Oxford is pretty neat.
Obviously, that’s an understatement, but I can’t even figure out how to describe the city. It’s gorgeous. There’s old, beautiful buildings everywhere and it’s almost like walking through the past. We were only there for the day, but we used it to throughly soak up the city.
First, we went to Pitt Rivers Museum, which had a ton of weird masks, shrunken heads and stuffed animals. Some of the animals you were allowed to touch, which I guess makes it kind of like a petting zoo with dead animals which is pretty creepy if you think about it. But, anyway, Drew tried to race me to touch a dead animal and he almost knocked it over. He also dropped his camera, so now all his pictures have this weird black thing around the edge, which I kind of love because then I look like a super hipster in every photo.
As cool as shrunken heads and old sword are, the most fun place was the gift store. They had masks. We love masks. I pretended to be an elephant and a dinosaur and Annie was on a safari and then the museum lady kicked us out for playing with the toys with no intent to buy them.
We just seem to love traveling to places famous writers have had inspiration. First, in Scotland, we visited The Elephant Cafe, where J.K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter and in Oxford, we ate lunch at the pub C.S. Lewis wrote The Chronicles of Narnia. The pub is called The Eagle and Child, which I guess is kind of a weird name for a pub and I didn’t think to ask why it’s named that until I started this sentence. It looks like it’s super tiny from the outside and we were convinced that our group of 17 was not going to be able to fit, but once we walked in, we realized that this place was huge. It’s really narrow and the hallways are tiny, but the pub stretches back so far, I felt like I was walking through the wardrobe to go into Narnia.
Oxford is just filled with places of fiction. After eating a delicious lunch at the back of the wardrobe, we went on a tour of Christchurch College which is only the Great Hall in Hogwarts. No big deal, I was just dying. Anna, Drew, Valerie and I were kind of geeking out about it and told Chelsea we couldn’t talk to her because she’s a fake Harry Potter fan.
Christchurch College is beautiful. It doesn’t look like a college at all. I think Ball State is a great campus, but it comes no where close to reaching the levels that this college did. It blows my mind that students get to walk in the Great Hall of Hogwarts every day. They are the luckiest. They probably get to pretend like they’re wizards all day. I’m transferring.
Probably the best part of the Hogwarts experience was that Voldemort walked through the Great Hall with me. Seriously. In order to get in, you have to stand in line (on the same staircase that Professor McGonnagel talks to Harry before he gets sorted by the Sorting Hat!!! I know, I’m a nerd) and then go through the room in the giant line. The guy behind me literally looked exactly like Voldemort. I thought Chelsea was just exaggerating when she pointed him out, but when he turned around, he had the same eyes, mouth… even the nose. So crazy. Loved it.
Afterwards, we just walked around Oxford. The streets seemed so fun; there were street fairs and vendors everywhere, including the “Bratman,” who literally walked around with a grill around his waist selling bratwurst. It’s such an interesting place with so many great things to see. I loved my experience, but wished I could have stayed longer. I hope that someday I get the chance to go back and explore more.