1. How white and polite street beggars are. Back where I live, beggars are either black and polite or white and mentally ill. The combination of very white and very courteous while begging for money throws me off.

2. How white the town is in general (aside from tourists and students). Even at the Lebanese deli everybody was whiter than me. I wanted to visit an Indian restaurant but was afraid to find only blond Brits there. No offense to anybody, but I don’t see the point of Indian food which is not made by Indians.

3. That there is a Jamie Oliver restaurant here and that I spent 2 hours in it before realizing what it was.

4. That the stores close so goddamn early, especially on weekends.

5. That it is so blissfully cold! It’s +15°C and it rains. In July! I adore this climate.

6. How much the local people like to joke. Everything is an opportunity for humor that is delivered with a totally deadpan expression.

7. The very indifferent bread coupled with sensationally good butter.

8. How bizarre British parking practices are. One can often encounter cars that are parked facing each other nose to nose. How that happens is a mystery.

9. The number of men who spend time with each other in public spaces is overwhelmingly greater than the number of women.

The conference is over, and after 3 days of spending 10 hours a day with my group I’ve had about all I can handle of sociability. People went out together to continue socializing, but even though I adore them all, I headed in the opposite direction looking for a nice quiet Lebanese deli to celebrate the end of the conference alone.

On the way to the deli, I saw the following beautiful building:

I really miss my husband, and this building made that feeling even more poignant.

And can anything get any more typically British than this view:

This is what I was looking for and did not find in London back in 2012.

This area of Oxford does not scream “wannabe New York” either:

I love it that there is so much space to walk. Oxford is beautiful but I’ve got to say, British people, I have no idea how you manage to afford living in this country. Everything is so very expensive. And don’t think I stick to the touristy part of the town. I’ve been quite far out and made a point of entering a Tesco and a Sainsbury’s to see how much people were paying for groceries and was kind of freaked out.

So. Greece agreed to everything and got a new bailout. The referendum was all a huge waste of time, it seems. No Grexit, no defection of Greece to Putin.

Why we all has to have our time wasted by these referendum – related stories is a mystery. But all is well that ends well.

Accidentally, the workshop I’m part of at the conference ended up consisting of two dozen women and a single very quiet man.

I love all – female conferences because there’s no posturing, no grandstanding, no need to be careful around easily woundable egos. There are 3 artists here who’ve been talking to everybody for 3 days and never mentioned their art once. Nobody has brought up their title, tenure, the prestigious publishing house where they published their book or even if they’ve published a book. Nobody mentions their private life at all.

The whole thing has been extremely productive, respectful, and low-key.

One thing I did not expect to find in the UK is humongous food portions. I live in the US, so I’m no stranger to huge plates but even I am taken aback by the portion size around here. Yesterday I went to a very elegant and expensive restaurant that served me a plate of carrot and parsnip soup that tasted divine yet had the size of a small swimming pool:

I think I hurt the chef’s feelings by not finishing it but I’d have needed to stay there for a couple of days to eat it all.

By the way, since people are asking, here is the deconsecrated chapel where the conference feeds us:

It’s so big that it doesn’t fit into a single frame:

I’ve also been to a Jamie Oliver restaurant. I know somebody is a great fan, so it’s time for a spot of envy. 🙂

Here is me looking and feeling terribly jet-lagged and overfed:

An Indian gentleman at the conference who is opposed to the caste system informed everybody collectively and then individually that he belongs to an upper caste.

An American gentleman who is a feminist informed everybody collectively and then every woman present individually that he has male privilege.

A white lady who defends the rights of the indigenous people of the Andes informed everybody collectively and then every person of color individually that she has white privilege.

I wonder what people did when there wasn’t such an easy way to tell people to their faces, “I’m better than you!” It must have been torture to keep all this superiority bottled up inside.

And now there seems to be another identity scandal that involves a scholar who is accused of not being Cherokee.

I will never become American enough to understand this “don’t touch my identity” drama. This is a legacy of being an immigrant nation and having no other way to avoid getting lost in a mass of people than grasping on to artificial identity constructs.

I always say things like, “in Spain we do this and that” or “our Calderón is so much better than your Shakespeare.” Hispanic people don’t seem to have a problem with it. To the contrary, they always keep including me with, “we, the Hispanics” or “as one of us, you understand.” But if somebody did object, I’d tell them to go stuff themselves because, in all probability, they don’t even remotely do as much for disseminating and raising the prestige of the Spanish culture as I do. So what makes them more “Hispanic”? An accident of birth? Yes, how hugely enlightened. Let’s all police each other’s DNA profiles now. And maybe even measure a few noses while we are at it.

I would feel nothing but happy and honored if somebody from, say, Australia or Denmark wanted to be Ukrainian and practice the language and the culture of Ukraine. But as I said, I’ll never be American enough to understand why one needs to begrudge a completely arbitrary identity to anybody else.