Flash back to that double-date that I mentioned once and then never brought up again.

Yeah, there was a reason for that, which was that it was really remarkably uneventful. My roommate and I had some (actually quite delicious) burgers (and milkshakes ohmygod the milkshakes… salted caramel… oops can you tell the highlight was the food?) with a couple full-time St Catz students, shared some awkward conversation, played a game of pool and then went our separate ways. They were sweet people, and we still say hello when we pass each other on campus, it was just not the ideal getting-to-know-someone situation.

Most of our other friends who were visiting students had similar experiences, including difficulty getting an in-depth conversation started with their British counterparts. As we recounted stories, this somehow led to the decision that should we ever be at a complete loss as to conversation topics again, CLEARLY the obvious solution is to (enthusiastically, to the point of being maniacal) ask “Do you like dragons?!?”

This has since become our catch-phrase, a go-to at those moments when group conversation comes to an inexplicable, or sometimes blatantly uncomfortable, halt.

I do, in fact, really like dragons.

The point of this story is that I went to Wales this weekend.

Wales has a dragon on its flag.

…

so…

d’you like dragons?!

Wales was pretty cool. I’ve been very impressed with the activities that IFSA-Butler has planned for us while abroad, and Adventure Weekend was no exception. They managed to get about 200 visiting students from all over England to the middle-of-nowhere Wales, where we took over an entire hotel for a couple nights and got to enjoy the cold, rainy, windy weather and participate in some cold, rainy, windy activities.

I actually loved the activities I got placed in, both of which involved lots of time being in the air. 😀 In the morning I did a high ropes course– we did have harnesses, but taking on the heights in a blustering, misty wind with bare hands was certainly a challenge.

(Ropes course from afar, the spider web climb)

(X-ropes and wobbly blocks)

(Skinny log and tippy balancing beam bridge. Yes these are the official names of the different ropes course challenges.)

In the afternoon, I headed over to an old slate mine, climbed down into the depths, and went on this awesome giant trampoline-net-play structure thing. Like, I can’t even describe it– it was a bunch of bouncy nets that you leapt around on, with ladders to climb up to get to higher levels and chutes to slide down to lower levels. One of my fellow jumpers described it best: it was like being 5 years old again.

 

 

All of the pictures of it look like a rave, because everyone was in constant motion and the lighting was crazy… so here are a couple videos!

Bounce Below 2

Bounce Below 1

We got back in time for dinner at the hotel (I can’t say the food was outstanding, but they were feeding 200 rambunctious Americans, so I give them props for making an effort). After dinner we headed down to the pub for some drinks (I found that I actually enjoy a Ginger Whiskey, which my friend from Kentucky introduced me to before downing three of them) and stopped by the party they threw, which was fun, but I left a little early to get a start on the reading I needed to finish for this week– because it’s 8th week! I can’t believe an entire term has passed so quickly. I’ll be writing two essays in the next four days, and then I’m… done with my first term at Oxford. I’ll have written over 80 pages of academic writing in the last 8 weeks. That is an absurd amount of writing, and I don’t even want to calculate how many pages of reading I’ve done. In some ways, Oxford has been less academically challenging than I expected, but looking back on it I suppose I have actually done a pretty impressive amount of work.

On our way back to Oxford we stopped by a small seaside town for one more taste of the cold, rainy, windy Welsh air.

I went shopping for gifts for all my friends back at Catz, who, even though it was only three days, I’d found myself missing a lot. I think we are all very ready for a break, but going from seeing my friends here every single day to not seeing them for six weeks is going to be hard. And I can’t even think about what it’s going to be like at the end of next term.

I came back from Wales with a lot of great photos, excitement about checking another country off my list, stress about my unfinished school work, and exhaustion after a weekend packed full of activities. But the thing I think that stuck with me the most was my realization of how much I appreciate the people I’ve met here, and how quickly I’ve come to really care about them. So, shout out to all of you amazing people who I have slowly been getting to know. You are truly, truly wonderful, and I’m so happy to have met you all.

And um…

Doyouguyslikedragons?? Because I brought back souvenirs. 😉

So, many of my friends know that ever since I took the Myers-Briggs personality test in freshman year of college, I have been oddly obsessed with personality types. (If you’d like to take the test, you can also find a relatively accurate free online test here: http://www.16personalities.com/).

I couldn’t say exactly what it is about Myers-Briggs that fascinates me, because I usually find stuff like this way overly generalizing/arbitrary. I’ve often told people how I feel like everyone seems to speak in a different language, even within English, because each word has a different set of connotations, and each person has a different set of experiences and filters through which they experience the world. I think what I like about Myers-Briggs is that it doesn’t try to tell you who you are or how to live your life, but it seems to have some surprisingly accurate ways of explaining the different languages that people speak. And (as my personality type would indicate) I am very introspective, so getting insight into the way my mind works and how I can maintain a healthy mentality and more authentically communicate with and understand other people is really important to me.

I’m an INFP, which stands for Introverted (as opposed to Extroverted), Intuitive (vs Sensing), Feeling (vs Thinking), and Perceiving (vs Judging). What this means is that I draw energy from being on my own or with one or two people I am very close to, as opposed to being around larger groups of people. I tend to focus on big-picture ideas, favoring theory and abstract concepts over concrete facts and details. I make decisions based on gut feeling rather than logic, and prefer to discuss things in terms of how they affect other people emotionally rather than what is objectively wrong/right/true/false. And while I do need the occasional list or in-depth plan to keep myself organized, my tendency is to be spontaneous, to finish things last minute, and to be flexible in my interactions with others.

Anywhoo, the reason I bring this all up is that I’ve had a resurgence of interest in Myers-Briggs recently, and I’ve been thinking about how my personality type affects my experience abroad and my interactions with the other people I meet here. First of all, I’ve found that my Introverted and Intuitive sides are very appropriate for the style of work/study here. Granted, I am taking English and Philosophy, so a tendency towards theory is already very present, but I’ve found that the emphasis on independent research is very fitting for my learning style. While my tutors have provided me with reading lists, they are very flexible, and much of the additional research is up to me. My English tutor lets me write about whatever I want in response to the books we read, and while my Philosophy tutor gives me prompts, they tend to be very open-ended, offering me as much space as I want to explore different aspects of Husserl and Heidegger. As someone who does best when they are able to find personal meaning in their projects and have the freedom to work on it at their own pace, the tutorial system is ideal.

The desire for personal meaning is a pretty big thing for INFP’s. While I am introverted, I thrive on having strong interpersonal bonds, on being around people who can engage with me on many different levels, people who I can have long, deep conversations with. That sounds kind of silly maybe, but I really am not one for small talk. Which makes being in a new environment with all new people pretty difficult, because I am suddenly back at the getting-to-know-you stage of relationships. I find this both exhausting and fun– I love learning about people, but as I am slow to open up and I tend to do better communicating one-on-one rather than in groups, it takes a while for me to form the strong friendships I crave. Especially in a culture which tends to be much more emotionally guarded initially, I’ve found it hard to get to have the kinds of conversations I really enjoy with British students (I have, however, begun to grow closer with some of the other visiting students, which has actually offered a whole different bunch of new perspectives!).

One of the outcomes of this, I think, is that I have been far better at keeping in touch with friends from back home. Being an ocean apart seems to have magically given me the motivation to actually talk to long-distance friends more frequently, and it makes me really thankful that we have the technology that allows for that. (I am finally actually using Facebook?!?)

INFP’s are known as the Dreamers or the Idealists, and Oxford has been the perfect place for me to dream. I can walk for hours and just let my mind wander, I can create my own way of exploring different academic areas, and I can lose myself in the vast number of stories surrounding me. Yesterday, I went to explore unseen parts of Oxford with two of my new friends here, and we found ourselves climbing towers and looking over the entire city:

 

(look at those moody clouds!)

 

 

I wanted to write something about how cool it is to see all of the people below, to have the Oxford wind blowing in my hair, to be with new friends and to share the moment with old friends in just an instant… But I think I’ll leave you, for lack of an ability to communicate this feeling, with a Florence and the Machine song (because Florence Welch is, of course, an INFP too):

 

+ lyrics (because what kind of INFP listens to a song without paying way too much attention to the lyrics?): http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/florencethemachine/allthisandheaventoo.html