July 9th

Today we did a lot. We took a day trip to Oxford which was a little over an hour away. We rode the train there. Once there we explored the city which also happens to be the campus. We visited the Oxford Printing Press which was more interesting that I thought it would be. The first paper in print in Europe was in 1478 and was introduced by Theodoric Rood. But the university still wasn’t authorized to print, until Robert Dudley. Robert Dudley worked for the university and apparently had an affair with the Queen, which gave the university an in and made it so they were allowed to print. We also saw the first copy of the bible that was printed here (1675). One of the more interesting things was we got to see the original printing press. The workers had to put each individual letter in one at a time, and they had to do the word backwards. Little fact: the term upper and lower case come from this printing system because the upper case letters were literally up on the “upper case” of the shelf and the lower case likewise. Another interesting fact about this printing press is that their paper was stronger than other printing presses. The reason behind this was because they used what they referred to as Indian paper, which they produced here and it was made partly from ropes. This made the paper stronger and more durable. Finally, perhaps the coolest part of the tour was getting to see how the Oxford English Dictionary was made. The first dictionary was completed in 1928 and it took over 60 years to complete. It was originally supposed to be 4 volumes but ended up being 12. For each word in the dictionary they provided a few sentences as examples using the word in context. Instead of having a few workers look up examples for millions of words they let the general public help. They asked the people to send in quotation slips with the word at the top and a few sentences using the word on the rest of the slip. They would get thousands of these in and we got to see the sorting mail box where they would sort through them. It was all really very cool to see how much work went into it.
After this we toured around the town and my roommate and I thought it would be really cool to ride around on a double decker bus and through skittles off of it at random pedestrians. Sometimes it is nice to relax from studying and do something immature like this. We also snuck into the city town hall building and went into a big room where they held official meetings and did some homework (we got kicked out fairly soon after we got there.)
After this we all went to a Catholic Mass. It was held at the Church of Christ which was a stunning cathedral. I really enjoyed participating and experiencing another religion and their beliefs.