Well, dear readers, I found a way. And that way is chocolate.
This mantra is posted on the walls of the homes of every 40+, single, female multiple-cat owner in the United States,
and also on my blog. So make of that what you will.
Now, I'll start by saying this connecting thread is a bit of a stretch in relation to the Inside London trips. I did, however buy myself a chocolate cookie at the slavery museum we visited in the morning to keep from passing out from cold- and slavery-pondering-induced fatigue! So we'll call that the connection.
The afternoon session of Inside London - a tour of London's East End to learn about the history of immigration in the area - was, while bitterly, freezing cold and distressingly chocolate-free, really pretty cool. We saw the neighborhood where Jack the Ripper used to hang out (read: kill people in terrible ways); some of London's most high-end and most rundown real estate sharing city blocks; and dozens of the narrow, cobblestone streets you associate with Dickensian London and dirty singing orphans. We also went into the bell foundry where they cast the Liberty Bell ('MURICA), the bell inside Big Ben, and all of the bells for last year's Olympics and Jubilee. A cool afternoon - literally; have I mentioned it was cold? I don't think I have - but, again, pretty free of chocolate.
Blessedly not chocolate-free was our next stop: Harrods. For those of you who don't know, Harrods is a magical department store where, in just over one literal million square feet of shopping space, astronomically expensive designer clothing and jewelry, toys of every imaginable kind, dozens of food shops, and every tourist in the city of London all coexist in perfect consumer harmony. As the only important SNL character of the past 10 years would say, this. Place. Has. Everything. In most of the store, buying even the cheapest of items would have far exceeded my budget for the day. [Note: That's not to say that everything in Harrods is incredibly pricey; that is simply to say that my budget yesterday was "SARAH DON'T SPEND MONEY UNLESS YOU'RE DYING."] The exception to this budget-exceeding rule, however, could be found in one glorious place: the Chocolate & Confectionery Room. One of the many rooms comprising the Harrods Food Halls, the Chocolate & Confectionery Room specializes in candies, chocolates, cupcakes, and all of those other foods off of which your dentist makes his money. Here, you can purchase even the most exotic of bite-sized chocolates for well under a pound. My friends and I spent a good third of our time at Harrods wandering around the Chocolate & Confectionery Room, but, left to my own devices, I would have left the room only to go buy a tent from the home goods section, bring it back to the Chocolate & Confectionery Room, and set it up somewhere in the middle of the room to live in indefinitely. After examining my hundreds of options, I eventually decided to spend my 70 pence on a chocolate called "black Spanish sea salt." It was incredible. I wore earrings today bigger than this chocolate, but this tiny food pretty much changed my life. I'll undoubtedly be making plenty of return visits to Harrods this semester, and I am wholly excited to think what new chocolate discoveries await me the next time. (I'm particularly excited for my return visit to Harrods while my parents are here, so I can buy more than one 70p chocolate at a time because I'm not paying for it. Thanks in advance, parentals.)
My life
Low-quality but necessary photo of Life-Changing Chocolate
Today, then, I headed out on the London Program day trip to Oxford. This, too, was full of both literally and figuratively cool things to do. The rector of our dorm, who - surprise - went to Oxford, gave us a walking tour around the city and university, giving us all sorts of insider trivia about life at Oxford. My personal favorite story was that of All Souls, Oxford's most elite, invitation-only graduate school. If you are one of the top two graduating students at Oxford in any given major, All Souls may invite you to apply to study with them. Upon invitation, your application consists of three three-hour exams, two written and one in the form of a dinner where the admissions people basically judge how good you are at simultaneously eating, mingling, and being an unparalleled super-genius. To give us some context on just how difficult these exams are, our rector shared with us one of the exam prompts from the All Souls application for his year: "Water." That's it. Three hours. One prompt. "Water." And finally, to give us some context on what kind of incomprehensible genius freaks actually get in to this school, he informed us of the answer strategy one successful applicant had in recent memory. When asked to translate a practically incomprehensible passage of some Greek or Latin philosophical text, not only did this applicant translate it; oh, no. He translated it into Serbo-Croatian.
I didn't even know Serbo-Croatian was a language.
Even at the standard undergraduate level, though, this school is pretty unreal. The stories our rector told of the academic program at Oxford thoroughly convinced me that my schooling at ND - one of America's top universities, if we'll recall - is akin to that of a kindergarten classroom. When not busy being super-geniuses, the students of Oxford inhabit colleges where they live like the kings that many of them probably actually are. The university's most prestigious college, Christ Church, provided the site for the filming of several scenes in the Harry Potter franchise. The cathedral on-site at Christ Church - in other words, the (very) rough equivalent to the Christ Church dorm chapel - looks like this:
So, I mean...whatever. In exploring the area surrounding the main campus of Oxford today, one could hardly help but run into the little shop that brought me to this blog title: a fudgery. This fudgery is run by three enthusiastic, awesome hipsters. It is full of deliciousness and joy. And it has the most brilliant business strategy of all the fudgeries in the world. At this little fudgery, you see, they believe whole-heartedly in free samples. Really wholeheartedly. For most of the day, one of the owners stands outside the shop holding a sign that says "Free Samples" and yelling at people to come in and eat free chocolate. When she's not outside, the sign stands prominently on its own outside the door. After walking past the shop a couple of times throughout the day (obviously we were in a hurry on those occasions), my friends and I eventually stopped in, because free chocolate. We took samples of the sea-salt caramel fudge the hipster owner was dishing out, agreed it was quite lovely, and prepared to leave. But, then, the hipster owner says, "Want another?"
Um.....is Oxford All Souls graduate school hard to get into?
At this fudgery, you see, you can literally take as many free samples as you want. Free samples of any flavor you want. Free samples of practically any size you want. Free samples of everything. Obviously, you would have to be completely crazy to turn these hipsters down. As much free fudge as you can get your hands on? Come on! After the sea-salt caramel, then, I tried a sample of the sea-salt dark chocolate, finding it, too, to be delicious. As the tight-vested, long-haired hipster making a new slab of maple syrup and walnut fudge on the marble counter in the corner handed me a huge, free glob of fudge quite literally right off the chopping block, I found myself thinking, "Silly cool fudge hipsters. You are giving me so much free food right now, but I'm totally going to walk out of here empty-handed in, like, three seconds. I have defeated you, silly cool fudge hipsters." But then I had free sample #4, and suddenly, the silly cool fudge hipsters were giving me pricing info. And suddenly, standing in the cool hipster fudgery, I found myself thinking, "Four pounds fifty is SO reasonable for a slab of Double Trouble Chocolate fudge that I will take out of here and inhale in under thirty seconds!" Before I knew it, I was leaving Oxford with not just the rugby shirt I'd been planning on buying but with a slab of fudge the size of my face. Silly cool fudge hipsters, you are geniuses. Somewhere in the middle of my first slice of this fudge earlier this evening, I decided: if my kindergarten-level top 20 university degree can't get me any other jobs, I am entirely on board with opening a college-town hipster fudgery. I could wear an ear cuff. I could give away free chocolate (read: I could eat a lot of free chocolate myself). As I said each time we passed the fudgery today, I could be about that life. Oh, yes. Oh, yes I could.
So that has been the past couple of days in my glamorous study abroad life: chocolate. Tomorrow, as I am out of almost every single foodstuff I've ever purchased, I am going to finally go grocery shopping again. Luckily, I've finally found some recipes to get me through the semester, thanks to this magical list. Am I kidding when I say that list will provide most of my sustenance for the next four months? Maybe because I doubt Funfetti exists in Britain...but maybe not. Until next time, kiddos. Keep on chocolatin' on.
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