By
Justin Snider
, Amherst College
Part One, On the Rhode to Oxford
A few weeks back I decided to travel to England for the handful of days I had
off from the university and my part-time job teaching at a high school in
Vienna, Austria. I hadn’t been to England in a decade and my memory of that
trip - accompanying my dad to London on business - was fuzzy at best: I remember
falling soundly asleep at Miss Saigon the night we arrived, and I vaguely
recall trying to see the changing of the guard at Buckingham palace. Instead I
saw mostly chests and breasts because, at age twelve, I was simply too short to
see much else. (In hindsight, it seems perfectly clear that the show I witnessed
was the more exciting and enlightening of the two.) And I most definitely
remember a fine meal at KFC somewhere near Piccadilly Circus. So my conception
of London was something like this: chicken breasts and chests, mixed with
musicals and cute black cabs, all amidst an annoyingly incessant drizzle. I
decided I was sufficiently pleased with my childhood memories of the place, and
thus I could venture elsewhere this time around. Recollecting a promise I made
to a friend last summer to visit him - and allured by the prospect of crashing
on a free floor - I headed to Oxford.
Oxford is a bizarre place to say the least: on any given day tourists
outnumber students four-to-one, and the centuries-old cobblestone streets are
overrun with exhaust-belching busses and heedless bicyclists. Despite all this
muck and madness, the town somehow still deserves to be called gorgeous. The
splendid architecture of Oxford’s thirty-nine various colleges alone justifies
the visit, though actually seeing the innards of the colleges can be something
of a feat. An elderly porter stands guard at the gated entrance to each college
- and generally the more famous the college, the more menacing and shrewd the
“bouncer” - redirecting tourist types to separate entrances. Christ Church,
reputedly the most elite and intellectual of the colleges, shamelessly charges
admission to its grounds. And no wonder: a great many of Christ Church’s
undergraduates hail from Eton and the college has churned out thirteen of
Britain’s prime ministers. The remaining thirty-eight colleges have together
only produced a meager nine! Christ Church has its very own cathedral, not to
mention an art gallery boasting works by Michelangelo, Leonardo and a whole host
of others.
