My Travel Adventures

On the Saturday of January 22 nd , I planned a walk to Headington with my housemates to see the famous Headington Shark. Although urban legend has it that the sculpture – a shark apparently crashing through the roof of a local house – was designed to spite local authorities, the reality is somewhat different. Its owner Bill Heine described the artistic intention behind John Buckley’s sculpture in the following way: “The shark was to express someone feeling totally impotent and ripping a hole in their roof out of a sense of impotence and anger and desperation…. It is saying something about CND, nuclear power, Chernobyl and Nagasaki.” The Oxford City Council subsequently attempted to have the shark removed but was defeated when the matter escalated to the central government.

I spent a nice three weeks at home making traditional Christmas sweets and going on walks. Since several of my friends had covid, I saw almost no one, and decided it would be safer that way considering I would have to get back to Oxford for my exams. I made it a resolution for the new term to take a walk every day, which has helped me explore a decent chunk of town around Saint Antony’s. I discovered the western end of University Parks – where I had never been before – as well as the beautiful grounds of Lady Margaret Hall, among others.

Ninth week at Oxford – a time when classes cease to meet and some exams are held – is a time when the mad gallop of the year slows down to a trot. Many people either party or try to leave early, and some even manage to do both. With the weight of schoolwork lifted from my shoulders, I ate a few long meals with course-mates and visited the botanic garden with a friend before the consequences of the omnipresent carefree atmosphere inevitably caught up with us. My housemate tested positive for covid, which forced us all into isolation for several days. Luckily, the contagion stopped there, which meant that no one else’s travel plans were impacted. However, the happy send-offs I was eagerly expecting would not happen.

Given how busy the terms are at Oxford, both this post and the last have been backdated. I wrote them while sitting at home in the Czech Republic on the 20 th of December, occasionally dodging my memory by consulting the photographs still on my hard drive (goodness, I really need to migrate those to my external hard drives already).

School terms at Oxford are nasty, brutish, and short. In contrast to Yale’s twelve weeks of instruction (with two weeks of break somewhere in between and one week of exams towards the end), they last a mere eight. Logically speaking, this equates to around 24 weeks of instruction per year in both cases, but these feel very different. During my last two years at Yale, I wrote the bulk of my papers during the holidays and had time during the semester to eat long meals with friends and participate in extracurriculars. At Oxford, this buffer is gone. Every week is a mad dash towards the sweet release of the upcoming holiday season, and there is barely enough time to do any one thing well.   

It is difficult, only a week after my departure from the Czech Republic, to try to recollect the events of that day – so much has happened since then! However, one thing does stand out in my memory in a way that only unpleasant experiences do: having forgotten to fill in a passenger locator form at home, I had to make a frantic dash through the multiple pages of the form on my phone before I was allowed to check in.

The pictures below are from a trip I made to the city hall in my hometown Beroun. At the time, I was making my first attempt to get a voting pass so I could vote in the upcoming parliamentary elections from the Czech Embassy in London. To my surprise and consternation, I found out I was still registered to vote in New York, which necessitated me to formally request my removal from their list. Luckily, the workers of the Consulate in New York were very responsive, and I was able to pick up my voting pass in Beroun only several days later. Note for the future: unless planning to settle somewhere long-term, get a voting pass!