The last late summer blackberries were still clinging to the roadside brambles when I arrived in Oxford this September. Apple season has come and gone; I’ve planted bulbs that I’ll only see blooming through a computer screen. My first week in the city felt like three months of summer heat arriving all at once, but […]

Paper straws tend to dissolve on me before I’m even halfway through a drink, but as England banned single-use plastic straws and drink stirrers in 2020, they seem to be here to stay. Several laws have been passed in England to target plastic pollution, from the straw ban to a minimum 10-pence levy on single-use […]

With the Ashmolean Museum just down the street, I never need to go far from campus to be immersed in art. Nature and the environment feature in many of the pieces, from oil paintings of rugged seascapes to delicate botanical watercolors. One of my favorite paintings occupies a wall in the third-floor Pre-Raphaelite gallery. With […]

I made a wrong turn on the way to the OxGrow community garden and showed up to the work session with my boots already muddy. After the session, some fellow volunteers kindly showed me the correct route — one that did not involve slogging through two rain-soaked sports fields — but by then, I had […]

The flight from San Francisco International Airport to London Heathrow is about 10 hours and covers about 5,320 miles (or 8,561 kilometers, if you’re not American). On the way back, the headwinds add an extra hour and an additional 0.1 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions. My flight into London has already emitted 1.72 metric […]

“The St Lawrence is water, the Mississippi is muddy water, but the Thames is liquid history.“ –  John Burns, 1929 My friends had a lot to say about swimming in the Thames. “Isn’t it really dirty, and full of chemicals?” one asked, while another warned me to watch out for brain-eating amoebas. Luckily, the Oxford […]

When walking around the Worcester campus at night, I’ve learned to watch my step. Especially after it rains, the paths are scattered with tiny toads hopping from one hedge to the other. I haven’t seen any at my sit spot during the daytime, and I don’t hear many frogs calling in the evenings either, but […]

Just like at Wellesley, walking around the Worcester College lake is a nice way to spend a sunny afternoon. Unlike Lake Waban, though, at Worcester College you can circle the whole lake in about twenty minutes (except for the one portion that’s blocked off because it’s essentially the Provost’s backyard). In that sense, it’s really […]