I'm Going to England, Baby!

Dear UGA at Oxford Applicant,

Thank you very much for your application to the Summer 2007 Grady at Oxford Program. We are very pleased to inform you that you have been chosen to participate in the Grady program.

These were the first few lines of the e-mail I received last night letting me know that I've been accepted into the Grady College's summer program at Oxford. I'll admit it--I jumped up and down and called at least 10 people within a 20-minute time frame when I found out. And now I can send in my passport application and reread my copy of Notes From a Small Island by Bill Bryson in preparation for my trip.

"Perhaps I'm too hard on poor old Oxford. I mean it is basically a wonderful place, with its smokey pubs and bookshops and scholarly air, as long as you fix your gaze on the good things and never go anywhere near Cornmarket or George Street."

Stay away from Cornmarket and George Street--check.

"I like wandering up St. Giles to immerse myself in the busy conviviality of Brown's Restaurant--a wonderful, friendly place where, perhaps uniquely in Britain, you can get an excellent Caesar salad and a bacon cheeseburger without having to sit among pounding music and a lot of ersatz Route 66 signs. Above all, I like to drink in the pubs, where you can sit with a book and not be looked on as a social miscreant; where you can be among laughing, lively young people and lose yourself in reveries of what it was like when you, too, had energy and a flat stomach and thought of sex as something more than a welcome chance to lie down for a while."

Thanks Bill.