Amelia's Outrageous Adventures: The Last Week in Oxford: It's hard to say goodbye

I’ve been very busy since Rachel left, but unfortunately I’ve been busy with schoolwork, so nothing worth talking about, unless you really enjoy hearing about International Business Transactions. This week I got to do some fun things during my study breaks. I finally made plans to meet up with a girl I studied abroad with in Paris, two and a half years ago. She’s getting a masters’ degree at UCL in Medieval Literature. It was great to catch up, although it made me very sad to talk to her and realize that in two and a half years, I’ve lost contact with almost everyone I knew in Paris. In a few years, I probably won’t be in contact with anyone from this program, either. I don’t deal well with goodbyes, and thinking about this just made it harder to say goodbye.

I also was having a hard time handling the idea that this was my last trip to London, and finally I got a great idea! I went to the Royal Opera House to see if they had day seats for that night’s performance. They did, and I got to sit in row J of the stalls for 15 pounds! That’s normally a 300 pound seat! I saw Rigoletto, and it was amazing! I’d rather not spoil the plot for you, but I took away two important lessons: listen to your father, and, most importantly, never trust Italian men!

I had to run to catch my train, which was probably a good thing, because I was too busy running to be sad about leaving London for the last time. I’m forever going to believe in the magic of London. London is the place you go and you don’t know how you’re going to spend your evening because you’re stressed about exams and you’re tired and grouchy, and then you get row J seats to the best opera company in the world doing a wonderful opera and life just feels so magical and perfect! London is one of those places where sometimes, absolutely everything goes right. I’m going to miss the adventure, but at least this was a great way to say goodbye. If I ever win the lottery, I’ll be on the next flight to Paris, and I’ll live there, and spend my weekends in London.

The Royal Opera House

Anyway, I spent two days talking about how I was never going to see London again, and then Thursday afternoon I got an email offering student standby tickets for the Royal Opera House’s La Fille du Regiment on Saturday afternoon! I’d never even considered seeing theatre on Saturday, because our farewell dinner is on Friday night, and farewells in Oxford tend to go on well into the night, but I got a front-row dead centre seat for ten pounds, so I couldn’t pass that up. The magic of London lives on. (also, this opera is in French, which should be cool. I usually only understand less than ten Italian words per opera, so I’m interested to see if I’ll be able to understand more words in a French opera. I’ve been told that even for a native speaker, it’s hard to understand words when they’re being sung in an opera)

I also said goodbye to Stratford-upon-Avon in style, as I went to two plays on Thursday, a matinee of Comedy of Errors and an evening performance of Twelfth Night. It was a great day! I got the third-to-last student ticket for Comedy and the last student ticket for Twelfth Night. Unfortunately, my seat for Twelfth Night was rather uncomfortable, so I employed the baseball rule and moved to a better, unoccupied seat at intermission. This had the unintended result that I sat in all three levels of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in one day: stalls, circle, and upper circle. I’ve also now seen all three of the shipwreck plays, the third being The Tempest, which I saw about three weeks ago with Rachel. The Royal Shakespeare Company was amazing, as always. I don’t really care for Comedy of Errors, as it’s generally ridiculous, but they definitely drew out some of the darker themes of violence and torture. There were some definite references to current events, as one of the characters was waterboarded, and at one point the jailers took a thumbs-up, smiling photo with a prisoner they were torturing. It was an interesting juxtaposition with the farce that is the rest of the play. Twelfth Night was so-so in the first act, but in the second, Malvolio’s appearance with his yellow stockings cross-gartered had the audience laughing for about five minutes. He had to wait for everyone to quiet down so he could say his lines. The crazy thing is that Malvolio was played by the same actor who played Prospero in the Tempest. Somehow I just take for granted that these actors are good at their roles, but it especially drives it home to see someone play such a comedic role three weeks after I’ve seen him perform a dramatic one.

As much as I sometimes detest law school, I think it’s given me a finer appreciation for the things in my life that aren’t law school. Everything seems more fun when you compare it to studying, and I’ve had to do so much studying in the past two weeks that I make sure to make my study breaks count. I’d rather go to an opera and study at intermission than forgo the opera and waste the time anyway by procrastinating.

I did go to the opera on Friday, and it was really cool! I’ve never been able to see the orchestra before, and I appreciated that almost more than I appreciated the opera. I was a little bit disappointed by the costumes, as it is a comic opera about a girl who was raised by a regiment of soldiers, and she spends most of the opera wearing overalls. Still, the opera was humorous, and I enjoyed it, although I did yawn once or twice, since I haven’t gotten a good night’s sleep in days, because of exam stress and the farewell dinner.

Here are some photos from the farewell dinner. I'm really going to miss my friends: