The Coolest Thing Since Sliced Bread

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the coolest thing since sliced bread. Or at least in the top ten. It's a hand dryer. But it's not just any hand dryer. This machine dries every drop of water from your hands in a matter of seconds. Just insert your hands, pull slowly out, and voila! No need to stand under a hand dryer with weak airflow, chafing your hands together vigorously and pressing the "on" button again and again, convinced that the only thing the machine is actually achieving is warming up the air-conditioned bathroom and drowning out the ambiance music, then eventually losing patience and wiping the still very present excess water off on your jeans. No sir, no ma'am. This Ferrari of a hand-drying device gets the job done in a way that makes you feel like James Bond every time you go to the loo: high-tech and efficient with an underlying aura of superiority.

Moving on...

Highland Fling

The following weekend found me in Scotland with Emily (my friend from back home) and her twin sister, Juliana. Juliana is currently studying abroad at St. Andrews University.


Emily and I in front of West Port gate, one of the few surviving Scottish city gates. It was erected in 1589!

We stopped for ice cream. I had banoffee flavored ice cream, a delicious combination of banana and toffee that is a common dessert flavor in the UK.
St. Andrews Cathedral, or what is left of it. The large round patches of stone are where the pillars stood in the nave.

The graveyard of St. Andrews cathedral, as shot from the "inside" of the church.

Parts of St. Andrews castle. The Scots were pretty hard on their architecture!

The North Sea, as seen from the base of the castle.


Emily caught unawares, looking quite like...


Keira Knightly, a la Pride and Prejudice.


The spot where Patrick Hamilton was executed in 1528. Patrick Hamilton was a student at St. Andrews University. He became a Protestant Reformer and was the first martyr in the Scottish Reformation to be burned at the stake heresy. It's believed that you won't graduate if you step on the initials. Therefore you see a lot of students shortly after graduation hopping and dancing on top of the stones.


No one knows how this face appeared in the wall above the PH. Legend has it that when Patrick Hamilton died, his soul flew up toward heaven but collided with the wall and never made it up there.

A Pictish cemetery on Hallow Hill, c. 5th-9th century CE.

A beautiful view of the North Sea from a coastline trail somewhere between St. Andrews and Pittenweem.

This is the quaint fishing town of Anstruther, home to the Anstruther Fish Bar, a delectable "wee chippy" that won the Seafish "Best Fish and Chips in the UK" award, according to the Times. I believe it--they were delicious!

Juliana in front of the coolest wall in town. It's a mosaic made entirely out of seashells. A few have fallen off, as you can see, but it's still fun to look at. Also interesting to note: about three out of every four houses that I saw in Scotland had their own names. People etch them into the glass or mantle above their doorway. This one doesn't have a name on display, but it's so unique that you can bet it has its own local moniker.


This is the entrance to St. Fillan's cave. St. Fillan was an 8th-century hermit (and son of Irish royalty) who whiled away his years in this cave by writing sermons by the light of his luminous left arm. He's now the patron saint of the mentally ill. Go figure.

Me admiring the inside of the cave. So roomy and cozy!


The deep recesses of the cave. No, that's not a patch of Godlight, that's a bulb put in by the owners. Good thing St. Fillan had a handy-dandy glowing arm. It's dark in there!

Down the Rabbit Hole

I'm baaaack! I've had many adventures in the past (ouch--was it really a month and a half?), and enough photographs to wallpaper Versailles. Here we have the beginning of my adventures: Oxford!

Oxford is amazing. I'm even more in love with it than Cambridge, and I hardly thought that possible. It has a much more consistently older feel than Cambridge. Cambridge has very old buildings mixed with very modern ones. Oxford blends the two together much more nicely. Furthermore, Oxford caters to the liberal arts majors (like me!), whereas Cambridge focuses more on mathematics and sciences.

Oxford is comprised of 38 separate colleges, and still operates under a (slightly modified and updated) medieval tutorial system. In other words, students mostly get one-on-one time with their advisers rather than sitting in lecture halls with 50 to 100 of their best friends.

Oxford is the oldest surviving university in the English-speaking world. Teaching began in the 1000s, but it didn't blossom until 1167, when King Henry II banned English students from attending the University of Paris. Some riots broke out between the students and the townies in 1209 and several of the students fled to Cambridge, where they proceeded to set up Cambridge University.


St. John's College is the oldest college, and has a propensity for spitting out future Prime Ministers. Twenty-five prime ministers have graduated from Oxford to date, along with thirty international leaders, twenty Archbishops of Canterbury, fifty Olympic medalists, and twelve saints. (N.B.--I have no idea if this is a picture of St. John's College or not; the photos got a bit jumbled. I stuck this one in the blog because it was pretty.)


This is a photo of one of the courtyards of King's College. It is here that J.R.R. Tolkien first began writing the hobbit. He and his buddy, C.S. Lewis, along with a group of literary friends who called themselves the Inklings, would go down to the Eagle and Child pub, get absolutely wasted, and concoct stories together. Then during the daytime, when they were sobered up and not teaching students, they would write out the ideas they'd hatched the night before.


This is the Radcliffe Camera, part of the Bodleian Library. The Bodleian Library has at least one copy of every book ever printed in the UK. Some of the books are so old that they are chained to the walls for security purposes. And as you walk across Radcliffe Square, tread carefully--the majority of the library is underground!

Here is Christ Church College, popularly known for Alice and Wonderland and Harry Potter. Oxford has a rather impressive register of names of famous authors who have attended the university, including Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Lewis Carroll, T.S. Eliot, John Donne, Percy Shelley, Robert Graves, and Samuel Johnson, to name just a few. T.E. Lawrence attended Jesus College as an undergraduate and All Souls as a postgrad, and it was there that he wrote the Seven Pillars of Wisdom.This is one of the outer courtyards of Christ Church College. It was here that Alice Liddell, the daughter of the Dean of Christ Church College, would play with her cat Dinah.

Her father's friend and colleague, Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a.k.a. Lewis Carroll, would often take Alice and her two older sisters on outings when their parents were busy.

The dining hall at Christ Church College. At the far left end, near the professors' table, is a small doorway that the dean of Christ Church college would disappear through after the meal was over. This way, the dean could leave dinner early to attend to business (especially when he was late for a very important date) without having to wade through the long rows of students. Alice Liddell's father, when he was dean, referred to the door as the "rabbit-hole."

The contents of that rabbit hole are looking awfully scholarly.

But wait! I've seen that dining hall before! Here it is...

And there it is again! (Give or take a few candles)


Yep. Christ Church College dining hall served as the inspiration for the Hogwarts dining hall in the Harry Potter movies. They didn't use the actual dining hall (it was too dark, only had three tables instead of four, and the ceiling looked way too solid), but they modeled the studio one after it.

Here's another familiar sight:

Miss M on the staircase...


McGonagall on the staircase, waiting to greet the soon-to-be-sorted first years. Maybe my photo would look more impressive if I had the hat.


Now, it's all well and good to write that Harry Potter has a lightning-shaped scar on his forehead and not go into any further detail than that. It leaves something to the reader's imagination. But that doesn't work so well for Hollywood, when the makeup mistress on the movie set is pestering the author about what exact sort of lightning bolt it is. Is it a crackling one? A very zig-zaggy one? What sort of eyeliner-pencil design should be scratched onto Daniel Radcliffe's forehead?

Well, to tell the truth, J.K. Rowling wasn't all that sure herself. What did the lightning bolt scar look like, precisely? She stewed, pondered, tossed and turned over the question, but still had no answer, and the makeup mistress was getting rather antsy. So J.K. Rowling popped down to Oxford to see a friend for the weekend and maybe get some inspiration. There she was, wandering about Oxford, racking her brain for a design, when she looked down at her feet and saw...


the perfect lightning bolt, etched into the stones outside the Sheldonian Theatre. Presto!


Now, if only I can magic my way into Oxford's graduate program...