OXFORD 2: Resting, more ancient history, walking about

Both old & new signage in Oxford

We 11 May

Low-key morning, parking in Oxford

We started the day off in a refreshingly low-key way; after our hotel breakfast, we just relaxed in our room til it was time to meet Allie for lunch. I even napped a bit (perhaps because of late nights blogging...). 

It took some back-and-forthing to get our lunchtime rendezvous set. We're not familiar with how parking works here, but neither is Allison, because she doesn't have a car here. There are official "car parks" but it turns out they charge different rates, and some can be quite expensive. We used one today which charged 6 pounds an hour (roughly $7.50/hr) for a maximum of two hours. Later, in the evening a different garage was only 4.5 pounds for the whole evening or 9.5 pounds for about 3 hours earlier in the day. These still aren't as bad as SF prices can be, but they were more than we expected!

We had a lovely ramen lunch, and then some treats at Gail's bakery, a favorite spot of Allie's. I very much enjoyed my pistachio lemon rose cake (shown with a piece of Doug's scone), but I was particularly impressed that their menu includes three kinds of made-to-order "porridge". 

More ancient history

Emperor Augustus; colored version
shows how the statue is believed
to have been colored in its day

After lunch, Allie went off to class while we ended up at the Ashmolean Museum, a well-known public museum in Oxford. It originated with a cabinet of curiosities that Elias Ashmole gave the University of Oxford in 1677. It is the second oldest university museum in the world, and Britain's first public museum.

It is a high-quality museum, but the collection is somewhat eclectic, including both art and archaeological objects, and often driven by what the museum has been given. For instance, there is a significant collection of Greek marble statues that were originally collected by the Earl of Arundel; there is an actual Sumerian temple that was gifted to Oxford and painstakingly moved here in 1936, using 200 crates.

The collection includes objects up into the modern day, but having spent so much time recently thinking about the Romans in Bath, we naturally gravitated to the Greek/Roman/Egyptian galleries.

Entire Sumerian temple, dating to about 680 B.C.

Oxford impressions

Much of the rest of the time, we just wandered the streets of Oxford. Oxford has much more of a variegated city aesthetic than Bath. There are lots of elegant and impressive old buildings, but they're mixed in with more modern buildings; there isn't as much a sense of a unifying aesthetic as there is in Bath. Also, the University is very much mixed in with the rest of the city, the way Berkeley and much of Harvard are, whereas Cambridge England (from what we remember) has more of a separate campus, like Stanford. 

The following photos give some sense of what caught my eye today.

Tower dates back to 1000-1050 CE,
oldest surviving building in Oxford

I liked The Crown next to McD's

This is actually about the double decker buses!

Christ Church

Way to build tall chimneys!

Trinity College

This is where the Tourist Info center
once was. The one in Bath had closed,
too... perhaps both victims of COVID?

This is for Faculty of History

Next Post

Tomorrow we hope to do some more organized walking around, to see particular colleges, and maybe to do a river walk (suggested in a Lonely Planet guidebook).  We are also thinking of trying to take a local bus!