Oxford, Day Two

I spent the entire day Saturday exploring the city of Oxford with Anna as my guide. First we went to the Ashmolean museum, which is the oldest museum in all of Britain, having been founded in the 1600s. The Ashmolean has a collection of art as well as antiquities, including some very impressive Egyptian artifacts. Besides the Egyptian collections, here are some of the other things I thought were cool at the Ashmolean:
-an original Stradivarius violin
-Chief Powhatan's Mantle (Pocahontas's Dad...and mantle=cloak)
-original Da Vinci sketches (Anna and I got to view in a special room, under supervision)
-The Parian Marble, which is the oldest Greek chronological table known (kind of like the oldest Greek calendar ever found; it is inscribed on marble)

After the Ashmolean we had coffee at the posh five-star Randolph hotel. I don't really drink coffee, but Anna loves it and insisted that we try it at the hotel. I'll admit it was pretty cool; we were served coffee and biscuits on silver place settings by white-jacketed waiters. Probably as elegant as two broke college kids can get. I heaped a ton of cream and sugar unto my coffee and it ended up tasting just fine.


After coffee and lunch, we explored the city in earnest, walking for miles on end. Whenever we walked past a college, we would go inside and gaze at the central courtyard, as well as the architecture. They are all lovely, and at a few of them we even went inside to look at their libraries or chapels. Some of the colleges were charging admission, but since I look like a student I could slip in unnoticed (bwahahahaha).

The city was bustling on a Saturday, crowded with tourists as well as locals. I was taken aback at the sheer size of it; it was a thriving, small city. I had expected Oxford to be a sleepy college town, but I was quickly proved otherwise.

At the end of the day, Anna and I returned to her flat, utterly exhausted. We had been walking for miles. There was talk of going out to a pub, but we had done that Friday night and it was full of round-faced 18 years olds barely past puberty. The pub scene in Oxford was not the place to meet sophisticated guys.

Saturday night Anna and I talked for hours, drank more coffee, and spent a good 45 minutes analyzing a giant Dali print tacked up to her wall (The Hallucinogenic Toreador- worth a look). Nothing like late night intellectual discussion. I went gratefully to bed that night, quite tired and overstimulated from my full day in Oxford.