The above slideshow depicts various pictures from a recent trip my dad and younger sister, Sara, made to visit me (and James Taylor and Carole King) in Nashville. That week with my dad made me feel so adult: I chose the restaurants and activities, made reservations and suggested faster routes, I hosted for a few days and then dropped them…

I can’t resist. I have to retell the lessons I learned about dating in the UK. At the risk of getting too personal on my blog and at the risk of offending many a English male, this stuff was just too fascinating to glaze over as if it were not a part of my British experience. So fascinating…

The English are expert walkers. They’re just good at it and know how to enjoy it. While we here in the States are good “power walkers,” I admire the English for their rambling: a term for a long nature walk (or that is how I’ve self-defined it), which is a common pastime for…

(I’m no foodie and have no intention of making this a foodie blog, but here’s my foodie opinion on England.) I don’t know if it’s a tragedy, disappointment or just down right luck that I spent a year in England without trying the very English dish of Beans on Toast. My American…

As mentioned in previous post, I have the type of hair that responds to the elements. If the elements are humid, my hair rebels against the half hour I spent straightening it with my flat iron that morning. And England was often humid, well, England was often raining which equals ultimate humidity. So riding a bike/walking everywhere meant my…

Disclaimer: the above picture was not the bike I used in Oxford (unfortunately). Somehow over the course of a full year in which I spent more time on a bike than I ever thought I would, in which my beautiful, old and used, high handle-barred blue beauty of a bike became practically one with me, somehow I managed to…

I was extremely nervous before my first class of graduate school. Not only was it graduate school, but it was graduate school in a foreign country. For all I knew, in England they expected their students to walk around reciting Shakespearean sonnets or give impromptu speeches in the courtyard about the parallels of Ulysses and The Odyssey. (I also assumed…

This post will be short and simple. The English love tea. I don’t have much else to say about it, but I can’t glaze over that important and deeply ingrained tradition as I reflect on my English lessons. For a while, I insisted the English love for tea was a direct parallel to the United States…

In my last post I mentioned having learned to “contain myself when possible” within the first few months, probably weeks, of moving to Oxford. The English, I noted, are not a particularly loud bunch. (Kate Fox refers to English mildness as a key social characteristic in her Watching the English.) And I am not a particularly loud person…