Safe travels, and have an awesome time! Take tons of pictures so I can live vicariously through you!

Here is a quotation for the journey. It makes me want to visit Oxford very much.

(The point of view is from the roof of the Camera in the mid-1930s.)

"There, eastward, within a stone's throw, stood the twin towers of All Souls, fantastic, unreal as a house of cards, clear-cut in the sunshine, the drenched oval in the quad beneath brilliant as an emerald in the bevel of a ring. Behind them, black and grey, New College frowning like a fortress, with dark wings wheeling about her belfry louvres; and Queen's with her dome of green copper; and, as the eye turned southward, Magdalen, yellow and slender, the tall lily of towers; the Schools and the battlemented front of University; Merton, square-pinnacled, half-hidden behind the shadowed North side and mounting spire of St. Mary's. Westward again, Christ Church, vast between Cathedral spire and Tom Tower; Brasenose close at hand; St. Aldate's and Carfax beyond; spire and tower and quadrangle, all Oxford springing underfoot in living leaf and enduring stone, ringed far off by her bulwark of blue hills.

Towery City, and branchy between towers,
Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark-charmèd,
rook-racked, river-rounded,
The dapple-eared lily below."

-Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

And another one probably more to the point when one is a chaperon for high school students:

{On arriving in London:] "Here I am once more in this scene of dissipation and vice, and I begin already to find my morals corrupted."

-Jane Austen, in a letter of August 1796

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Oooh, that first one made me shiver! I've studied in the "camera" - it's now part of the library, so I know exactly what she means... Of course, All Souls college will only let you gaze at it from the outside - they let no one in but graduate students ;)

As far as vice... I've already started that trend with my sheet of british slang, which inadvertently contains some offensive language. I kind of think it's funny, but the chaperones won't, and I don't want to make enemies, so I'm thinking of ripping it out of the packet.

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