Educating Ourselves in Oxford

Thursday, September 19

Charlotte:

We got up early today to drive to Oxford. It was an hour and a half drive. When we got there we went right to the Christchurch College and Cathedral.

The staircase was where they filmed some parts of Harry Potter movies and the dining room was the model for the Great Hall in the movies. The dining room is still used everyday by the students at the college. There are over 600 students there. We couldn’t go see any student rooms because they were all full of students.

The cloisters, which is also in the movie, was an outdoor hallway surrounding a courtyard.

In the cathedral, Sam and I got to be “head hunters.” There was a game for kids that was a list of heads that you needed to find all around the church to get a sticker. We both got one. The heads were found on statues, stained glass, etc. One of the windows had painted glass instead of stained glass, except for the figure of Jonah.

We walked around the university property and the city and took more pictures.

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Sam:

We were hungry, so we walked around, looking for a place to eat. We found a covered market, where we ate our picnic lunch of scones, Jan, and cheese. We looked around the market after eating, and we noticed that there was a lot of cool places, such as a gelateria, a great looking cookie store, and a milkshake place. We decided on gelato. Dad got pineapple, I got Ferrero Rocher, Charlotte got strawberry, and Mom tried plum, which she said was tangy and delicious. We also saw an amazing cake shop that made really detailed cakes.

We walked down a street for pedestrians only and checked out a few shops, but none of them really sparked our interest.

We saw a giant museum called the Ashmolean museum and it was free. It had lots of old statues and coins. We saw four skulls of humans, and one was dated to over a million years ago. It was really interactive and fun for kids, too. There little models of ancient villages and some games. One was called “Shove Ha’Penny.” You played the game by putting a penny on the board and placing the palm of your hands on top of it. Then you shove it and try to get it in between lines on the board. If you do, you move the switch corresponding to that line. Players take turns and the first person to get the penny into all of the spaces wins. King Henry the eighth banned the game from bars because it took too long.

There were lots of artefacts from different time periods and civilizations, like Ancient Greece, Egypt, Rome, Crete, Mesopotamia, etc. Some other things we saw were mummies, weapons, and how much coins from different time periods were worth. Overall, it was a pretty cool museum. I’d go back again because we didn’t see everything that was there.

We ate dinner at a restaurant where we sat outdoors. It really reminded us all of the place we went in Ireland last summer when we listened to a bunch of Irish stories while we ate.