Packing for Oxford

Hello again!

I am leaving for study abroad in Oxford this Wednesday, and I have not even started packing yet. I am going to try posting stuff as I go on here and putting up pictures and videos and other various and sundry technological bits of things. I have never been out of the US. I have always been a huge fan of Narnia and Middle Earth and all those worlds that let me escape my own worries.

(Aside: I guess it is a bit strange that I am starting to pack for England on the anniversary of our independence from England. Hmmmm. I like irony. It's tasty.)

People always ask me what I'm doing this summer, and then I tell them I'm going to Oxford. They always have the same reactions, "Wow! Aren't you excited?" followed by, "I remember when I went there on a tour," or, "I have always wanted to go, take pictures for me!"

I never feel like I'm quite able to give enough of an excited face to show how much I really appreciate my parents letting me do this and explore the world. I feel like I have to push a little extra and fake it slightly because I really can't grasp getting on a plane for 14 hours and arriving somewhere else. I don't know if it's 14 hours. That's a total guess.

Anyways, I hope this blog will be something I can contribute on the interblag to show my appreciation to Lewis, Tolkien, my parents, Baylor, and airplanes for the possibility for me to go somewhere that before only existed in my imagination.

I hope that everyone wears vests and smokes pipes and speaks in a ridiculously strong high British accent, but I am fairly sure that people across the pond have actually gone through the same time we have and arrived in the 21st century (perhaps more than we.)

I hope that I will come back with a faint British accent that will up my general sex appeal by a million, but my fake British accent will probably stay just as annoying and unsexy as before.

I hope that I will somehow find out everything that I want to do with my life in a sudden epiphany caused by the new environment and intellectual locale, but I will probably be just as confused if not more than before.

So, here we go. Preparing for something for which I cannot prepare. Hoping for stuff that probably won't happen. I am excited, but I am also nervous, jittery, deceived, confused, and all in all befuddled by what is about to happen, whether I am ready for it or not.

Join me, ye readers, on a journey outside of my experience, and through a world that to me has only existed in between the leather bindings of books and unformed ideas in between my ears.

Excited?