Oxford

It's 7pm on Sunday, and I can hear Big Ben chiming in the background. Jay and I are exhausted. We've walked approximately 25 miles over the last two days (thanks FitBit!). But before I can tell you about London, I have to finish with Oxford:

Our first glimpse of Oxford was when we came in to town that first day in the UK, foolishly thinking that we would be able to park and find a café for Jay to work in.

Ha.

Turns out, to visit Oxford, the best thing is to use one of the three Park and Ride facilities outside of town. I think even people who work in Oxford use them. So, Thursday afternoon we made our first attempt to go into Oxford. We didn't really plan ahead, which was silly, and I had a pretty bad spasm in my neck, so I wasn't really in top form. We wandered a little bit, found the Oxford University Press Bookshop, and saw the Oxford Covered Market, which is a neat little Food etc. conglomeration of shops, reminiscent of Chelsea Market in New York, or the Ferry Building in San Francisco. Unfortunately, at this point, my neck spasm had gotten bad enough that I was losing mobility and was in a lot of pain, so we headed back to the bus and returned to the flowerbed shed. After an evening of heat on my muscles and rest and a little bit of research we were ready to make a second attempt at Oxford Friday afternoon.

This time I had a map that I'd done some marking on, and we had a plan. We headed up the High Street into the northern part of campus and found Radcliffe Camera and the Bodleian (tours were sold out, sadly. I would have forked out for that). We also saw All Soul's college (I don't wanna explain it, see Wikipedia), and Hertford College (formerly Magdalen Hall) which is the college that Thomas Hobbes was a member of when he was at Oxford at the age of 15. 

The gate in to All Soul's College

The Bridge of Sighs of Oxford - it connects the two parts of Hertford College. The builder built it because he was tired of carting his books between the buildings in the Oxford rain.

Jay in front of Hertford College, as close as we could get. 

The edifice from the inner courtyard of the Bodleian

Radcliffe Camera - I think it's library, but I mostly like it cause its a gorgeous building

After that we headed to Blackwell's bookstore, which is a sort of book lover Mecca that takes up three store fronts and is a veritable maze of literature and lore. Jay wondered off to the philosophy section, while I found a few new pharmacology books that I need to read and then we had some fun wandering around the rare books section. No copies of Hobbes' Leviathan though. It's a shame, Jay has quite the collection going.

After that we headed to the Natural History Museum, which was in a gorgeous building, we didn't really explore more than the entrance hall because we were there with a different goal in mind.

The Natural History Museum

My first love, Charles Darwin

Within the Natural History Museum, at the back, there's the Pitt Rivers Museum, which is an anthropological collection of epic proportions. I get the feeling that these people buy random things at the store and throw them in a closet for a hundred years so that they can bring them out once they're historical. They don't always wait. The cool thing is that everything is grouped by purpose, rather than origin. So, for example, all the looms, from Hopi to Nepalese to Finnish, were grouped together in one case. It was really cool to see the similarities. There was a section with different things that have been used as currency in the past and sections for toys, puppets, boats, swords, guns, jewelry. It was a glorious mess of humanity all pulled together. If you'll forgive me for getting a little sappy, this way of displaying things really brought out the similarities between all the different cultures of the world and reinvigorated the idea that we really are all one people, which I think is an important thing to remember these days.

This doesn't even begin to capture the chaos of the Pitt Rivers Museum,
and this is just the first floor.

(Also, Dad, you would have loved the weapons display)

Really old guns at the Pitt Rivers Museum

After that we were getting pretty tired so we headed back for our last night at the flowerbed shed.

Before we depart Oxford, I need to tell you about one more thing. The shower at the flowerbed shed.

Its outdoors.

The view from the shower

And its quite possibly the best shower I've ever taken in my life. The water was hot and the pressure was perfect and I had a view. I'm pretty sure the length of my showers would be considered unseemly by European standards. Anyway, I was sad to say goodbye to it, because the other showers I've experienced in Europe have been pretty wimpy so far. But I'm not all that sad to say goodbye to the composting toilet, and that's all I'll say about that. 

We've finished our second day in London, but I have a LOT of pictures to go through before that post is ready to go up so you'll have to wait till I've had some time in Aarhus (next stop, Denmark!).