Blenheim Palace and Bath
Thursday March 9, 2017
There's a couple of places that are easier to reach from Oxford than London, so while I'm here, I thought I might as well get those out of the way. Charlotte recommended Blenheim Palace, just a short bus ride north of Oxford, so as the sun was out on Monday, I decided to head there.
Blenheim Palace is massive. It's a little unfortunate that at this time of year, the gardens aren't in bloom yet, but it does mean there aren't as many tourists wandering around. Blenheim Palace has been home to the various Dukes of Malborough, but is more famous for being the birthplace of Sir Winston Churchill. The front steps were under renovation when I was there, but there was still a lot to see and learn about this residence and the various people who have been involved with this building.
On Tuesday, I took the train to Bath, famous for its Roman baths, built on top naturally occurring hot springs. Again, it's stunning to see structures that are hundreds of years old and so well preserved, and even though it may not be perfectly intact, the remnants themselves have their own stories of how they came to be in that state. I walked from the train station to Pulteney Bridge, then walked around Bath Abbey before spending a solid hour walking around the Roman Baths. The tour is very well thought out, taking you through the background, architecture and features of the bath in a linear fashion. You get to taste some of the spa water at the end - I would not recommend this. It does not taste pleasant.
I also covered the Assembly Rooms, the Circus, Royal Crescent and the Botanical Gardens. All in all, I would have spent close to six hours wandering around; a lot of the tours from Oxford and London also include Stonehenge in the day trip but only give you four hours to explore Bath, which is doable but quite rushed, especially if you are walking around everywhere.
Posted by Jeremy at 12:10pm on Thursday March 9, 2017 :: 0 comments :: 
The Cotswolds and Stratford-upon-Avon
Sunday March 5, 2017
On Saturday, I took a day trip to the Cotswolds and Stratford-upon-Avon, famous of course for being the birthplace of William Shakespeare. The English countryside, on a good day, shows a vibrant green that I haven't seen since leaving New Zealand, but mainly because every place I've been to has been covered in snow (or Malaysia.) I can finally see why people talk about these rolling hills too. It's very picturesque and full of buildings and structures that are hundreds of years old. There are so many small churches around here. There are houses with thatched roofs made from dried straw. There are dry walls - walls made without cement or mortar because it was too expensive. It's interesting because there's so much story behind all these things, and that simply doesn't exist in New Zealand.
The first stop was to Minster Lowell, a village that had popped up to take advantage of wool production. It was named after the Lovells, who were the land holding family of the area. The ruins of the manor house remain today, and this is where we spent most of our time here.
Second on the list was Burford, home of the church where mutineers of the New Model Army were held captive by Oliver Cromwell. Again, the buildings are rich with history and beautiful architecture. Etched graffiti on the stone of the font in the church still remains, scratched out by one of the prisoners in the church during the mutiny. It's amazing to think it has been there for 400 years and that it can still be seen today.
We continued north to the Rollright Stones, a formation of rocks in three distinct groups: the King Stone, the Whispering Knights and the King's Men, all named after the characters in one of the local myths of the area. A king was met by a witch at this area, who said that if the king could see Long Compton from this position, then the King of England he shall be. Of course, the king could not see Long Compton, and was turned to stone by the witch (the King Stone) who then proceeded to turn the circle of men into stone (the King's Men) as well as a group of mutineering knights (Whispering Knights).
The last stop of the day was Stratford-upon-Avon. We had a few hours to walk around and join any tours of the various important houses in Shakespeare's life. I wandered down to the riverside and admired the gardens and some of the monuments and statues erected in Shakespeare's honour, and then had a quick lunch before wandering further into town. I ended up at the Holy Trinity Church, which is the site of Shakespeare's grave, and for £3, it wasn't too expensive to wander in. Again, magnificent architecture with all sorts of arches and columns adorning the main church area, and some fantastic stained glass windows in the fore and rear.
I was back in Oxford in the evening for a pizza and wine tasting session with Jono and Charlotte's friends, who take their wine tasting very seriously (and competitively!) Of course I had to self-moderate my consumption, and wasn't feeling too bad by the end of the night. We continued to Wolfson student bar and played some darts before retiring for the night.
Posted by Jeremy at 8:27pm on Sunday March 5, 2017 :: 0 comments ::
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 ::
Oxford
Sunday February 26, 2017
I've finally made it to the United Kingdom, where I'm boarding temporarily in Oxford until I figure out what I want to do. It seems there is a high administrative overhead in opening a bank account, getting a tax number and finding a flat, and of course London is one of the most expensive cities in the world. The weather is exactly as I've expected it to be - cloudy and wet - but it is winter after all, and I expect it to warm up over the next couple of months.
It was a very early start in Reykjavik - 5am to be precise - to get to Keflavik Airport on Saturday, but the flight was short and I arrived in Gatwick just before noon with no problems at immigration. The bus to Oxford took two hours but at least it had free wifi. The first thing I noticed upon arriving is how gorgeous the buildings are; so full of character and rich with history. The food scene is apparently quite lacking here, but I'll be exploring the city tomorrow and will give you a proper opinion after I have experienced it myself.
I have at least managed to obtain a local SIM card for myself, and fortunately this deal allows me to roam around Europe with 12GB of data each month at no additional cost. Again, obtaining this was not a trivial exercise and reinforced the notion that bureaucracy is rife here. The app for managing my account and usage was only available in the UK App Store, so I had to create a new account in order to download it, and honestly I was rolling my eyes so hard at just how unnecessarily complicated things can be. Despite all this, it's all sorted now, and I've even managed to catch the fourth regional Pokemon, Mr Mime. That leaves Heracross (South America) and Corsola (equatorial countries), thanks to Generation II dropping a week ago.
Posted by Jeremy at 10:28pm on Sunday February 26, 2017 :: 0 comments ::
Iceland
Friday February 24, 2017
There's something in the ice in Iceland that makes it much more serene than in Canada. Certainly at this time of year, the soft covering of pristine white snow around the city makes it more picturesque, and even more so in the countryside.
Upon arriving in Reykjavik, I had some time to kill before checking in, so I wandered around town for a bit. I'm staying on a hill near a massive church, with a tower that overlooks the whole city. The view from the top is the highest point in Reykjavik and seeing the city come alive as the sun rose was magical. Afterwards, I walked into the CBD and visited a volcano museum, which happened to be staffed by a guy who studied at Victoria University in Wellington, so that was a good yarn indeed. I continued on to various locations around town, stopping for lunch (I got grilled plaice and lobster!) and for shelter during the snow storm. I wanted to go to this highly rated Icelandic restaurant for dinner but they didn't have space available, so I went to a steakhouse and got some steak.
Yesterday I went on a tour around Iceland's southern coast. It was jam packed with sightseeing, we visited Skogafoss Waterfall, which has water from the infamous volcano, Eyjafjallajökull, then the Reynisfjara Black Sand Beach for lunchtime where I got some expensive fish and chips. The tour continued to the Solheimajokull Glacier, where we hiked for a few hours onto the glacier itself, admiring (and avoiding) some large crevasses all over the terrain. There was the opportunity to go down and explore one of them, but unfortunately we didn't have time. There were a lot of groups on the glacier and we opted to hike further up to watch the sunset colours light up the white snow and blue ice.
We stopped by the Seljalandsfoss Waterfall on the way back, which we missed that morning as there were too many people around it. You can walk behind it, but at that time of night it would have been suicidal, so we took a few photos and then I got dropped off for the aurora hunting tour.
Four minibuses scoured the southwestern coast of Iceland for a dark spot with no light pollution and clear skies. We found the Strandarkirkja church and waited for a bit but to no luck. A snowstorm started picking up so we bundled back onto the buses. Unexpectedly, about an hour later on the way back to Reykjavik, we found a large campfire by the side of the road and all four buses pulled over - "we have lights!!" came the excited call over the intercom. We all rushed out to gawk at the night sky and sure enough, overhead, visible but faint, were these curtains and pillars of green light, moving slowly and fading in and out of view.
The shots you see on Google image search are all taken with long exposures on fancy cameras so completely not representative of what you see in real life. What the cameras don't capture is the movement, the ghostly shimmering of the aurora borealis as it dances across the sky. It was a very memorable experience for me, it's definitely one that I can check off on the bucket list. Of course I'd like to take every opportunity to see more aurora, especially in different colours.
I was back at the hostel close to 2am and today it's completely whited out with snow. They cancelled the whale watching trip I was supposed to go on and it does look quite miserable outside, so it might just be a quiet rest day today.
Posted by Jeremy at 1:01pm on Friday February 24, 2017 :: 0 comments ::