valid and so the land belongs to Israel

- but then turn to Deuteronomy and say that the Jews aren’t actually exercising their God-given right to the land, because they are currently in disobedience

- but then acknowledge that 1948 was a partial fulfillment of prophecy anyway

- but since Israel doesn’t have its biblical borders yet, there’s no reason they can’t give up land

- and then make some scary claims about what the Palestinians actually want to do to Israel

- but then assert that Israel has a moral obligation to seek peace even with people who probably want to destroy them

- but then turn around and denounce Obama’s current policy because America is pressuring Israel to do something it doesn’t really want to do, and we shouldn’t do that.

And this hypothetical person is actually not contradicting himself. Nor does his logic address all the possible considerations that Christian Zionists can take into account. It’s all just very complex, kind of like a spider’s web (minus the spider) that has about a thousand possible paths to the middle. And my job in this paper is to explain the web. It’s a little daunting.

[Also, if the web analogy was lost on you, don't feel bad. My professor didn't really go for it either. Just know that Christian Zionism is way more complex than people give it credit for, and I don't want to write about it right now.]

Two weeks left and I’ll be halfway done with college. Oddly, I’m not freaking out about how quickly the time has passed. The England preparation has reached the point where we are actually doing things (immunizations, passport, looking at plane tickets, choosing tutorials (!!!) and oh so much paperwork), and I just feel ready to move on with it. Sure, I love Jewell, but a year away sounds fantastic.

I don’t know how to even begin to recap this semester. Not because it was particularly eventful, but just because it’s five whole months! So, onward. The plan for the summer is to spend June and July mostly at school, researching Christian Zionism and similar streams of thought and how those relate to potential peace deals between Israel and Palestine. SO STINKING EXCITED. For August and September, I’m thinking of pulling together a few random moneymaking things– photo shoots, babysitting, etc– and then also maybe working at the climbing gym, because I have got to finance the habit somehow. And of course, prayer room time and family time. Then, if all goes well, we’ll be off to Oxford!

I like my summer plans quite a bit, and I would sort of prefer to fast-forward these last weeks of school and get to it already. The end of the school year is always a little bit sad– saying goodbye to the seniors, and the roommate (my second attempt at roommate-finding was a smashing success. she’s so awesome)– but it’s funny how excitement sort of overrides it all. My last paper is due May 11th. Bring it on.