A Weekend of Museums - Part One

I have been utterly and completely useless in updating my blog, and I think this is partly because I leave it for too long and then have these massive amounts of time that I need to backtrack and fill in. When I eventually start writing I get bored pretty quickly and feel like I am droning on, which is so boring to write and I imagine, pretty boring to read. So, what I am going to TRY and do now, is fill in what we’ve been doing for the last 3 months (eek!) but rather than in blocks of time, I might try and do it in a different way – countries or something like that. We’ll see how it goes. Anyway, we just went to Oxford for the weekend, so although I need to update on everything else we’ve already done, I thought I’d write about that now while it’s still fresh! It probably won’t be too long as we only spent two nights there, but I think short and sweet is probably best!

So, Cam hasn’t been working so he’s been really bored during the week while I’m at work. He goes riding a bit but since we don’t know anyone here he hasn’t really got anyone to hang out with during the day and it gets a bit repetitive. He said to me on Tuesday that he was really bored so I suggested we go away for the weekend to get a change of scenery. My parents came to this part of the world about 5 years ago, when my sister Chloe was living in Galway, and when they were here they went to Oxford. Mum has told me a couple of times about the museum they went to there, the Pitt Rivers Museum. Actually, what she mostly said was “Shrunken heads Micaela. Shrunken heads!” I did explain to mum we’d seen shrunken heads at the Ripley’s Museum in Hollywood, but she was so wrapped up in her memory that I don’t think she heard me. (Just kidding mum). Anyway, because she’d been talking about that recently, I thought going to Oxford would be a nice trip away.

My lovely cousin Erin told me about this website called Red Spotted Hanky, where you can buy cheaper rail tickets for the National Rail service. (It was lucky she had because when we went to Glasgow in September, we would’ve had to pay £157 per person, each way. I just about died when we saw that – over £600 for the two of us to go to Scotland! I downloaded the Red Spotted Hanky app and managed to get us tickets for £126 each return – much better.) I love travelling on the train. We’ve done the Cambridge – London one quite a few times now, so that’s not so interesting, but when we go to new places I can quite happily put my book aside and stare out the window for ages. I was enjoying our train ride so much that I was a little disappointed when it was over. We’re planning on doing a few more train rides around the UK in the next few weeks; I can’t wait!

On our way to Oxford the train stopped in Slough and Reading. Slough is the place where the original version of The Office was set, apparently because it’s quite dull. I couldn’t see enough from the train station to make a judgement call on that, but I did see this:

I have no idea what this building is, but Cam and I both agreed that it was pretty ugly. I thought it looked a bit like a flatworm that would live in your intestines. Cam looked around to check that no one was looking, then whispered to me: “Robot sperm.” Awesome.

We arrived in Oxford and it was sunny, but freezing! We’d been hoping it would be warmer than Cambridge has been lately, but it felt way colder. A weekend of thermals, coats and scarves for me! (I am planning on investing in a couple more thermals before we head away, otherwise the one that I own will get a thrashing.)

We checked into our B&B, just down the road from the train station, and headed into Oxford for a wander around. It was Saturday afternoon, and it was so busy. We saw a lot of people dressed like this:

 Although all the girls we saw were wearing skirts, with their white blouses tucked in and pulled up to their boobs. Cam commented that they’d managed to make their uniforms into hipster outfits. (He’s a bit obsessed with hipsters at the moment, I think it’s because there are SO many here, and he’s a bit puzzled by them and their weird hair.) We were confused as to why they were wearing these uniforms on a Saturday, but we found out later on that they have to wear formal dress when they sit their examinations. There is a LOT of old traditions at Oxford University! Up until recently it was still a requirement that you take Latin in order to be a student there. I imagine it would be quite interesting to be a part of a university like that, definitely different from studying at the teachers college in Nelson!

We wandered around Oxford, having a look at all the old buildings and found a teeny weeny pub to have a beer in. It was like what the Honest Lawyer wants to be, but authentic. We kept wandering and came across the Ashmolean Museum, which a teacher at a school I have been at regularly had mentioned when I said I was off to Oxford. It feels like’ve been to a lot of museums on this trip, but when I actually add it up, it’s really only a few – Ripley’s Museum in Hollywood (not really a museum if you’re honest) a German Stein museum in Germany, the Louvre, and the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge. The Ashmolean was similar to the Louvre and the Fitzwilliam – lots of Ancient Egyptian/Greek artefacts, including mummies, vases and artwork; a lot of religious artwork, mostly paintings of the Virgin Mary & Christ as a baby (Mary and whatshisname, Aunty Lou); paintings from Victorian times (I’m encompassing a lot in here, but you get what I mean); and various other things. I like museums, but when you’ve seen a lot of this stuff, it starts to get a bit repetitive and boring after a while. So the most interesting things I can say that I saw at the Ashmolean, that I haven’t seen anywhere else are:  - 

- This mummy of a 2 ½ yr old boy, which was still fully wrapped, but had had CT scans taken. From these CT scans, an artist used ink and 111 sheets of glass to re-create an image of the boy’s body. It was so well done! Straight on from the side, you couldn’t see anything, but once you were on an angle to the glass it looked amazing.

-  Paintings by Renoir, Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec and Van Gogh! There isn’t a lot I remember from Art History in high school, so I get excited when I see artists that I know (and who I’m sure most of the population know). 

- The displays about the ancestors to Homo Sapien. I am fascinated by this, I’m not entirely sure why. I guess it’s just that at one point, there were creatures that were like us, but not us, that walked the Earth. Evolution is fascinating!

Right, because I am tired and it is now 10.30pm (and I have to get up early and sit around while I wait to see if there is any work for me, blergh) I am going to stop here for the moment. But! Because I want to make sure that I finish this entry, I am going to post this as a part one which means I’ll HAVE to do part two in the next couple of days. So, I hope you haven’t been too bored reading this so far, this is me attempting to summarise a bit more! I can definitely drag it out if I’m not careful.

Adios amigos.