Fairbairns and Thanksgiving

Last Thursday I rowed with the Churchill women's novice boat in a big race called Fairbairns. After getting to the starting line and a lot of waiting in the cold it was finally our turn to race, as you can see in the photo below:


I am second from the far left, rowing at number 7. The front of the boat is cut off in the photo, but the cox is sitting right in front of number 8. You can also see some swans, who really don't care that a race is going on, on the opposite side of our boat. The results came out and we rowed the 2700 m course in 12 min. 18 sec. which put us at 18th out of 58 women's novice boats. Everyone on the team was really excited, and I'm really glad that I got to row that day. Actually, half of the women in the boat are American graduate students.

In case anyone was wondering, I did get to have Thanksgiving here in the UK. Since there are so many students from the US here at Churchill College, the master of the college invited us all to a free Thanksgiving dinner in the fellows' dining hall in Churchill. I hadn't been into this room before, and I was talking to some of my friends waiting for dinner to start, when I suddenly realized what was hanging on the wall across from me:
Marilyn Monroe prints by Andy Warhol (photo from the Churchill College website). I asked the master about them, and he said that they belong to a graduate of Churchill and are on loan to the college; they are probably too expensive for the college to actually buy them. The master said that they have a joke here at Churchill about them: at other colleges, they count the silver after the formal dinners, but at Churchill, they count the Marilyns.

The food at the Thanksgiving dinner was all right, though not as good as the scenery. Everything went just fine until we got to the pumpkin pie, which I'm pretty sure did not have pumpkins in it. It was very bland tasting and was white. I think they don't use the word pumpkin in Britain and we were speculating as to whether some other sort of squash had been used. The next night a lot of the American grad students cooked various dishes and brought them all together for a second Thanksgiving dinner. It felt a lot more like Thanksgiving and a lot of the students here are great cooks. Someone made absolutely fantastic pumpkin pie.
In other news, my Michaelmas term lectures are over. For the next couple of days I'll be taking part in activities for rowing camp... an outing or two per day plus a gym session. Then I'll be in France for a week. Otherwise, I'm going to be desperately trying to learn the material from this term so that I can get ready for next term and for writing my essay.