I took a field trip to Oxford to meet up with high school friends Miriam (atheist religious studies major beginning a term at Keble College) and Regina (world traveller who tagged along for the ride).
First we had tea at an unbelievably posh tea room that has its origins as the second coffeehouse in England in 1650:
Then we climbed the Norman motte…
…for the view of the 12th-century St. George’s Tower:
Then we wandered through Christ Church Meadow, which is like the Shire crossed with Lyra’s Oxford crossed with Alice in Wonderland (no surprise, since Tolkien, Pullman and Carroll were all Oxford dons).
We watched punters on the river run around, but I didn’t get a picture of it.
We also tried to visit Christ Church but decided we’d rather spend four pounds on coffee than admission. Here’s Christ Church from the outside.
I suppose the thing that surprised me the most about Oxford was its normalcy. A number of my favorite books are set there—To Say Nothing of the Dog; The Golden Compass—so I had this skewed mental image of Oxford as a city that revolved around the famous university. But the vast majority of Oxford looks a great deal like Caerphilly, Newport, suburban Bristol, or any other medium-sized British city. The university is only a tiny (and scattered) fraction of the actual Oxford.