A Peculiar, Uncanny, Bizarre, Spontaneous, and Ridiculous Life of an Adventurer: The end of the first week of class.....

Although it's only Thursday, I am able to claim that I survived the first week of classes. Thankfully it really hasn't been all that bad, I'm only in class from 10am until about 3pm on average with an hour lunch break in between. The only factor that makes it a little rough is that we are cramming 16 of us into a fairly small room. I really don't have room to complain all that bad though because after all, I am studying at Oxford! We had two guest lectures this week that spoke to us during out Decision Making class, both provided their own theory of the proper process to make decisions. Without getting into too much detail that will bore you to death, I'll only say that one of the lecturers loved mathematical functions to solve for the correct and most efficient decision and the other looked at things from more of a probability standpoint, therefore putting a lot of human instincts into his theory of decision making. I don't know if any of that made any sense nor do I know if it was worth trying to explain without boring you, but there it is, my class!

Besides class, the rest of the time is spent either hanging out, exploring the city, or doing homework. A fact that I didn't know prior to my arrival is since Oxford University is so old, the city is pretty much built around what would be considered the university. This means that there really isn't much of a campus, but rather a collection of specific buildings that can be found throughout the city depend on what "college" you are attending within the university. It's a beautiful place with everything being so old and cultural thanks to a university town. The way ourprogram is set up is we are provided breakfast and lunch on the weekdays and a dinner Monday through Wednesday. This week's menu consisted of an awesome local pub Monday night, Indian food on Tuesday, and Italian food last night. All of the food was amazing, the program director is doing a great job finding the good places and arranging for everything to be in order upon arrival. In about three hours I will be heading to the bus stop that will take the group to London for the day tomorrow where we will be touring the mentioned places in my previous blog entry. It should be a great day spent in a great city!

As for this weekend though is where the next bit of excitement will come from. A few of us will be making out way into Dublin, Ireland via train and ferry tomorrow night. After we finish up an entire day of tours and good food, we will head to a train station that will take us from London to Holyhead, Wales, where we will then catch a ferry that will take us straight into Dublin. It should be an amazing time, as of now the only thing that is a must do on my list is to of course tour the Guinness Brewery and drink lots of Guinness. I love Guinness, but my real reason for falling in love with the drink was when my flight that was returning from my year deployment in Afghanistan made an hour pit stop at the Shannon Airport in Ireland, we bought some Guinness and it was amazing. I love Guinness, but Guinness from Ireland is a completely different drink. My own father, who tends to be more of a lighter beer drinker said that he only drank Guinness in Wales during my parent's stay because it was so different. None the less, I love both American and Irish Guinness, but I really really love Irish Guinness. So after that long introduction to my life of Guinness, I think I will move on to the next paragraph.....haha I think I will call it quits for now. Look forward to at least another post sometime early next week that will go into the details of the Dublin trip and our fun journey throughout England and Wales to get there. I hope that this finds everyone well and thank you LeAnn, Crystal and Tiffany for your comments! I'm so glad to hear that people are enjoying the writing! I will do my best not to ramble on for too long each post!! Have a great weekend! And now for the pictures...

A view of one of the churches