So Thursday morning, I decided to head to Oxford for a day trip. Unheard of for English people who would only consider the 1hr+ one trip for a longer amount of time - a weekend or a week! Walked into town and hit up the Ashmolean museum first - a free activity. I think it may well rank among the most random museums I have ever been to, containing statues from Egypt and Greece, printings from China and Japan, old English table settings, Italian rennisance art, coins, an exhibit of contemporary sculptures made from prosthetic legs, and 4 Stradivarius instruments. I spent some time wandering around the silent, musty, mostly devoid of visitors rooms. The music room was actually closed and I had to beg a nearby curator to open it up for me to see the Stradivarius violin 'Le Messie.' So the 10 min tour of a small room packed with instruments and 2 stradivarius violins, 1 guitar, and 1 sitar before being escourted out and told to hide the paper from the room so that no one else would know the curator opened it. Out again on the streets of Oxford, headed down by Carfax tower and then to Christ church College. Having so many separate universities reminds me a bit of Yale where everyone lived in "colleges." I must admit that I couldn't bring myself to pay to get into any of them. I mean, really, it is a school still! But I really enjoyed wandering the small back allies, peeking inside some of the less well known colleges, following people who looked like they might actually be students. I of course made sure as well to see the famous New College and Magdalen College. I got a kick out of just walking along a street and looking up to see a plaque that read something along the lines of "while living here, Sir Alfred Boyle discovered Boyle's Law and some other guy who i can't remember at the moment but know of made a microscope and identified a living cell for the first time." So, yeah, cool! Oxford reminded me a bit of Bath with more architectural diversity. After wandering for several hrs, I called it a day and hopped the train back to Bath.
So in other recent news, two of the Americans have now left: Les on Wed. and Dan today. We all keep going out the night before and our numbers are already dwindling. It's very odd to sit around a table with the people you've hung out with most the past 4 months and say that you'll never all be together again. I suppose that this is just a preview for graduation next year. I guess one of the consequences of spreading your friends out and around the world is that you'll be lucky to see them once every 5-10 yrs. At any rate, I haven't studied for the past 2 days. I know I can't totally blow off these exams... so I guess I'll go attempt to do some work now.
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