Oxford. May 11

Another journey day for us, this time to Oxford. 

The weather today was very good, sunny and not too chilly. We started the day exploring the beautiful town a little and managed to find, by chance, the Natural History museum. It was incredible. Waaaaayyyy better than the one in London, with amazing collections of taxidermy (good taxidermy) and heaps of proper scientific explanations, not just aimed at kids like in London. We kind of lost ourselves in there for a bit, going crazy in the nature. 

Walking around finding too much cliche

Mammal bones!

Humpback whale skull

We then joined a walking tour (got toffee fudge first, of course) which took us to all the major sights/colleges in Oxford. 
We went to some pretty amazing buildings (archee-tech-cha for days), many of which were designed by famous architect Sir Christopher Wren, known best for building St. Paul's Cathedral in London. We saw the Bodleian Library's Divinity School (the first classroom in Oxford) which was used for the infirmary in Harry Potter, and the Sheldonian Theatre. 

Radcliffe Camera- first year Humanities library

Sass queens

Sheldonian Theatre

Another highlight was seeing the apparent inspiration for 'The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe' by author C.S. Lewis; a cute little doorway with fawn lintel decorations, a lamppost nearby, and the wardrobe like door with a lions face carving, which he apparently walked through every day before writing the books. Also Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carrol, wrote Alice in Wonderland here and based the character on Alice Liddel, a masters daughter at the college. We saw the little gated garden where Alice and her siblings would play and the river he would take them rowing on.

Lion!

Fawn!

Where little Alice played!

On a sad note we missed out on going to the Museum of the History of Science because it was closed, which sounded like he best ever and Ash was devastated. Our tour guide told us it had Einstein's original blackboard with his equations about the diameter, age and expansion of the universe used in the second of his series of three lectures he did at Oxford in 1931. Whaaaaaatttttt!

We visited the grounds of the famous Christchurch college, which is basically the coolest ever btw. Here the inspiration came for the Harry Potter great hall, and the scene with the steps where we first meet Draco, prior to being sorted into their houses, was actually filmed in this college. But mainly the grounds were the most beautiful we've seen of all the colleges. 

Christchurch (Great Hall to the right)

Following the tour we went back to Christchurch to absorb the sun and eat our fudge. It was pretty idyllic. While sitting and eating we noticed many runners going down a path, so we decided to be stalkers and find out where it lead. Best decision ever. We came across the river, which itself was amazing, and then heaps and heaps geese, goslings, ducks, ducklings and swans! Also rowing houses and people rowing which was pretty fun to watch. 

We headed back into town to a pub that served pizza (we know we're obsessed with pizza, habit) which was pretty tasty and had weird hipsters basically running the place so that was some entertainment for the evening.

Finally we got the train back into London, having had a very good day.

Much love, A&E.