Last night we attended our first Oxford Christmas ball. The Christmas ball seems to be a big thing with the Oxford colleges - each one has one, and you can go to any of them as a guest. Despite my hefty tuition, they aren't free - far from it, in fact - but we figured we had to check out Wolfson's version despite the cost.
The theme was "Premiere," and they had a red carpet, a Hollywood sign, and other movie-related decorations. It was a very dressy occasion, and most men had tuxedos on. David and I went in the only fancy clothes we brought from home - a suit for him and a basic Banana Republic black dress for me, which I'd decided to throw in the suitcase at the last minute. The evening started at about 7pm with standing in a line for over 15 minutes to get security wristbands. And here I had foregone my nice watch because I thought it would ruin my outfit! It was quite a high-security event - even those Wolfsonites who didn't attend the ball had to have a wristband and the whole college was closed down at 6pm. Some of these shindigs must get pretty wild.
After we were banded we headed into the Wolfson dining hall for champagne before dinner started at 7:45. I took a self-portrait of us to pass the time:
Dinner was quite tasty and good fun. The tables were set quite beautifully, complete with official Wolfson dishes and linen napkins, and we even had place tags. We had brushetta with white wine, followed by chicken and veggies with red wine (the lady next to us said the changing of the wines is quite normal here), then a lovely strawberry mousse dessert. A jazz band played throughout.
We had party crackers at our place setting, which everyone cracked before the food came. David and I pulled on ours together, and I pulled so hard on my end that the prize flew onto the table behind me! It was great fun. The main prize was the traditional Christmas paper crown, which most people wore throughout the meal.
There was a lot of down time between courses, so the folks next to us occupied themselves with attempting to find just the right weight ratio to make the helium balloons hover halfway in the air. We pitched in from time to time, and I even offered up my strange little lemon-head man I'd gotten in my cracker.
The guys informed us that they are physicists (in training, I presume), so it's good to know the project was supervised by professionals. The blond girl with them was really cute - her name was Magdalena (they called her Maggie) and she had a wonderful German accent. She seemed to be into the project the most, though I never determined if she is a physicist also.
After dinner the party moved into the upper and lower common rooms, where there were drinks, a casino, and a magician. There were rumors of a chocolate fountain, which was in fact one of the reasons I attended the thing at all, but it seems to have been a no-show. There was also to be a ceilidh (pronounced "caley"), a Scottish dance, but there were no signs of that yet. The party was scheduled to go on until 4am, so it may have been a couple hours before the ceilidh band and the DJ showed up. Given that, and the fact that poor David is once again quite sick with a cold, we didn't hang around long.
We did stop briefly at the magician, who was a soft-spoken Danish man with a beard. He was doing audience-participation card tricks - "You will be the magician, not me!" - and he did a really impressive trick with the first guy. I stepped up next, and I'm very sorry to say I completely foiled him. His trick didn't work at all, which was probably due to the fact that I dealt from the bottom of the stack. I didn't realize I did this, but David saw it and he said the poor guy's face fell when I did it. But he kept saying things to show how random it was, like "choose one of the piles of your own free will," or "stack them however you want," so I guess that's the chance you take when you introduce the human element!
We were home before 10pm like the wild couple we are. David was in bed about 10 minutes after we got home. Poor sicky.
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