Oxford is only an hour and a half train away from London but once you step off that train platform and walk into the university's sprawling campus, which actually is the town of Oxford, you suddenly realize you are in a whole different world. Everywhere you look medieval buildings older that my country are sprinkled around town. The Mayans were still climbing up the steps of Chichen-Itza to pray to the gods of Sun and already students at Oxford were taking lectures in Theology.
The university is over 800 years old and as I walked along the streets, in and out of ancestral college courtyards, medieval chapels and century-old libraries, I wondered what it must feel like for the students currently enrolled to know that within these same very walls Einstein studied science, Halley discovered a comet, Carrol dreamt up an Alice and a white rabbit, Smith toyed with Economics...... that through these walls future Nobel Peace winners and Presidents and award winning writers and poets probably complained about the cafeteria's menu....
I doubt a lot of them studied much History though... what could they have possibly learned back then? History wasn't even written yet !!
I was both fascinated and intimidated by the sheer power and magnificence of those buildings and what they represented, what secrets and stories their walls held, what illustrious names were associated to every possible bench, garden, table, court, window on those grounds...
When I finished high school I didn't really know what I wanted to study nor where I wanted to go so I took a year off to make up my mind. During that year we traveled to Texas to visit my family and during our time there one day my mom drove us to Austin and took us to visit her old alma mater, UT (University of Texas). I remember feeling exactly the same: fascinated, intimidated and fairly certain I did not belong in something so big, so imposing, so huge. I didn't even bother entertaining the idea of applying to UT.
In the end I signed up to and graduated from a University in my hometown with a little over 1,200 enrolled students and a grand total of 17 years of history. And never looked back. I had a grand time there, learned lots, made great friends and still hold that school in a special place in my heart.
But walking in the Bodleian library at Oxford knowing such unique items like the Magna Carta or the Gutenberg Bible were safely kept within those very same walls, and that students holding an Oxford student card had the right to access such treasures, well, I have to admit I did feel a ting of regret... not because I feel I belonged at Oxford (as if!) but mainly because I wondered what it must feel like to know that 800 generation of students probably crossed the same threshold to your dorm room (then again...... eiwww).
I mean, think about it. It must do something to a person's incentive to learn to go do your homework in sixteen-century Radcliff Camera ....
.... or to look out of your dorm room and see the Magdalen Tower, where students were already taking classes in 1264 ....
.... or to take a coffee break in the "vaults" (which probably are real vaults) ....
.... or get from classroom L208 to classroom H204 by crossing the "Bridge of Sighs" .....
.... or to take a short cut through a fifteen-century alley to make it to class in time ....
.... or stay up late at night chatting away with your roommate in your Tudor residence hall ....
.... or work in a science lab that looks something like this .....
As we boarded the train back to London I wondered if my old self, the one who shrank back at the sight of The Tower back in 1997, might have thought differently if she'd know that one day she would go live in a different continent, learn a new language, have the incredible opportunity to travel the globe and see four out of the seven wonders of the world...
... I guess I'll never know.....
Fned.
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