Simon’s Staggered
Another day in the queen’s country, today was Simon Wenham’s celebration of his singleness before he gets married. Poor guy. We were all happy for him and yet slightly jealous ;). Eh, anywho... extremely fun day that started out with heading in to Oxford via Wil’s VW Polo. Initially, Oxford did not strike me the way I had expected. All of the English countryside outside of London is beautiful. Colorful fields, vast rolling hills, and idyllic scenes with cows or sheep scattered in various fields along the way. The thing that is interesting about Oxford though is that the university is not centralized within the town. Instead its various colleges are spread and integrated throughout the town. So, this means that many of the early buildings of university are intermingled with “newer” buildings and businesses. That said, I was expecting there to be a “campus” but there isn’t. You can basically, wander the town visiting the 29 colleges that make up Oxford.
The spire you see pictured left was my first look at what struck me as quintessentially “Oxford”. This particular spire is Magdalen College which CS Lewis worked with. On May 1st of every year a choir gathers at the top of that spire and sings as the sun rises, followed by a large party with people jumping from the bridge that we are walking over in the photo. In fact, this is depicted in the movie Shadow Lands, which depicts the life of CS Lewis with his wife Joy. I’m not sure what is being celebrated, because I forgot, but I’m certain it may be one of the many excuses for the British to drink alcohol. :-p As if they needed one.
Our first activity for the stag was a good round of “Punting” in which you ride a Punt, a small, four-seated, flat bottom boat. One of your group is naturally responsible for piloting the mighty vessel with a long pole which you push the boat with against the bottom of the canal. It looks a lot like someone piloting a gondola. The trick is that if you push the pole too hard into the mud, it will get stuck. Then you have a choice: either let go of the pole and stay dry or try to retrieve it and most likely fall into the canal. I should not have to tell you how nasty these canals are. Luckily, I didn’t fall in at all, but one of the twenty people in our group did manage to fall in. Of course, this was after we purposely rammed his punt with ours :) I think Mark Mayhew may have been punting at that time too.
The crowning moment for the guys was our involvement in a junior cricket match. As we punted around the canals, we circled a cricket pitch about two times and felt the insatiable need to heckle the batsman, who was all of 8 years old. After we began heckling the bowler got a clean bowl off on the batsman and his father walked over to give us a stern look. :) We figured the kid needed to learn to handle heckling.
Next stop: Oxford Cart Racing. Seems like an odd thing to choose to do for a stag party, but it was much better than I thought. I imagined those days when I was a kid at Gulf Shores, AL and they only allowed you to go about 10 mph and if you bumped anybody, you were in trouble. Not here. The carts weren’t incredibly fast, but fast enough to get up to 50 mph supposedly. There certainly wasn’t a shortage of bumping or just all out wrecks on the track as we skidded around corners and rammed other people off the road. Aggressive driving at its best! After every race, my forearms were so sore from gripping the wheel too tight and my breathing was so quick. I loved it. Can’t imagine doing it with a real car though. I came in 10th place out of 20. Eh, oh well. I just didn’t start to get good at it until I had lost a couple of the races.
Once we awarded the winners of the races and were ready to leave to eat dinner, we were all awarded the surprise of Simon’s stag outfit. Understand that Simon is one of the more straight laced sort of guys I know. He has fun, but has a more distinguish wit about him. So to see him dress as a mixture of a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader and Captain America was more than a joyous sight.We started the rest of the evening off at a nasty little pub that smelled like they mopped the floors with vomit. We only stayed there for about 15 minutes before going to our actual dinner location. We were apparently just buying time by being at the puke joint. We ended up at Pizza Express, which seems to be England’s version of Canada’s Boston Pizza, which is Canada’s version of the US’s... well... nothing. We don’t have any restaurant like those... that serve pizza at least.
All and all a fun evening. Getting home became a little tough because Wil and I missed our bus back to the park & ride and were forced to use a taxi: boo! And that was the end of our adventures.
Saturday, April 28, 2007
