Still in Oxford
Friday March 3, 2017
I've pretty much covered most of Oxford's main sights - the Bodleian Library, the Ashmolean Museum and the various colleges around town like Christ Church, Trinity and Magdalen (pronounced Mawd-lin for some very odd reason). I walked the length of Port Meadow where I found some horses roaming around with no fence separating me and them, and I ambled around the Oxford University Parks and Christ Church Meadow, admiring the spring flowers starting to bloom along the riverside. And Oxford is a nice place, but I'm rapidly exhausting the to-do list. Next week, I'll visit the Natural History museum and take a day trip to Blenheim Castle, but that's basically all I have planned.
I spent the first day of March in London, picking up my biometrics residents permit, which allows me to go in and out of the UK freely, and I also met up with Alice, who took me to various places. We had a traditional English pub lunch of fish and chips, and wandered around Borough Market where I got a Baileys chocolate cheesecake. We walked to St Paul's Cathedral (via a few Pokemon spawns) and went inside briefly to attend mass, as it was Ash Wednesday. Normally £18, entry was free as long as you actually sat down for the service. Night fell as we got to Soho and Alice left to meet another friend. I continued wandering as I wasn't quite hungry yet, catching more Pokemon, because I just wanted to pass time, and then got an average steak dinner before taking the bus back to Oxford. It would have been close to midnight when I arrived, just in time for all the drunk people to be wandering the streets, and let me tell you, drunk English people are not fun.
Walking around London was interesting, because there's a lot to see. The landmarks are all so well known and to see them in real life is quite gratifying. But I have to say, if the Japanese are extremely orderly people, and the Canadians walk on the right side of the footpath religiously, then the English are chaotic and haphazardly wander down the street on all sides of the path. It's certainly a different place.
My blog has been having a few issues too. For some reason, the comments query suddenly spiked in memory usage, causing the database to return an empty set due to overallocation. Furthermore, I finally managed to install working versions of Apache, MySQL and PHP on my laptop thanks to WAMP, but it wasn't all smooth sailing and I'd rather not have to do anything like that again.
Posted by Jeremy at 6:21pm on Friday March 3, 2017 :: 0 comments :: 