MrsHughey.com

What we've been up to

Sorry for the long delay in entries. I have no excuse. Just lazy I guess.

Christmas eve we were invited to have dinner with our Uzbekistani housemate, Inessa. Her husband is visiting England for a few days (their child is still in Uzbekistan with her mother) and she prepared a really lovely meal for us. She's a Russian national, but grew up in Uzbekistan where she studied Japanese and eventually became a translator and lived in Japan for a while. Then she decided to pursue post-graduate studies here in Oxford, again in Japanese. So she speaks fluent Russian, Japanese, English and French. It's pretty amazing.

After that we were going to head into town for the 11:00 church service at St. Mary's, the University's official church. Unfortunately, it was pouring and the busses weren't running. So we would have had to walk 30 minutes in the pouring rain in our dress clothes, then spend half an hour at church and walk back. We decided to skip it and read/pray at home.

On Christmas day we woke up around 9 and exchanged gifts. We also opened the gifts my mom sent us. It was really nice. Mom sent us clothes and household stuff. Great and very practical! Andrew was very generous and shopped really carefully, so I got lots of stuff and it turns out he didn't spend as much as I thought. He gave me a tea cozy, a few nice books, the Buffy "Once More with Feeling" soundtrack and script book, and the two collest gifts: a day at a London spa and VCD's of this season's 10 Buffy episodes (all those that have aired so far!). WOW! I was pretty much floored by both of those. After a brief freak-out about how much money he must have spent, he explained to me that he actually didn't spend that much, and I was all ::drool, drool::.

Unfortunately, we didn't have time to watch Buffy that morning because we had been invited to friends' (another couple from Hertford's MCR) flat for lunch. She is an associate member of the MCR like me and also a vegetarian. He is a grad student. They're from South Africa and had two other friends over for lunch, too. So around 11 we set out for college. We were going to ride our bikes, but mine had a low tire and we don't have a pump (please don't email me offering advice or a pump; we'll get one). So we decided to walk. We walked to the college where we dropped off our computers for the planned 6:00 chat with my family, then headed the rest of the way to their flat. It was about a 45-minute walk from college, so quite long. Fortunately, the weather and scenery were nice.

Their flat is university-owned and quite far out on the edge of town. We enjoyed some conversation and traditional English Christmas "Crackers." Crackers are these wrapped cardboard tubes which you pull on and they pop like a firecracker. Then little prizes come out (you get a joke, a paper crown, and some kind of Crackerjack-like plastic toy). The food was, again, awesome. Camilla made a lentil loaf and there were potatoes and cranberry sauce and veggies and - YUM! After lunch we enjoyed traditional Christmas pudding, conversation about various things from Christmas decorations to education to vegetarianism. Then we managed to fit in a game of "Cluedo" (it's Clue, just the English version which is only slightly different) before walking back to college.

I got online and waited for my family to arrive. I'd emailed them that I'd try to be on from 6 until 10 my time. Nobody showed up until about 7. My sister and I chatted and Dad and my aunt Georgann showed up for a bit. I was REALLY tired by about 8, but stayed on as long as I could. Again, the busses weren't running, so at 10 we packed it in and walked home. I was really beat by the time we got home, but we stayed up and watched the first two episodes of Buffy anyway. We both wanted to watch more, but held off.

Boxing Day is December 26. I am told that it's traditionally the day you give a Christmas box of gifts to your postman, grocer, etc. Around Oxford, shops are as closed down on Boxing Day as they are on Christmas iteself - maybe more so! Of course, the Hugheys didn't realize this because we spent until about 4 p.m. in our cave watching 6 more episodes of Buffy. We are SO loving this! So we were pretty hungry by that time and were going to order pizza (didn't want to eat out because we wanted to be home to watch more Buffy!). Anyway, we decided instead of calling to order (because we have never ordered delivery pizza here before and the store is only 5 minutes away), we'd go to the supermarket and pick up a frozen one and some garlic bread or something.

So we headed over to Summertown and there was NOTHING open. Darn! No restaurants (which are often open on Christmas, even), no supermarket, no newsagents. Nada! The ONLY thing open was the off-license (liquor store). So we went in there and picked up two bottles of water and some chips and went back home to eat unhealthy foods and watch the remaining episodes of Buffy. I managed to scrape together a pasta dinner, too.

This season of Buffy - EXCELLENT so far! Really awesome! I don't want to talk a lot about it on the site, though. I hate talking too much about it with anybody other than Andrew. I'm really weird about some stuff like that. I also can't stand watching Buffy with anybody other than Andrew and maybe like Evan or somebody who's a good friend. Anyway, it's GOOD. Unfortunately, Andrew and I have some sad theories (sad story-wise, not sad lack-of-imagination-wise) about what's going on, but we hope to see they don't pan out.

Let's see, on Friday we came back down to the college and I worked on the novel. Andrew did a bit of studying and a bit of playing on his computer.

Yesterday we headed to London where I went to a lovely day spa and enjoyed being thoroughly pampered. I got some very nice, relaxing treatments including my favourite: a facial. If you've never had a facial, I highly recommend you try to get one. It's more relaxing than a massage, in my opinion. I've had a few and LOVE them. Then we wandered around Oxford Circus (that's a street in London) and looked in the shops a bit before heading back to Oxford.

I still have a few days off before returning to work on the 2nd. No major plans for New Year's or anything. My sister's birthday is tomorrow, so Happy Birthday, Kim!

Posted by Erin at December 29, 2002 05:30 PM