Envision Stephen Hawking, John Donne and Harry Potter eating here

DINING at Oxford's colleges, you cannot escape the feeling that through some form of alchemy, you've been transmuted into a medieval scholar. You and your fellow scholars eat facing each other on long wooden tables stretching the full length of the baronial hall, while your professors dine on a raised dais at the far end of the room.

On the darkly paneled and windowed clerestory walls above you hang portraits of august notables long deceased, kings, queens, knights, dons and churchly grandees in full medieval regalia. Were it not for the paintings of the recent college rectors, you might also think that you have wandered onto the set of a "Harry Potter" movie.

If You Go THE PROGRAM The University of Oxford held programs in English literature as well as history, politics and society from July 2 through 22. Resident tuition for both was 1,965 British pounds (about US$3,644). This includes room and board at Exeter College. There was also a program in creative writing held from July 23 through Aug. 12 for the same price. You can access information for summer 2007 courses by visiting the University of Oxford's Continuing Education Web site at www.conted.ox.ac.uk/ courses/international. Those interested in taking summer courses at Oxford's arch rival, the University of Cambridge, should visit their International Summer School Web site at www.cont-ed. cam.ac.uk/IntSummer. GETTING THERE Airlines: Take American or British Airways departing Honolulu at 8 a.m. and arriving at London's Heathrow Airport at noon the next day, with a connection in Los Angeles. Flight time averages 17 hours. Summer fares are around $1,600 round trip. Ground transportation: From Heathrow Airport, take the Oxford Express bus, which costs 16 British pounds one way and takes about 90 minutes to get to downtown Oxford. If traveling from London, board the Oxford Express bus at the Victoria Coach Station. One-way fare from London is 11 British pounds. WHAT TO BRING The weather changes quickly from warm to cold and rainy, so bring a rain jacket and sweater. You should also have at least one formal outfit for ceremonial occasions. I suggest bringing a laptop computer and a flash-drive storage device. You can buy electrical adapter plugs in Oxford.

Actually, you have. The grand dining hall at Oxford's Christ Church College was used for filming the series about the young magician. Welcome to Oxford, England, where the mixture of the medieval and the modern will awe and delight you. For a truly memorable vacation, I recommend sampling the town over a three-week period by enrolling in the University of Oxford's summer sessions, where you will study and interact with intellectually stimulating people from all over the planet.

Oxford is the model from which the rest of the world's universities took inspiration. America's Ivy League copied Oxford's look and feel extensively so that when you visit Yale, Princeton or Penn, you will see pseudo-Gothic buildings entwined in ivy, some dating back several centuries. In contrast, Oxford lays claim to fully nine centuries of continuous existence as a center of higher learning.

During July and August the University of Oxford and its arch rival, the University of Cambridge, permit applicants with bachelor's degrees to take graduate courses. The cost for a three-week session at Oxford, including tuition, room and full board, is 1,965 British pounds, or $3,644 at today's exchange rates.

I chose the program in English literature but could also have opted for the program on history, politics and society. I took courses in Chaucer and Shakespeare, though there were many others that looked intriguing. Alas, how much can you do within three weeks?

Courses are rigorous and consist of large group lectures and smaller class meetings, each run by Oxford professors, and entail many hours of independent reading per day. In my Shakespeare in Performance class, for example, we read "Henry V," "Richard III" and "Twelfth Night," as well as secondary sources about each work. We then viewed various filmed versions of the same plays, examining how film directors from different eras interpreted the bard's texts. In addition to class work, students are expected to complete one research paper per course.

Most of the research is done in Oxford's famous Bodleian Library, one of the truly great collections in the world, with more than 7 million volumes. Though the Bodleian is housed in numerous buildings, its crown jewel is the Divinity School, a masterpiece of English Gothic architecture, upon which work commenced in 1427. I especially admired the fan-vaulted ceiling with its carved initials and coats of arms, each identifying those who contributed to the cost of the building. Close by is the library's Radcliffe Camera, dating from 1737. This circular baroque edifice has a domed reading room in which I spent many pleasant hours.

Below the library's venerable main buildings, however, lie modern, subterranean storage tunnels for much of the 80 miles of shelving needed to house the books and manuscripts in the collection. The Bodleian is not a lending library -- even King Charles the First was refused permission to borrow a book -- so all reading must be done on site.

THE UNIVERSITY of Oxford is actually a collection of 39 separate colleges, some richer, some poorer, some hoary with age and some founded as recently as the 1960s. Many of the colleges are located within the town of Oxford, and they resemble medieval castles, with high, fortresslike walls surrounding a grassy courtyard.

This was purposeful design, for in the 13th century the town-gown disputes frequently led to riots and assaults against the young scholars by enraged town folk. The beleaguered students could retreat to the colleges and close the gates for safety against the rampaging mobs. Today, you still enter the colleges through a main gate that is guarded night and day by the college porters.

Inside each college's walls is a self-contained world consisting of the chapel, classrooms, residential area and dining hall. There is usually a pub in a Gothic-arched cellar next to the dining hall, serving pints of delightful British beer at student prices. Groups of us from around the world would usually gather there for some conviviality before heading upstairs to the dining hall for the 6 o'clock meal.

It seems that all of us had heard horror tales about British cooking, and I can report that this is not true of Oxford's dining halls. We found the food surprisingly tasty, though perhaps a bit heavy on the fried potatoes. We all agreed that the Harry Potter-esque ambience of the hall compensated for any deficiencies in the cuisine.

I lived and took my courses right in the heart of town at Exeter College on Turl Street. My single student room was adequate, though the bathroom facilities were located down the hall and a half-flight of stairs away. I recommend requesting a room facing the grassy interior of the college rather than one facing out onto the town's streets. That's because during the summer, the town of Oxford hosts vast numbers of young people from all over the world, there to take enrichment courses during the day and to promenade up and down High Street in the evening, meeting and mingling with other teens in what anthropologists would regard as our species' mating ritual.

The scene looked like fun and reminded me of my student days in Paris long ago, but time is an abyss that separates youth from adults. I could only wistfully observe, reminiscing about the past and loves lost. But I digress from my point, which is that if you're not a teen yourself, the noise of alcohol-fueled revelry can get pretty loud in the wee hours when the pubs start emptying.

WHEN YOU LEAVE the confines of your college, you step out into the streets of Oxford, a delightful little city. In the medieval period, the town was named for a nearby ford in the Thames River where farmers could safely bring their oxen across the shallows from one riverbank to the other. Today, the town center, where many colleges are located, still retains the lanes and half-timbered architecture of its medieval past. I loved to take exploratory walks in the afternoon, though I found that I frequently got turned around and confused as I meandered through these twisting little streets. However, the town is small enough that I could always find my way back to Exeter College without undue hardship.

The town of Oxford holds numerous attractions that will compete with your course work for your attention. I frequently visited the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, drawn to their Greek and Roman statuary downstairs, and upstairs, paintings from the Italian Renaissance, Baroque and Impressionist periods. It is also worth visiting the university's Museum of Natural History and the adjoining Pitt Rivers Museum, a pleasant walk out from the center of town.

I also enjoyed the green, parklike setting of Christ Church College Meadows. Gravel paths loop for a half-mile alongside a punting canal where lovers pole their boats and ducks and geese wander the banks. The canal is part of the Isis River, as the upper section of the Thames here at Oxford is dubbed. The river is navigable from London to Oxford via a series of locks, and is filled with colorful boats of all types.

During the course of your three weeks' stay, you can join your fellow students for cultural expeditions to other parts of Britain. Entertainment in Shakespeare's day consisted of plays, bull and bear baiting, and public executions. Mercifully, of this trio, only the plays remain.

A group of us took a bus down to London to see Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing" at the Globe Theater. Sitting in the Gentlemen's Box above and behind stage right gave me a unique perspective on Elizabethan drama, as I frequently saw the actors' backs, but they played to the audience sitting and standing all around, above and below them.

On another trip we spent the day in Shakespeare's hometown, Stratford-on-Avon. We got there in the early afternoon so we had plenty of time to explore. A fellow student and I walked outside of town to the family home of Shakespeare's wife, Anne Hathaway.

At her cottage the guide explained the origin of various English words we never stop to think about. For example, the term "upper crust" literally is derived from the way bread was baked in brick ovens in Shakespeare's day. The upper crust was the desirable part of the bread and was cut off from the blackened, lower part of the loaf. The upper crust was given to the higher-status individuals, while the lower orders had to content themselves with the blackened, less desirable portion.

Leaving Anne's cottage, we walked to a nearby pub where I ordered toad-in-the-hole along with the obligatory pint. Thus satisfied, we rejoined the other members of our group for the evening's performance of "Macbeth" in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.

To allow the tutors time to read them, the research papers were due at the end of the second week of class. What a relief when I got them finished, an eight-pager on Shakespeare and a 13-pager on Chaucer. I could now enjoy the final week at Oxford without a care in the world, and it flew by.

Soon, it was time for goodbyes, but even that was done with a nod to tradition. The rector of Exeter College hosted a reception in her private garden, a coat, tie, and cocktail dress affair amid the flowers, bathed in the golden glow of a lingering British summer afternoon. We felt like characters from a novel of manners, magically transformed from lowly students into members of the upper crust. We then retired to the dining hall for a formal banquet with speeches by our professors, and the alchemy was complete.

The portraits of the long-departed notables gazed down on us, no doubt pleased that tradition continues to resonate at Oxford, even as the university embraces the challenges of modernity.

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