Catch Up Part 3: Discoveries

As I've let more than a year go by with this site laying dormant, wondering if I'll ever go back to writing about these adventures of our time in England, I've finally returned, only to have Blogger change their settings and any editing of old posts, which admittedly, I neglected to publish back then, have gone horribly awry. So! Here I am, hopefully about to rock this writing universe like a hurricane once again, but until I have something new and improved, I'm trying to get the old ones done. Better late than never. As evidence, I offer you the below post from March of 2014 - not 2015 like it's dated - because when I do that, my sidebar disappears. Sigh. Google world - in all your technical wonder, why do you flout me thus? Nevermind. I will find another way. Til then, imagine a time when this town was still shiny and new..

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Not every tourist town has a world-renown and respected university in it and not every university town is swarmed with tourists all year round. And, even if your tourist town does have a university in it, I bet people don't come to see the university as their main tourist attraction. AND if said tourist destination does have a university at its center, it probably doesn't have THIRTY NINE of them like Oxford does (They count All Souls College, but it doesn't take any students so.. that's confusing.). So with all those schools, it usually feels a bit crowded in this teeny tiny city. Kind of like all of downtown Seattle at rush hour compressed into downtown Fremont for example. Essentially, three to four main city blocks with everyone in it trying to get somewhere and that doubles on weekends. Add in pouring down rain and you're lucky if you can get down a block with your umbrella in tact (Yes, it rains differently here than in Seattle. Also, with no car, well.. it's wetter. So now we are Umbrella People. I know. I feel the failure in my soul too.). I don't know where everyone is going, but for some reason, they all have to be out and about a lot. 

Usually we aren't deterred by the constant crowds of students hitting the books or the pints and slow-moving, camera-laden tourists, but for a few weeks in January, we took advantage of the quiet due to students still being gone for the holiday and the new term still a week or two off. 

Creepy clown art installation that everyone mentions at Cafe Coco on Cowley Road. Pretty good pizza and calzones. Mike wasn't so impressed (he has higher standards apparently), but we both enjoyed our cocktails. 

One of the most popular areas to hit for food is Cowley Road. Cowley is a popular student area, cheaper to live, lots of bars and eateries and one of the bigger music venues is there (We laugh every time we walk by it because Less Than Jake seems to always be set to play there, a band Mike has opened for two or three times and was always terrible he says. How are they still touring?). The street is swarmed on weekends. So far we've tried one of the pizza joints, a burger place, Lebanese and Spanish tapas. The latter two were the winners for us both despite the other two coming highly recommended by everyone we've met. Eh.. we've had better in Seattle and Chicago, we thought, and we admit we're a bit snobby about our stateside favorites. Still the town is noticeably without anything at all resembling a Dick's and though it boasts a popular ramen place, Wagamama, it's more like Seattle's Boom Noodle and not nearly as cheap and awesome as the pho you can get at any Seattle Than Bros locations. I know, I know.. we're trying to blend in and be open to everything, but sometimes, you can't help but contrast and compare. 

At least a couple of times, we've gone out with other people! Seriously, get us in a group setting and we get so excited that OTHER PEOPLE will be there besides just the two of us. I mean, we love each other and all, but we see each other All. The. Time. So a birthday for one of Mike's colleagues? Yes! Totes in!

Everyone started at our place for food and pre-funking and out we went to a new speakeasy called The Mad Hatter (really, Oxford may be getting a bit on the Alice overkill.. but who am I to say?). Apparently, when it's a Dutch person's birthday, the birthday person buys the first round. And then everyone dances, though I don't think that's part of the tradition. That's just what we did. 

Me and Mike's 'normal' face again.. Handsome, right?

Mathilde (from France) and Myrte (pronounced Meer-tah), the birthday girl from the Netherlands.

Dancing the night away (really they did til well after we, the old marrieds, left), Mathilde, Rachel (from Croydon, London-ish)..er the back of her head at least, Melissa (from Manchester) and Lukasz (from Poland). They're fun.

Our new friends even came out for the surprise birthday party I planned shortly thereafter for Mike. Oddly, there are no pictures whatsoever from that event. I actually don't know how that happened, but here's the condensed version: We ate alone in a corner of the restaurant and all his friends snuck in and sat in another part where he'd seen there were birthday balloons all set up and thought someone else was having a birthday too. Then, in order to get him into the other room after dinner, I couldn't come up with anything more than his birthday dessert was too big for our little table. Yeah, not my best work, but he bought it. I led him with his eyes closed to the other room where everyone began singing Happy Birthday when they saw him and Bam! Surprise! Yeah.. sorry. Pictures would've been better, but we'll all get over it.

My view from the top of St. Mary the Virgin church. Pretty.. 

We then spent the next couple of weeks doing things we just hadn't had time to do prior - like sight-seeing around town. There's a gorgeous lookout from the top of the tower in the main church belonging to the university called St. Mary the Virgin. It's where they tried all the Protestant heretics back in Queen Mary's day. And from the top of it, which you get to by climbing a zillion teeny tiny spiral stairs that can make anyone claustrophobic and dizzy, is an incredible view of Oxford.

To continue making the most of our  Let's See More Stuff Now, we got in a play in town - a hot mess of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night that was more pretentious performance art than theater to both of us - and after a quick lunch at Harrod's Montreaux Jazz Cafe as part of another day in London, we had front row seats to The 39 Steps, which completely exceeded any expectations we had of that. Amazeballs and hilarious.

We took walks along the canal, met boat kitties, saw double rainbows, ate at pubs, took a tour of the Oxford Castle complete with a costumed tour guide (which is always sort of awkward), had a lovely Valentine's day and experienced the grand re-opening of Oxford's Museum of Natural History that was really fun.

Oops! That clearly moves into February - but that's ok. Because it's March now as I'm writing this! I'm really behind.

And then she went back inside her boat! So cute!

This little thing came out to get a little pat from us.

Oooh! Along the canal on a gorgeous day and bam! Swans!

The tower at Oxford Castle.

This weird and creepy well where prisoners used to have to get water where clearly someone was partying the night before. Must've been a good party.

The crypt in the Oxford Castle. The pillars and arches are Norman, which dates it back to the 11th Century, around 1074!

The gorgeous ceiling of the Museum of Natural History. It's been closed for cleaning and restoration. I don't know how many windows they had to clean and replace, but it was a lot.

My bearded love and L'il Sebastian - ok some other stuffed pony from the Museum of Natural History.

The beautiful Radcliffe Camera, which I can't even go into, not unless I'm on a stupid tour.

The Museum of Natural History. Most of their dinosaurs are only replicas from the real ones in Chicago.

I got Mike the turntable for Christmas and he got me the xx album for Valentine's. Aww.

January Catch Up Part 2: Historical Stuff and Lots of Pictures!

Fall leaves encroach the muddy waters that run along the edge of Christ Church College.

In my attempts to make up for all I missed writing about in January, I honestly didn't get very far. The first days of the year were quite the adventure, thanks to Paul and Erin. But that leaves a lot more ground to cover so let's get a move on.

The entrance to Christ Church College, for once, not swarmed with tourists as it usually is on the weekends.

Mike and I had a day to ourselves and we decided to finally take a tour of Christ Church, the only church in Oxford that's also a cathedral. It was supposed to be the location of Cardinal Wolsey's college, however, King Henry VIII took it over when Wolsey fell out of favor for failing to secure the king's annulment to Catherine of Aragon. Oops. It's also where Alice Lydell, the Alice from Wonderland, was born, where Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, was a math teacher and where scenes from Harry Potter were filmed.

At the bottom of the Great Hall is the oldest known ‛graffiti' dating back to the 17th Century that was a protest against a former Christ Church student who eventually became Prime Minister. Sir Robert Peel's Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 gave rights that had previously been denied to Roman Catholics, namely the Irish, for the first time since The Reformation and that didn't sit well with many Anglicans at Christ Church. Peel and his colleagues who brought forth the act had been against this very idea for the last 20 years. It caused quite the uproar and divided the Tory party in later years. Whoo hoo! History!

Graffiti artists back then didn't use spray paint. Pfft. They used NAILS to get their message out.

180 degrees from the Peel door is the staircase to the Great Hall. THE staircase where Dame Maggie Smith stood in character providing some sort of valuable lesson I've forgotten to the new Hogwarts students including young Harry Potter. Unfortunately, there were too many tourists taking the exact same picture so I stood at the bottom of it and took a picture of the ceiling because I thought it was gorgeous. 

Sorry, no famous staircase and no Dame Maggie Smith. 

The dining hall of the Harry Potter movies sans CGI effects.

At the top of the stairs is the Great Hall, also known as the dining hall in all the Harry Potter movies. And, like many of the other tourists, we were a little excited to feel the Harry Potter-ness of the room. Since we didn't remember all the historical portraits from the movie that line the walls (Henry VIII and Elizabeth I being front and center), we assumed they were all CGI'd out. And when you compare pictures, that theory seems to be accurate. Not to mention the archways along the walls were also lengthened and go all the way to the floor. But they do serve lunch in there daily to staff and students so it's closed to tourists regularly from 12-2pm. I wouldn't mind dining in that kind of cafeteria.

The main center wall furthest from the entrance decked out in gorgeous historical portraits, with King Henry VIII making sure everyone behaves.

A closer look at the dapper King Henry and his daughter, Elizabeth I, to the left.

The room is surrounded by gorgeous stained glass windows, but our favorite was the one dedicated to Alice Lydell (pronounced like ‛Little'). If you look to the bottom in the corners of each pane, you'll see teeny tiny Alice in Wonderland characters. Some are also on either side of the crests on the bottom row of panes. The very top right and left panes have little circles each depicting young Alice (left) and George Dodgson (right) who wrote the Alice books.      

The Alice window in the Great Hall in Christ Church College.

Onwards to the cathedral, every nook and cranny ached to be photographed and I probably took too many. Wooden carvings, tombs, memorial plaques dedicated to John Wesley and John Locke and though we weren't on one of the tours swarming around us, we both took turns eavesdropping on the groups in order to hear as many details as possible.

Of all the wooden carvings within the cathedral, this was my favorite.

The front of the church decked out in all its most glamorous baby Jesus-ness for Christmas.

History: This is the tomb of a 14th Century knight, probably John Nowers, who died in 1386, says the little plaque. Also that he was super tall for the time standing at 6' 6".  Not an exact quote.

Just a memorial. Locke isn't buried in Christ Church, but he was one cool guy apparently.

Christ Church courtyard just outside the cathedral. They don't let you wander any closer but we're pretty sure the statue in the fountain is of Hermes (the patron saint of really expensive handbags, say Mike.).

The alley you walk out to at the tourist exit for Christ Church. We wandered out at dusk into the fresh January evening. All tourist access ends at 4:30pm sharp.

The holiday over for Oxford staff and post-docs, my husband had to get back to work at his lab. But more Seattle friends, Julian, Kate and their little man, Gregory, were also in the UK visiting Julian's family for Christmas. Since Seattle seems to cultivate a lot of Brits, they also know Paul and Erin so I hopped a bus in the middle of the post-holiday week to hang with everyone for day.

It was my first solo London trip and we were set to meet at Harrod's, which I'd only heard of, not yet been to. I was dropped at the Marble Arch and got a chance to wander through the spectacular Hyde Park, which Mike and I hadn't been to yet together. Unexpectedly warm at 54 degrees, I was late, a little lost, carrying my scarf and furry coat, but managed a few pictures in the park and to meet up with my friends only a little exasperated. Harrod's is BIG, y'all.

Beyond the flatter area of Hyde Park, I came across Serpentine Lake and these gorgeous gardens nearby. 

Idyllic.. sigh. 

Kate and Julian had planned a shopping day to themselves, so after catching up with everyone over a lovely lunch at Harrod's, Erin swooped up Gregory and took him home for his nap and Paul and I wandered around London all afternoon.

The Living Wall at The Athenaeum Hotel. The red spots of color are the cutest bird houses. 

Randomly, we walked past a bird sanctuary with herons, ducks of all kinds I'd never seen and I captured this beautiful black swan. 

The Victoria Palace Theatre in the West End.

Next to Victoria Station. I just had to. 

Paul and I walked for hours and hours through London just catching up and taking in the nice day. When we decided to head back to Battersea for dinner, where Kate and Julian were staying, it was still quite far away. London is huge. I honestly had no idea exactly where we were ever, but Paul is a great guide. Exhausted, but happy, when we arrived at the apartment, I plopped down with Erin to get my kid fix with Gregory and Paul got to work prepping dinner for everyone. When Kate and Julian arrived, we broke open the champagne, dined on Paul's fantastic dinner and though they all encouraged me to stay over, I eventually dragged myself to the nearby bus stop to head home to my sweet husband who didn't get to play all day like I had.

One of our adorable hosts, Gregory, and his best friend, Paul.

Our host daddy, Julian, busts out the most important things for celebrating: Champagne, glasses and one eager baby to get it going.

More to come for January: Flooding, rainbows, more trips to London, our crazy friends in Oxford, plays of all kinds, Mike's 38th surprise birthday party of which there are no pictures (?!), cats on boats and other historic places in our new home town. Til then, pip pip and all that!

Rain, Rain, Go Away.. And Never Come Back

Between terminals at Chicago's O'Hare Airport on our way to catch our flight to London after the Christmas holidays. 

I let January slip past me without a post although, when I was in the midst of it, it felt like watching paint dry. If we were still in the states, I'd think it so terribly romantic to be living here and wandering around in the English rain, like that last scene in Four Weddings And A Funeral, ‟Is it still raining? I hadn't noticed." Oh please. There's no way you couldn't have noticed. Mainly because there's been so much of it. Apparently, it hasn't rained this much in January in the UK since sometime in the middle of the 1700's! And it's not romantic in the slightest. It's So. Incredibly. Grey (Really, they should coin their own color. Incredibly UK Grey. If it doesn't already exist in a J. Crew catalogue, it really should.) and downright dreary. It's only good for staying inside all day in your pajamas, drinking tea when you're not sleeping an excessive amount and finding laundry and Pinterest the most exciting parts of your day. Yeah, I'm aware that's probably the most boring sentence written in history maybe ever. 

Don't get me wrong. I'm aware of the Polar Apocalypse they're fighting in our home regions in the states and I'm grateful we aren't fighting snow as well. The potential flooding I can deal with. We're at least in a two-floor flat, thank goodness. But this English diamond has lost a bit of its luster. Not that the honeymoon is over, but we do need to get moving into Real Life and that usually circles around doing something for a living. While one of us has that, in fact, that was the reason for moving here, the other, namely me, does not. Not yet anyway. And for the love of all that is good and holy, I need to get something soon. There are only so many soup recipes I can find fascinating. That said, I've become something of a soup wizard, which, thank you, Pinterest. I appreciate what you've done for me, but it's time we see other people.

My National Insurance Number finally arrived last week, which is something akin to a Social Security Number and will allow me to work. I've been waiting since the beginning of the year for it when I found out not only did I need one, but it was quite the process to get. Had we known this would cause a delay in finding me a job, I would've applied when I had more time to kill when we first arrived. But now having procured it at last, I can move forward. I've reset the initial interview I had with a temp agency in town that I previously had to cancel and I'm hoping by next week, they'll have found some gainful employment for me to sink my teeth into. And if it's not quite teeth sinking, well.. provide me a reason to get out of bed before noon. At this point, I'll accept that. 

In the meantime, obviously there's still been a lot of excitement here for us despite the gusty and oppressive weather. I'll do my best to catch up on all of our January Fun Times, but we'll start at the beginning, New Year's Eve!

We welcomed our first overnight guests, our Seattle friends, Paul and Erin who visited us after their trip to India and their holiday trip to Liverpool to see Paul's family. We spent a crowded New Year's Eve together at The Rusty Bicycle with oh.. 250 other people. Though we arrived early to this tiny pub, it was already nearly full. Every time we found seats, we were forced to eventually move and ended up at an outside table in the covered garden for the majority of the night under a couple of heat lamps. There was a lot of drinking. For like six hours. As I said, we got there early. Luckily, only one of us took a goofy picture and he's probably very proud of it. 

Our handsome men, Mike and Paul. That's Mike's ‛normal' face.

Me and Erin and our happy, tipsy faces under the glow of the heat lamp.

Our friends, John and Jen, also met us out as well and, after midnight, with the crowd at its peak, we decided to walk back to our flat, which was a quieter and warmer place to continue celebrating.

The next day, despite the pissing rain and wind, we thought it was the perfect day to venture out since Paul and Erin had a car and we don't often get out of town unless it's to London on a long bus ride. We collectively decided to find the prehistoric White Horse in Uffington. If you don't know what that is, I suggest you click on the link and read up. Also you'll see a MUCH better picture than we took. 

I don't think any of us thought this outing would be quite so arduous, but the rain kept coming and Paul and Erin's gps led us to smaller roads that were blocked due to flooding at first, so we had to scout out a different path.

Oops! That's just under 2 feet of water covering that road. Let's go another way. 

No problem! Onwards and finally there we were, a carpark with National Trust signs leading the way. Funny, it looked like a pretty basic hill with a lot of sheep hanging out to us. And oddly, um.. it was. It's amazing how these centuries old landmarks of history are literally just part of the country's landscape. 

Both Erin and I had on our wellies, the boys did not unfortunately, but the slope of the hill and the wind that'd picked up which blew the rain sideways made it difficult for all of us to stay upright on the already slippery grass and navigate all the sheep poop that added yet another element of risk. But we made it to their version of ‛the viewpoint', which honestly, this picture below was the best I could get. You can.. kind of see it.. right? I think the only way to get the best view is from the sky, but that wasn't going to happen that day. 

It's there! That itty bitty bit of chalk is a giant prehistoric chalky horse,  I swear!

Paul doing his best to fight the wind and stay upright. His hair is having a grand old time.

We didn't stay long. We got the pictures and that was it for Uffington. We made it back to the car and all of us were soaked. This is what Mike and I looked like immediately after: 

Windblown and exhausted from our White Horse trek. Actually, Mike looks pretty good. Wtf?

That part of the trip over, we all decided we should backtrack a bit and head to Bampton, the town that stands in for the village in Downton Abbey. Ooh we were excited for this!

We drove through and really, it looks like every quaint little town Mike and I have seen already in Oxfordshire. Nothing terribly special about it. They're all about the same age of old, which is still lovely and historical, but unless you have a guide, it's hard to figure out on your own. We noticed all kinds of current town street signs and the like and wondered what part of the area was actually used for the tv show. Then we accidentally found the grassy triangle that connects three different roads all used over and over for small scenes. One is the side of the local church, another the gate to Crawley house and another to the Grantham Pub. There's also a giant tree in the middle. At the time, we missed seeing the gate to the Crawley house because we weren't quite sure what we were looking for and obviously, signs for things like the Grantham Pub had been removed but I recognized the walkway after seeing old episodes again. That little area is host to quite a few different types of scenes - but of course, not while we were there. No one in their right mind would be there when we were, on a stormy New Year's Day, when EVERYONE was probably at home because the ENTIRE town was dead. Sigh. 

The Bampton town church used in Downton Abbey, sometimes, this shot exactly.

We stopped in a pub for a bite, but had just missed the end of lunch because of course we did. We settled for beers and peanuts. Fine, whatever. We were the only customers there. I did love their pub sign. I find it hilarious that Aunt Sally is a pub game. I guess cribbage was already taken. 

They did have this very colorful toilet in the ladies' room though. Fancy!

Aren't they the cutest lovebirds?

We gave up trying to find any more historic or famous places that day and decided to head back home. We took our friends to our new favorite French bistro for dinner, Côte Brasserie, and had a fantastically decadent New Year's feast. They left the next day to visit another set of friends after a morning walk through Christ Church and Merton College and we felt ever so lucky for the time they spent with us. It was really wonderful to feel the energy of old friends in our new home. Ahhhh.. 

More of January soon, I promise, and more pictures!