blog d'europe: oxford

a late night trip out to stansted airport to pick up jana - then here we were in london. having not seen each other in over a month, we had a heap to catch up on....so we arose bright and early the next morning with a solid 3 hours of sleep behind us. it was a 6:30am tube trip into london victoria, followed by a stressful search for our bus up the length of buckingham palace rd (that was due to leave in five minutes), before we were able to get a bit of shut-eye on the way to...

oxford! we got here mid-morning, dumped our heavy packs at our hostel, then set out on foot to explore the university town. there's something like 30 colleges here, all making up oxford university. we visited a few of them, one being magdalen college. cue weird english spelling vs. pronunciation - 'magdalen' is actually pronounced 'mawd-len'. thank-you lonely planet for letting us know before we went there, so we didn't look or sound (as) ridiculous.

of all the colleges though, my fav was christ church college. it's steeped with history, not least of all because it was the set for several harry potter locations - including the courtyard (where harry tells ron with attitude to leave him alone, film IX), the entrance hall staircase (where hermione does some quality acting, crying after the yule ball, film IX) & the great hall (which, sadly, doesn't actually have an enchanted ceiling). in case that didn't just give it away, i'm a harry potter nerd... needless to say, i loved it.

christ church is also famous for being the birthplace & inspiration of alice in wonderland. one of the maths lecturers, charles dodgson (pen name = lewis carroll), based the character of alice after the daughter of the college dean. the white rabbit symbolises the dean, who always fretted about things being on-time & who disappeared out of the great hall after meals thru a secret passageway behind a concealed door (disappearing down the rabbit hole). the queen of hearts' infamous outcry "off with her head!", is a reference back to the college founder, henry VIII - who is well-known for beheading two of his wives...as well as a heap of others who pushed his buttons.

all in all, a pretty cool college with roman & gothic architecture.

we took a pit-stop at café coco, where we demolished a delicious tomato, chiken, jalepeño, feta & tzatziki pizza. mouthwatering....and eye-watering thanks to the jalepeños. we then walked back along magdalen bridge and lost ourselves in the shops along high & queen streets. while jana was crazily shopping chez topshop, i perhaps took advantage of the 'tester bottle' of olive green nail polish...walking out five minutes later with all 10 nails painted.

a heap of tributaries leading off the thames snake their way through oxford. when the sun came out, j & i walked along a few of them, basking in the sun & pointing out all of the quaint canal boats. we found a top posi on a floating pontoon, overlooking a wider part of the river. we lounged around, wrote some postcards & watched the canal boats go by. beautiful.