Nerding Out

For the past two days or so, I have officially been nerding out with my new buddy, Geoffrey Chaucer. I mean, The Canterbury Tales and I are becoming quite intimate. For the better part of Sunday, I sprawled out on the floor, pouring over introductory material about the life of Chaucer. Evidently, he had a great reputation as a civil servant, managing taxes over wool, and even worked under the king. With all of his diplomatic prowess, it is no wonder he appealed to a very wide audience with such a subversive poem. And trust me, it's subversive! He is writing in the 1300s where heresy is pretty much gauche in all social circles, lest you want to be burned at the stake. Well, Chaucer, with all the wit he can muster, goes so far to give The Pardoner, a representative of the voice of Rome, a voice that sounds like a goat, which is a common sign of the devil. But what really hammers it home, is that the comparison is made using a rhyming couplet. See, I have never studied Chaucer before in his original language, so working with Middle English is helping me see his work in an entirely new light. Keeping with the example of the Pardoner (my favorite character in The C.T.), let's look at what I mean about Chaucer's rhyme scheme. When he describes the Pardoner coming from Rome and having a goat voice , Chaucer writes that the Pardoner has his bag "bretful of pardoun comen from Rome al hoot, / A voys he hadde as smal as hath a goot" (687-8). There's just something about religiously subversive couplets written in Middle English that makes my skin tingle! I don't actually start my Medieval tutorial until two weeks from now, but I am so excited to discuss Chaucer. Also, as a change of pace, Hayley and I took our readings down to the remarkably sunny Oxford park today. All in all, the week end has been slow, but productive!

Immaculate Morning

This morning was such a brilliant one that I have to blog about it. I made a list of what I needed to get accomplished this morning, which consisted of getting my mobile (the English word for "cell phone") and buying some texts--The Riverside Chaucer and The Poems of Pearl Manuscript. I woke up this morning at 7:15am to a gorgeous overcast sky, got breakfast, and then Hayley and I went into town to run our errands down on Cornmarket Street. I picked up my mobile, and then we went around to Broad Street to Blackwell's Books--this multi-storied book store! It was a little bit of Mecca mixed with Christmas Morning. I found a second hand copy of The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript and my copy of Chaucer, so I was a very happy camper. I have a lot of reading to do before my Medieval Tutorial starts! After Blackwells, Hayley and I decided to walk through Christ Church Meadow before lunch, which was a great walk.





For lunch, Hayley and I met our house director/warden, Dr. Bagley, as well as Danielle for lunch at the gorgeous Radcliffe Camera. There is this restaurant in the cellar of the cathedral of St. Mary the Virgin, which is right next to the Camera, where we ate amazing chicken in this creamy sauce over a bed of salad. The outside tables were by gravestones, since the restaurant is part on cathedral grounds, so in a way, we dined with the dead this afternoon. It was an absolutely fantastic day!

I'm Here and Not Dead!

Hey, everybody, so I finally arrived in Oxford today. It took an eight hour plane ride with some jet-lag, but everything went well. I sat next to this really genial British couple on the plane, and they asked me why I was going to London. I told them I was going to study in Oxford, and they were very excited. I asked them what they were doing in Atlanta, and apparently they went on holiday to the South, catching some sun, seeing the CNN center, and then visiting Charlotte, SC.

After the flight, and after customs, baggage claim, a two hour bus ride, and navigating the center of Oxford with my three heavy bags, I found a taxi that took me to the Spencer House. My fellow students and I had a little more than two hours before we had to meet with Dr. Robson, one of our Oxford tutors and the director of study abroad at Regent's Park. We were pretty hungry after our trip, so we went to this market right around the corner--The Co-op. It was this small place will relatively inexpensive food. We have to shop for groceries about every other day because British refrigerators are smaller that those in America, plus seven people have to share the one in the Spencer House. Well, we brought our own bags (the respectable way to grocery shop in Oxford) and perused their goods. I kind of freaked out a little bit because I felt so out of place. I felt like I was in the way of everybody else, and I was so ready to just run back and hide in the Spencer House. But, I didn't! We stayed and shopped and checked out and kicked Culture Shock's butt. Yeah, I feel kind of proud right now--proud, and kind of jet-lagged. Tomorrow I'll take on more British shops as I learn to navigate Oxford! Wish me luck!

Almost Gone

It's official.
I have my visa.
I have my e-ticket, itinerary, and boarding pass.
I have a window seat.
I have a case of the nerves.
I leave tonight, 9:15pm, and will wake up in London in the morning.
I am hours from gone.

An Introduction

Hello, my name is Jarred Wiehe, and you have found the beginning of an electronic chronicle (um, an electronicle?) of my upcoming academic year. IN ENGLAND! Right now, I am a third year English major at Columbus State University, which basically means I'm a Southern word-nerd/tweed-dweeb.
I will be spending this year abroad, studying British Literature at Oxford, and I want to document my growth as a student, scholar, and person, so this blog came into being. I'm thinking of it as a bildungsroman--a self-developement novel--only in blog form. A bildungsblog? (And, like my favorite self-developement novel, The Catcher in the Rye, this blog will probably be very stream-of-consciousness.) Anyway, I want to present an honest experience of crossing cultures, specifically looking at the differences in higher education between the United States and Great Britain, as well as the daily challenges and rewards of living in another world.
I had a rough time thinking of a name for this experience, and I finally came up with "The Way He Travels." When I pitched this name to a friend, she enthusiastically responded, "Yes! I love it! I mean, how many people's last names are homophonous with 'way he,' right?" I'm glad she approved; I'm also glad she used "homophonous" in a sentence. I hope you will follow me on this transcontinental journey, and vicariously experience the way I travel. Please leave me any comments, questions or concerns that you may have--really, I'm like a suggestions box. Well, the UPS man has just arrived with my visa, which is good because I leave in one week!