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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 many. They…

(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 roommates arrived in…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

One of my Subway lessons taught me that these new people did not prioritize convenience in the way I did. I believe this to be the most difficult lesson for Americans in particular–a culture so focused on making things faster and easier and then a little faster and even easier–to learn when moving overseas. At…

Subway in England comforted me. During my first Oxford adventure–studying abroad for a semester in 2006–my friends and I once walked 45 minutes just to eat there and feel like we were at home. Oxford has other American chains such as McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, KFC and Burger King, but since I never go to those…