It is a Dark and Stormy Night

Hello; I've been trying for ages to try and post some pictures but this sight is having some issues with it. It is a Monday and today was our first day of classes at Wycliffe Hall, which is a small College just off the road that leads down to Oxford Central which is in all about an eight minute walk which is NOTHING to the amount that we've been walking every day - at least an hour and a half to get around to Wycliffe Hall and back to the Vines. It's good exercise. It has, however, also been raining like the dickens here and we've had to carry around an umbrella wherever we go and just whip it out. No one is very bothered on the streets, little umbrellas just pop up everywhere. Actually, yesterday there was the most rain in fifty years!
I've learned much about the University and today a tourist asked me for directions, the name of the building behind us and the way to get to the Museum and I was able to help her so I must be doing something right! Apparently, that which is known of as Oxford University is made up of about thirty individual colleges (I could be wrong on the number) that function like the USA. The University is like the Supreme Court and Washington D.C and all the other colleges are like States. The most beautiful are generally these three: Merton (one of the oldest), Magdalen (pronounced "Maudlin" if you remember) and Christ Church. Merton is where Tolkien was a master and was built in the mid thirteenth century. Magdalen is where Lewis lived and Christ Church was funded by Henry VIII and is very elite, rich and is where they filmed Harry Potter.
On Sunday Justine and I attended a church with a friend from home, Nathan. It was his church - St. Aldates - a very charismatic Anglican church which was an interesting mix. The music was lovely and there was some good attention to Trinitarian worship. After church we headed off to G & D's the famous Oxford ice cream shop where the three of us chatted, and then Nathan (a graduate at Merton) offered to show us around. We bought some things and then he took us to the Merton Common Room (which only Merton students can use) where we had lunch. It was such a priviledge (sorry if that's spelled wrong). We also went around the Merton and Magdalen gardens, as well as browsed around Christ Church. Justine and I attended Evensong at Christ Church along with many of the other students at the program.
This morning we had a lecture on monasticism and the Desert Fathers by a woman named Sister Benedicta Ward who has written 8 books about them and translated their sayings for Penguin Classics. Later there was a lecture on Celtic Christianity by Dr. Mark Atherton who edited a translation of Hildegard von Bingen! It was a fascinating lecture; ah, those Celts. I also had my first Literature in the Christian Tradition class with an Oxford professor named Santha Bhattacharji and she is marvellous. We are working on Chaucer and also Spenser as of today but will be rapidly moving on.
Everyone is in their rooms reading and being generally scholastic - comes from being with a bunch of smart people wanting to go to Oxford and buy books! Everyone here just loves them and we all are dorks about hanging around the big Oxford bookstore Blackwells (which literally has six miles of bookshelves and is over five floors). Things are indeed expensive here and I am reserving my shopping for the second hand bookstores and things like meals and outings.
We get three class trips on Fridays for our Christianity in the British Isles lectures: the first one is St. Albans, the second is Hampton Court (where Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII and all that good stuff took place) and the third is Glastonbury (lots of Arthur legends about that place; also rumored to be the place Joseph of Arimathea brought the cup of Christ). Can't wait.
Close by is also Blenheim Palace, which is now a World Heritage site, the birthplace of Winston Churchill and the place used for Pemberley both in the BBC version Pride and Prejudice and the recent one with Keira Knightely. I will write more when I post the photos. Hope I haven't overwhelmed all of you. Miss you much. Wish you were here. I think I want to live here all of my life, it's that achingly beautiful.