Oxford

Oxford was a nice town with stunning buildings and people walking around in those black robes with the coloured sashes just like in the movies. I was put in a bad mood our first day though because it is a shocking town to drive in. you would think that a town full of academics could devise a better traffic system than the one they currently have in place.
Something Oxford does do well is museums. We went to two museums the first one was the Natural History museum where we got to pat some ponies and badgers, wallabies and cheetahs. they also had rocks that were pretty ancient, some were nearly 4 million years old and you were allowed to touch these. it surprised me how hands-on this museum was, i liked it. it made it much more interesting. they had displays of lots of different animals, both taxidermied and in skeleton form. We only looked through one floor of this museum as we had lots to do and not much time to do it all in.

T-Rex skeleton at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History

Ewen getting friendly with the local wildlife

A reindeer skeleton amongst others

Ewen and a badger

Next up was the Pitt Rivers museum, this museum was attached to the Natural History museum but was about 1000% more bizarre. The museum consists of three levels of things that a guy called Pitt Rivers collected during his travels from all over the world. This museum had pretty much everything you can think of on display including games from all over the world, magical items, tools, musical instruments, photos, weapons, clothes, statues, shrunken human heads (yep!) books, manuscripts, skulls, cooking utensils, etc. I just read that the collection of Pitt Rivers consisted of 18,000 items but now there are half a million items on display many of which were donated by other explorers and anthropologists.

This was in the Pitt Rivers museum. It was used for some kind of throwing game

A shrunken head in the Pitt Rivers museum

A fan with actual stuffed birds stuck on it

We went to Balliol college which was pretty. we saw a couple of students wandering around with hockey sticks. they also had two gargoyles one of a student sticking its tongue out while it took notes and one of a teacher reading from a book.

Balliol college

The next college we went to was Christ Church. this is one of the most popular colleges to visit in Oxford probably because some of the Harry Potter movies were filmed here. We went into a chapel, a hallway and a food hall (i think this is the room they used in the movies). Going to the colleges was very interesting but kind of annoying that you have to pay to get in and then are only allowed in a couple of rooms (at Balliol we couldn't go into any rooms) and maybe a quadrangle.

Me at Christ Church college

Ewen in the hall at Christ Church college

The last college we went to was Magdalene college. This college has gargoyles that were used as the inspiration for the stones statues in the Chronicles of Narnia. Also Oscar Wilde went to this college. They had a paddock of deer just behind the college.

Magdalene college

Deer at Magdalene college