Formal Hall & Week in Oxford

So on Tuesday night we had a "Formal Hall" for Georgia Tech, a tradition that apparently goes back several hundred years here at Oxford. Basically all of the students wear their best clothes, all the professors wear robes, and everyone gets together for a very fancy meal. The most interesting parts were the toasts initiated by our program leaders--we toasted everyone from the Queen to the head of the Porters (like campus security) to the food staff to all of our professors. We finished out the evening with a rousing chorus of "The Ramblin' Wreck" (Georgia Tech's fight song), which I must say has A LOT of words, especially considering it was originally written as a drinking song. I much prefer the greatest fight song of all time (according to John Philip Sousa)... at least I know all the words to that one! :-)

Other than that, life has been kind of quiet around here... since we only have one more week of class left, there's a lot of studying and paper-writing to be done. I'm writing my final paper for Computing Ethics on the ethical and security implications of the RFID chips in the new e-passports, and it turns out that there's a HUGE amount of controversy around the issue that I didn't even know about. It's really interesting, although writing an APA-formatted paper is never that much fun. I'm just not the biggest fan of parenthetical citations, not gonna lie.

Other exciting events of the week include me finishing up my penicillin and getting over my tonsillitis, as well as my laptop charger breaking. I now have a new Apple charging brick with British adapters, which will clearly be very useful to me in life. Oh well. Kathryn and I also went to see "The Hangover" last night for our weekly movie date, which was HILARIOUS. I wasn't sure that I was going to like it, but I'd definitely recommend it.

So we're heading to London tomorrow morning for our last full weekend in the UK, and it should be really fun. I'm going to see "Jersey Boys" in the West End on Friday night while my friends go to see "Hairspray" (since I've already seen it), and other than that it's just going to be lots of sightseeing. On Tuesday night Uncle Bob is going to be coming to Oxford for dinner, which should also be very nice. Other than that, I have class all next week, finals on Friday and Saturday, and then I fly back to Boston Sunday afternoon! Geez... time flies.

Anyway, back to work. Have a great weekend, everyone!

Dara

This pic: The girls all dressed up for Formal Hall. From left: Andrea, me, Jasmin, and Kathryn