This Friday was the annual BADA River Party.  Everyone took the 20 minute walk from Balliol to the Oxford Boat House just north of campus.  It was a very lovely evening.  We were allowed to rent out punts (kinda the combination of a canoe and gondola) and cruise along the river.  Then they provided dinner and drinks for us all and the evening culminated in a big dance party by the river.  Everyone dressed and up and looked very nice, and I ate waaaay too much food.  That’s another thing: I was expecting to come to England, hate the food, and lose a little weight, but exactly the opposite happened.  I love everything they feed us here.  And they feed us a lot.  We get 3 meals a day in Hall during the week, and have to provide our own meals on weekends, but lunch and dinner are always great.  Another thing about Oxford/Balliol - it’s like they are in 2 separate worlds.  When you’re inside the walls of Balliol it feels incredibly private, quiet, and studious, but the moment you walk out the giant, wooden door-within-a-door at the front entrance, you are immediately transported into busy Oxford.  I swear, the temperature goes up 10 degrees, the noise level jumps incredibly, and you are just hit by this rush of business and tourists.  Having a bedroom on the first floor with a window right on Broad St, I get a taste of noisy tourists every night when I’m trying to go to bed, but I can sleep through anything.  I would shut the window, but it’s too hot in the room to not have it open.

Anyway, after the River Party we went out for a few more drinks and dancing, and ended up crashing at around 3am, with plans to go up to London in the morning.

Now, I wish I could say my first day in London was incredible, but it was actually pretty disastrous.  We left Balliol at 8am and when I tried to use the ATM to get out enough money for the day, it rejected my card.  I figured it was just the ATM and decided I would just get money when we got into the city.  We walked 5 minutes over to the bus station (where I was first dropped off from the airport) and bought our roundtrip bus tickets to London for 13 pounds.  However, when I tried to use my debit card to pay for my bus ticket, it was rejected once again.  I thought it was probably just a fluke, so Pamela payed for my ticket and I said I would pay her back that day.  I slept pretty much the whole busride and when we got to London we jumped off the bus and got a one-day pass for the Tube.  And once again, my debit card was rejected by the machine.  By now, I figured something was really effed up.  So Hannah helped me pay for the Tube card.  Once we got off the subway, I took out my card and tried to call the “Calling from out of the country” number on the back….but the machine it took me too was not helpful and started asking me about taxes and house leases.  So I hung up after blowing 5 pounds of my pay-as-you-go phone on this pointless phone call.  (And I just topped up for 20 pounds on Thursday night, and I was hoping that would last me the rest of my trip.)  So I decided to look for a Barclays bank to talk to a teller.  We crossed the footbridge over the Thames and looked out at Parliament and Big Ben.  We stopped first at the National Gallery of Art and spent about an hour in that museum, hanging out with DaVinci.  

Then we headed up towards the West End.  We passed a Barclays, but of course, it was closed.  So I took a pound and headed over to an internet cafe I saw, so I could check my bank statement online while everyone went ahead to Leicester Square.  I spent a good 45 minutes online talking to this Bank of America associate online.  Everything was perfectly all right on my bank statement, there were no odd purchases and my balance was what it should have been, so I was very confused as to why my card was not working.  The guy online told me my card had a block put on it and gave me a number to call to get the block removed.  He also said that I never informed Bank of America that I would be using my card internationally, which is total bullshit, because I made that phone call weeks before I left the country and told them the exact dates I would be gone.  Anyway, he gave me the number, and I called it from my little pay-as-you-go phone.  The women on the line told me that my account was stopped after a bizarre $92 fee was charged (which is about 60 pounds) - which is the amount of money that I usually take out of the ATM.  So I told her this was a normal purchase and that I took out $92 on the 16th of July, but she said this purchase was from the 24th.  And I definitely didn’t make that purchase, so they were very right to put a stop on my account.  But the women told me that my card had definitely been tampered with so they had to send me a new card, and that would take 7-10 days.  Obviously, that wasn’t going to fly with me being in England and everything.  But she said I could go to a Barclays on Monday and get a temporary card, which is what I will have to do.  Oh, but it gets worse……as I was on the phone with her, she told me if I go to an ATM she will unblock my account for 2 minutes so I can withdraw enough money for the weekend.  So I quickly signed out of the Internet Cafe and went to the ATM just outside, by this time I had been on the phone with this women for 14 minutes and I got to the ATM and put my card in just as my fucking phone died.  I used up all my minutes talking to this women (the minutes that I just added 3 days ago and was hoping would last me till the end of BADA.)  And since the woman had not unblocked my account before the call dropped, the ATM ate my card because it recognized a fraud, blocked card.  So basically…..it was noon, I was in London alone, with no debit card, and no phone.  Luckily, while I was talking to the woman, Hannah texted me that she and everyone were at the restaurant Rendezvous in Leicester Square, which was right around the corner from where the ATM was.  And I could still read her text because she had already sent it to me.  So I met up with them and recounted my whole trauma story for them.  They bought me some pizza for lunch and we headed over to the British Museum - where we saw the Rosetta Stone and very cool Grecian reconstructions.

We then went over to Buckingham Palace, or The Buck, as I dubbed it.  The coolest part of The Buck was the gates outside the palace.  Every time I thought I had found the coolest gates ever, cooler gates kept appearing!

We headed back across the river and ate dinner at Strada….a nice restaurant right on the water and by the National Theatre.  After dinner, we got 10 pound tickets for a show called “The Habit of Art” at the National.  I really enjoyed the show….it was like a less farcical, more serious Noises Off.  A rehearsal of a play within a play about WH Auden’s life.  In order to evoke a real rehearsal, there were a couple actors onstage playing “Techies” who didn’t say or do anything but sit there.  The “rehearsal pianist” was even a character in the show who never spoke, just played the piano occasionally.  The woman playing the Stage Manager was phenomenal as were the guys playing Auden, Benjamin Britain, and Stewart (a Rent Boy.)  It was very funny every time they had to stop rehearsals to yell at the playwright for issues they had with his script.  And since 2 actors were missing from rehearsal that day, the Stage Manager and Asst. Stage Manager read their parts.

Today is Sunday, and I need to finish memorizing Cherry Orchard tonight.  We have another Q&A this afternoon, but I do not remember who it is with.  Let’s hope I can make it through the day with no phone and cash.

I forgot my camera in my room, but I’ll upload photos from this weekend in a couple days.