Today marks my third day at BADA, and while I regret to say that I have not yet acquired my own cool accent, met David Beckham, become best friends with Alex Day, or seduced a member of the British royal family, I HAVE...

1. not yet been run over by a car (and while this may sound rudimentary, any of my friends in the US will tell you that it's hard enough for me when the traffic goes the normal way),
2. been given a free, legal sample of some sort of alcoholic beverage,
3. conversed with a BADA faculty member who refers to Maggie Smith fondly as "Megala,"
4. located excellent Thai food,
5. and three Pret a Mangers in a one-mile radius,
6. managed to dress somewhat appropriately for the weather,
7. caught up on So You Think You Can Dance (not a Britain-related activity, but VERY VERY important), and
8. gained Arthur Weasley levels of British plug knowledge.

If you're wondering why so little of this is acting-related, it's because classes at BADA don't begin until tomorrow. We learned the groups that we'll be with for the next four weeks today, and by total happy accident I'm with my friends Anna and Josh from NU. There's definitely a Northwestern Mafia presence here - seven of us - and anyone who has someone else here from their acting class is in a group with the person from their acting class. I don't know what the odds of that are, but I'm guessing pretty minuscule. Of course, I've also concluded that this place is magical, so all normal bets are off.

Anyway, we've had the weekend to sort of run around doing whatever we want. The only all-BADA event so far was dinner on the first night, which was preceded by a free drinks reception on the lawn of our castle. On the first day of college in the US, you're immediately bombarded with videos and presentations and lectures about how Drinking Is Bad, If You Drink You WILL Get Pregnant And Die, etc., and on the first day of summer acting school in Britain everyone's all, come! have free champagne! Tonight is our formal welcome dinner, and it is preceded by - you guessed it - drinks.

I'm beginning to wonder if "high tea" doesn't actually, you know, refer to tea.

I did the pub thing last night and the night before with NU friends, and even though I'm two years over the drinking age here, it still feels like I shouldn't even be allowed in. Of course, I still run into #shitlikethis:

Bartender: The kitchen's closed.
Me: Oh, I'm still deciding what I want.
Bartender: It's after 10. The kitchen's closed.
Me:
Me:
Me:
Me:

And then Anna, Josh, and I left for a different pub. The place where we ended up was next to the place where we really should have been - Copa, which was filled with drunk, dancing people undoubtedly looking for a random snog and playing music you could hear across the street. So why weren't we there? Oh, because it was casually the kind of place where people in cocktail dresses enter after emerging from fancy cars. We were clearly underdressed and probably outclassed. But I still wanted to check it out, so I went, "Guys, come on, let's just take a gander at it." And the bouncer just held up a hand like, honey, don't even think about it.

Clearly, I have not yet developed British sophistication. But I'm working on it.

Anyway, pubs are very prevalent here. Less prevalent are gyms. I discovered this when Josh and I walked around for two hours yesterday looking for a reasonably-priced way to stay fit (in the American sense) and fit (in the English sense). The closest one to Magdalen College, where we're staying, no longer exists. A short membership at LA Fitness costs about $200. Our only other option was over a mile away - which I know because we walked most of the way there.

So our quest did not lead us to a gym, but it did lead us somewhere better: to Christ Church, another college at Oxford.

Reasons Christ Church is famous
1. The Cathedral is gorgeous:

(iPod took these because I didn't have my camera with me.)

2. It has a bell called Great Tom that strikes 101 times at 9:05 every night (luckily, Magdalen is too far away for this to piss me off).

3. It was the school and home of Charles Dodgson, better immortalized in pop culture as Lewis Carroll, author of Alice In Wonderland. And Alice was real! She was one of the children of Christ Church's then-dean. His relationship with the dean's kids was sort of akin to J.M. Barrie and the Llewelyn Davies kids - Dodgson told them stories about Wonderland, and, famously, made Alice the star of them. The stained glass windows in Christ Church's dining hall are filled with Wonderland imagery, which is an awesome surprise when you're expecting cherubs, or whatever.

4. This:




which, by the way, is also



this - oh, and

5. This:

<

which is where



this happened, and

6. This:



which casually inspired



this.

You know. Whatever.

I went here on my Unofficial Harry Potter Tour of Britain ten years ago, and while I hope to have changed in some ways since then, my thought process at Christ Church was pretty much identical.

Oh my God, Hogwarts is real.
Where is my Hogwarts letter.
This is where Harry learned to fly!
This place is amazing.
THE STAIRS I'M ABOUT TO GET SORTED.
How did they edit out the white marks on the stairs in the movies?
THE GREAT HALL.
I'm thirsty.
I want pumpkin juice.

Even excluding Christ Church's pop cultural significance, it's still amazing to be in a place where so many things have happened that mattered, and continue to matter. There's a gravitas possessed by these places and Europe that doesn't totally exist in the States.

Also, they name things correctly here. For example: in Illinois, I live near a place called Deer Park. Deer Park is having an identity crisis. It has its own zip code, like a town, but as far as I know the only area in Deer Park is a mall of the same name. I attribute Deer Park's confusion to its misnomering; it very clearly contains neither deer nor a park. So when I looked at the map of Magdalen College and saw a Deer Park, I was like, okay, whatever, it's probably a meadow at best.

But no.

You guys.

It's a park.

With deer.

And not just one deer, like you occasionally see lost in the woods at home.


A HERD of deer.

This is where I ran this morning. Around a castle. Among deer.

Did I mention this place is magical?