The Christchurch (rowing) Regatta

Rowing is an important feature of life in Oxford and the UK generally. Almost every College has a 'Boat Club' for both male & female rowing crews. The University of Oxford as a whole has a varsity team made up of national team level rowers. The Oxford team competes annually against Cambridge in what is known throughout England (and the rowing world in general) as 'the Boat Race' (started in 1856, see wikipedia). It's a gruelling +4 mile race on the Thames in London during the worst part of winter. Cambridge has won 79 times and Oxford has won 74 times. Millions of people around the world watch it on television and tens of thousands line the banks to watch the race.

So given the attraction of instant fame & fortune....and also noting that Oxford doesn't have the required amount of snow in winter for my preferred sport of Nordic skiing, I joined the Linacre College Boat Club at the start of this term (I don't already have an Olympic rowing medal so I didn't even think about trying out for the university team).

I'm in the stroke seat of a men's 8 boat (see the picture/video link below, I'm the one looking tired in the stern near the cox). We've been training for about 2 months and had our first major competition this past week. The 'Christchurch Regatta', organised by the Oxford college of the same name (see one of my previous posts), is only for crews of novice rowers who don't have previous race experience....consequently it is quite entertaining.

Novice rowers + racing + a narrow river + the excitement of a large crowd of spectators = crashes, broken oars, smashed boats, collisions, and every now and then somebody falls into the river.

The Christchurch Regatta is a tournament style event with head-to-head races held over the course of 4 days (over 100 crews entered). The winner of each race moves on to the next round - the losing boat is eliminated. It was actually lucky that the race happened at all as most years it is cancelled due to flood conditions on the river (it rains a lot here, eh?).

So how did we do?

If you have Facebook, check out this video link (we're the crew wearing black):

http://www.facebook.com/video/?of=502557689#/video/video.php?v=626959396213&subj=502557689

Well, in case you can't tell from the video....we won our race on the first day of competition! It was against a crew from Hertford College (a smallish college with about as much reputation as Linacre College, ie. not much). It was a good race from our perspective, we had a good start (very important in short races, this one was only ~ 800m), and we pulled away from them and held onto our lead of about one boat length as we crossed the finish line. So we advanced to the second round and accomplished our primary objective: don't fall into the water, don't get too embarrassed by the competition or our general lack of skill, and make it beyond the first day of the regatta. Mission accomplished!

The next day we lost...despite a good effort.

We actually had a better race in terms of technique the second day, but we just weren't as strong as the other boat. Generally our crew was excited by the experience, I think that many of us will stay on to row for the college next semester when the competition gets slightly more severe than the novice-only affair last week.

ps. the Linacre College woman's team made it all the way to the semi-finals (four days of rowing!) before bowing out to a quality crew.

Going to the United Nations climate meeting...in Poland

...it's official. I have purchased my plane tickets. I will be coming home for the winter holidays, but I'm off to a conference first before coming home to Canada.

Some of you may remember that I was at the United Nations meeting last year in Bali, Indonesia? Well I'm off again this year with the Canadian Youth Delegation (http://www.cydpoznan.org/) to the 2008 UN climate change conference in Poznan, Poland from Dec. 5 - 15. I'm really excited about it (but not overly hopeful about the outcome), after a full semester of environmental education I feel much more prepared for the climate circus (over 10,000 people are likely to attend the meeting). After a bit of negotiations bedlam I should be getting into Toronto sometime on the 16th.

Here is an article recently posted on the U of Guelph website about some recent graduates (myself included) attending the UN conference:

http://www.uoguelph.ca/news/2008/11/post_153.html

Field Trip # 2 - 'Sunny' Brighton & the South Downs

Hello readers! Apologies (again) for the long pause in between blog entries.

Today's feature: My second field trip of the semester, this time to the South Downs near Brighton, in Sussex (on the south coast of England, about 1hr. from London).

The most common activity on our field trips in general is something I like to describe as the 'walk & talk'. Essentially our group drives out to a site of significance (be it biological, environmental, geological, etc.....), we meet up with a local expert on the issues of the area, we hike through said area, and then we periodically stop to either have a chat about the issues or to sample the local pub fare. This basic pattern is repeated for 2-3 days and evenings are filled with continued conversations at the pub. Or in the case of this specific field trip to Brighton, at a funky jazz club with a live band.

The reason for the location of this particular field trip was two-fold. Firstly, it was to investigate and area of southern England being considered for the creation of a new National Park. The ecosystem that they are trying to preserve is called 'chalk grasslands', essentially consisting of rolling hills of limestone overlaid with very thin soil and short grass maintained by the constant presence of sheep. From a North American perspective I must admit it that it has been challenging comparing the landscape management issues in the UK to those at home....there simply isn't any decent sized 'wilderness' areas left in England. While in Canada we might just periodically designate another far north location with (almost) zero inhabitants and call it a park, in the UK it's not that simple. When they make decisions about where to create parks they have to consider the fact that the land they want to designate for protection is often already overcrowded with people, towns, and agriculture. Furthermore, the idea behind the creation of the park doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the concept of preserving a 'wild' ecosystem, often it has much more to do with managing a certain area to maintain it in the way that fits some kind of preconceived notion about how a landscape should look. This is certainly the case for the South Downs where we visited most recently. The second reason for this field trip location was because it was the site of one of our professors ongoing research into soil erosion and flooding. It's a common problem in this part of England, when farmers change from growing grassland grazed by sheep (good for preventing erosion) to intensive crop farming which makes the land more vulnerable to run-off (which in turn floods villages poorly suitated in flood plains and gullies).

A side note....one of the days on the field trip we stopped for lunch in a town called Arundel that had a nice castle. As I explored the town I felt a vague sense of deja-vu....after consulting with my folks, turns out that my family visited this town when we lived in England previously. When I was 6 or so. Strange thing memory....

Matriculation time

Sorry folks, I'm a little behind the times with blog posts of late..... It's been a busy couple of weeks since classes have started.

The subject of this post is Matriculation, the time-honoured traditional entrance ceremony that all new students of Oxford must attend in order to be considered official members of the University.

Matriculation, from the student point of view at least, goes like this:

You get up early on a Saturday morning near the start of the fall term. You dress up in sub-fusc academic dress. This needs further explanation....sub-fusc consists (for men) of a dark suit, white shirt, white bow tie, as well as the academic gown and cap. It's one of the most formal dress codes for Oxford events. All students must wear this attire in order to be allowed to attend Matriculation, which is a mandatory event....so you basically have no choice, you wear the stuff and don't complain. Students must also be dressed in this fashion for exams at the end of the winter semester. I can't say that I'm all-together looking forward to dressing in full academic gown for three days worth of exams.....but we'll cross that bridge when it comes.

After getting dressed up, the students of each college gather together to proceed en-masse towards the centre of the city where the Matriculation ceremony takes place. This part is actually quite amusing, it's a bit like herding cattle through town....there are staff members who keep trying to encourage the group to stay together and the whole line of students inevitably gets split up and spread out. The poor tourists in the streets didn't really seem to know what was going on.....perhaps they assume that everyday is like this in Oxford?

My Matriculation ceremony was held in the 'Examination Schools', the location of the previously mentioned evaluations at the end of the winter term. After about 40mins of waiting to be let in and then waiting for the other colleges to arrive we were finally ushered into the 'holding pens' inside the building so the ceremony could begin. We stood in rows inside a large hall that had many large portraits of apparently famous people and high ceilings. I felt badly for the shorter students who probably didn't see a whole lot of anything except the back of the person in front of them.

The ceremony itself was short - about 10mins in total. A University official said some words in Latin (basically a long way of saying, 'you are now admitted'), followed by a short welcome speech in English and then it was all over. Back to the college where it all started for a group photo and then a free lunch with free wine. The whole experience sort of leaves you with the impression that some traditions, while symbolically important to the institution, may lack a little in translation for those unaccustomed to the pomp & circumstance of life in Oxford. All in all it was fun, people love to get dressed up here!

Thanks to Heidi and Pauline for some of the photos which I borrowed from Facebook.