Wednesday in Oxford

After I commented to Deb that her blog on Stonehenge was “just the facts, Ma’am”, I was given the task of the next posting. Of course, any description of a place with big rocks is bound to be a little dry.

We have been here a week, and I have set up my first experiments today-- Deb is having a quiet day back at the apartment . We enjoyed dinner at our place last night with her friend Shelly and daughter Sara before they took off for Cambridge.

The three of them had a fun day around Oxford yesterday—it took only 6 days into our trip for Deb to make her first visit to a library. They poked around Bodleian Library, the main library at the University of Oxford and Holywell Cemetery, looking for the grave of Kenneth Grahame, the author of the Wind and the Willows. You can tell this threesome has literary interests….

We have already visited the Eagle and Child pub (Deb has been there twice in fact), the home pub of JR Tolkein and CS Lewis. It is what I imagine a literary pub should be like—small rooms, big fireplace, old wooden floors and not too spiffy. We also visited our “local”, the Fir Tree pub at the end of our block, also pretty nice. It has old wood, antique advertising signs, and several small tables in one main room. It also had Bruce Springsteen and 70s rock on the juke box so how bad could it be? Of course, every pub is different and they are more about being sociable rather than about drinking alcohol. Most of them have outdoor tables, and the weather has been perfect for sitting outside. We have not really learned much about the individual characters of any of them. They are somewhat like the cafes in Vienna or the coffee shops in Seattle—community meeting places, and all very different in character.

We live in East Oxford, a culturally mixed neighborhood with a range of interesting shops to be explored. In addition to the expected Indian and Chinese restaurants, there are also many Thai and Middle Eastern places, and three Polish bakeries. It is a short walk to the Tesco, an international supermarket and department store chain. We have a stove, oven, and microwave so Deb can cook easily enough but the refrigerator is apartment-sized so we can’t have lots of stored items. That is OK, since we have to carry our purchases home and even a two-liter soda container is pretty heavy after a few blocks. Central Oxford is a 20 minute walk, with all of the main shops and the colleges of the University. We have walked a lot, and our feet are reminding us that they are not used to so much work. We did see someone punting yesterday, so that was a first.

Everyone bicycles—there must be 75 of them lined up outside the building where I work. The city is flat, the streets are narrow, but every road has a bicycle lane on each side. We see students, professional adults headed to work, elderly people, and all the in-betweens riding around town. Because the streets are narrow and crowded with stone buildings close to the road, it is not a particularly quiet place. However, you can head through a gate or down a very narrow lane and end up in a quiet meadow or grassy quad where the noisy streets seem to be a long ways off.