OXFORD 4: The Cow and Kite

Cow.
I don't believe I zoomed this photo; the cow was really close.
Sadly, I did not get a close-up of Kite.

Fr 13 May

Pub Names

I've noticed that a lot of British pubs have names like "The Eagle and Child" or "The Lamb and Flag" or "The Swan and Castle" or "The Angel and Greyhound" or "The Rose and Crown." These are all actual names of pubs in Oxford, though as mentioned in the last post, The Eagle and Child is closed for at least two years. Inspired by these names, I'm calling this post "The Cow and Kite." Later you'll understand why. 

Short Post Today

I'm also keeping today's post short, as we've already been out late (back to our room at 10:45pm today vs. something like 7pm yesterday), and we have a big day tomorrow. We had three main activities today: 

• visiting Magdalen College and walking along its beautiful meadow
• visiting the even larger Christ Church meadow and Boathouse Island at the end
• hanging out with our Beloved Daughter, seeing her business school and seeing a huge third meadow, Port Meadow, site of the Cow and Kite.

I will post just a small sampling of photos; we took dozens and dozens of photos of the beautiful buildings and halls, and beautiful scenery.  It was a beautiful, sunny, warm day, and lots of people were out punting or picnicking. We spent most of the day outdoors as well.

Magdalen College

Magdalen College Meadows

Christ Church Meadow and Boathouse Island

The Cow and Kite

Out in the vast Port Meadow of Oxford, in the early evening, there were a few groups of people picnicking here and there. There was also a man flying a green parafoil kite. At one point his kite came down, and a couple of cows in the meadow came over to investigate. The man tried to carry his kite off, but not only did the two cows follow him, but more joined in the party. It was like the Pied Piper leading the rats, only it was the Kite Man being persistently followed by cows. It was really quite funny; both Doug and I took videos. Eventually the man managed to get himself and his kite far enough away that the cows lost interest.

LEFT: 2 cows.  MIDDLE: Kite.  RIGHT: Man.

Man & Kite, being followed by multiple cows.

Next Post

You'll just have to wait and see. We're using our rental car to travel about an hour away from Oxford...

In front of the Saïd Business School

At Port Meadow
(site of the Cow and Kite)

Just imagine all the other stories from today I don't have time to tell..

OXFORD 3: Taking a bus! More stairs, views, atmosphere

 

Panorama shot of Radcliffe Camera from the top of University Church

Th 12 May

Taking a bus!

We started off today by taking a local bus to get to central Oxford, instead of driving and dealing with parking. Fortunately, there is great public transportation—on the street by our lodging a bus comes by every 4 minutes or so during the day, and even in the evening it still runs every 8 minutes or so. Buses are double decker, which is fun. We climb up to the top level, to enjoy the view from there. 

In an ideal situation, we'd be staying in central Oxford and could walk everywhere. but we're about two miles out, so it's pretty far to rely on walking alone. 

It says to wear a face covering but almost no one did,  including the driver

Our bus There are lots and lots of buses, you see them all the time.

More stairs and views

Once we got off in central Oxford, we started walking around some more. I am gradually getting a better sense of the city and where things are. We started off looking for the "Radcliffe Camera," one of the standard Oxford sights (shown at the top of this post). On the way there we saw the Bridge of Sighs, where a fellow American asked us to take her picture for her. She rewarded us, not only by taking our picture for us, but also by telling us to check out the view from the University Church tower, for only 5 pounds. 

We wandered over there, and once again, climbed winding stairs up a clock/bell tower. After having done the Bath Abbey climb, I figured this would be a piece of cake. It was in fact, shorter and there was even a metal handrail of sorts. At the top though, the railing was lower, and the space you stood in was quite narrow; while it still felt safe enough, I found myself feeling dizzier than I had at Bath Abbey. It was great to get the view  though, and we were early enough that we had the narrow walkway all to ourselves. I would hate to be there with a crowd.

In the photos below, the climb took us to the walkway at the top of the church clock face. That's where we  looked out from. In the photo looking down, notice how many buses there are! The photo at the top of this post was taken from the church, too.

Lunch and a few COVID comments

We met Allie at the Gloucester Green outdoor Market for lunch, where you can pick up a bite to eat at any of a number of food stalls. It was bustling! Allie got Korean, Doug got Indian, and I had an Italian arancini. 

We overhear more different languages here at Oxford than we did at Bath. That is not surprising, given that students at Oxford come from all over; however we might have heard more languages at Bath, too, in pre-COVID times. Our walking tour guide in Bath mentioned that it's been mostly British tourists after COVID shut down international travel.

Attitudes towards COVID precautions seem quite relaxed here, as in Bath, and we've been pretty relaxed, too. You do still see a few people wearing masks here and there, mostly Asians and/or older people. At Gail's coffeehouse, the cashier was masked, but no other staff. At a Thai restaurant we went to, our server was masked. Our bus drivers have not been masked—though they sit behind a plexiglass barrier we suspect was installed for COVID—and most passengers have not been masked either. To a very large extent, things seem "normal" except every now and then you get hints that things aren't quite, or that things haven't been normal that long. 

One of the hints, besides the tourist info centers disappearing, is that a friend wrote us with two restaurant suggestions in Oxford. It turns out one place (Eagle and Child) closed in March 2020, when COVID started. It hopes to renovate and reopen with added hotel rooms, but it will take at least two years and its future is still uncertain. Another place (The Nosebag) has ended up closing, after 51 years in business.

Oxford schools, the Bodleian Library

Map showing college locations

Even though, as I mentioned yesterday, Oxford University is intermingled with the town rather than having a discrete, contiguous campus, the central area is much more densely full of Oxford colleges than I had initially appreciated.  Oxford currently consists of 30 colleges, each of which functions like a small sub-school; they're much more than just a "dorm". They typically are inward-focused, with one or more inner courtyards, and only a few are open to the public. It's hard to get a sense of Oxford just from the outside. I feel that we have barely scratched the surface.

Yet, for whatever reasons, we haven't felt that motivated to take a general tour, even though we found the walking tour in Bath very useful (of course that one was also free). We were willing to book a specific tour, though, to get to see the "shouldn't miss" sights of the Bodleian Library, only available via tour. It was well worth it.

What you see, in the 30 minute tour we opted for, is only two sites that are associated with the Library: the Divinity Hall and Duke Humfrey's Library. These sites are spectacular though, and you also get to hear and understand more about the entire Library and the history of it. As shown in the photos below, the Divinity Hall is incredibly atmospheric; so is Duke Humfrey's Library, but photos aren't allowed there (Google images of it if you want). Both sites have been used in Harry Potter films; the Divinity Hall has been used in some other films as well. 

Next post:

More Oxford tomorrow, then a special field trip with Allison on Saturday...  

Also, please feel free to reply to L3_Blog with any comments, suggestions, questions if you have them. I've gotten a few (like the restaurant suggestions mentioned above) and it's fun to get them. 

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!