May Day

May 1st or May Day, a pagan-based holiday, is a huge deal in Oxford. The tradition is to stay up all night on April 30th (usually drinking) and then be at Magdalen College at 6 am to listen to their choir sing for exactly seven minutes. Now, Friday night, Roni was out at a college dinner til 11:30 and I was out until about the same time with the Pathfinders Staff having pizza and beef jerky and chocolate cheesecake at Heather's so there was no way that we were making it into Magdalen College by 6 am. So we woke up late, ate breakfast and walked down to North Parade around noon. There were a bunch of people hanging around but after about twenty minutes of waiting, the Morris Dancers, who had been making their way all over Oxford since 6:30 am, arrived.

Morris Dancing, according to Wikkipedia, is a form of English folk dance usually accompanied by music. It's based on rhythmic stepping and choreography and usually implements such as sticks, swords, handkerchiefs and bells may be used. We saw all of the previously stated implements in the various dancing that we saw. A bunch of older men danced in various forms, holding either sticks or bells of handkerchiefs. Usually they were accompanied by one or two men on an accordion. They all kind of looked the same to us but all were entertaining.


Yes, this tree had legs.... it was just wandering around like it had no care in the world. Not at all stranger....
Check out the mutton-chops on this guy! I haven't seen anything like it since Chester A. Arthur!

Some videos of Morris Dancing. You can get the picture pretty quickly.













We moved onto some little markets around town, like at New Inn Street where there were a ton of books but nothing I wanted to buy. While we were there, we got the call from the boys that the movie was over to we headed down to George Street to meet Brian and Ian outside of the movie theatre. The four of us decided to go down to the castle to the Pizza Express for lunch, hoping that we'd be able to eat outside. We weren't but we ended up staying anyway and had some absolutely delicious Pizza Express pizza.


After lunch we separated and Roni and I walked down to Magdalen. We were hoping to go to the Botanical Gardens but because they were super expensive, we decided just to eat our 99 Flake and wander around Magdalen. Magdalen has some incredibly beautiful gardens and there are deer there. During WWII, in order to keep the deer protected, members of the college were somehow able to get them classified as flora instead of fauna. Impressive.




That night, we met up at Neal's house for brisket and youtube videos. It was a great time- lots of laughing and great food but not really May Day-ish. Still fun.