Corpus Christi

When I studied a few months at Oxford, I was associated with Corpus Christi College. I loved the place. My time at Oxford was filled with mystery and magic. Indeed, I lived in a house that had 48 residents and 50-some staircases. Nobody could find her way around that place for the first week. There were rumors about secret passageways and shortcuts to the laundry room, the library, the music room. It was such a great place. My bedroom even had a fireplace.

The city itself was enchanting. I visited a pub built in 1242, climbed Carfax tower, and registered with the Bodleian library. It houses every single book published in Britain since the 1600s. In fact, they measure their collection of books in miles. To gain access to the library, we had to take an oath in front of a black-robed judge-like person. Quite the experience.

I took an Oxford tutorial on Philosophy of Religion. Despite only meeting 8 times for 1-2 hour sessions, it challenged me the most of all my philosophy classes. Each week, I read anywhere from 5-15 texts and wrote a paper. At the tutorial, I read my paper aloud and in the style of the Socratic method, I had to defend my arguments from objections by the professor (tutorials only have one student per professor). It was a fantastic way to learn philosophy, and I focused my attention on arguments for and against the existence of a God as well as the relationship between God, language, and meaning.

Ah, I miss England - Sainsbury's, Ben's cookies, pasties, the reduced Shakespeare company, Countdown, High Street, Ahmed's kebab vans... It was fantastic studying in a whole different place; it really felt like an excursion into something mythical. I built some of my best friendships there and developed some of my core philosophical beliefs.