Milkshakes, Harry Potter, and Farewell to Oxford

Oxford week was such a busy week - but so much fun!  I had an absolutely wonderful time exploring the city and experiencing the Oxford community.  Our week there went by so fast, though I am glad to have roommates again!  A brief synopsis of the week (I'll try not to make it too lengthy):

Oxford University
Botanic Gardens

Tuesday:  I started out the day with a stop at Primark, the discount clothing store of the UK.  Despite the absolutely fabulous prices (e.g. 5 GBP for a dress!), I only bought some accessories.  Still, it was definitely fun to have a morning of shopping and looking around the city - I haven't legitimately shopped in such a long time!  After my 4 hours of class that day, our whole program went out for Indian food.  The dish I had wasn't bad, but still was not my favorite kind of food either.  However, the naan was amazing! hahaha :)

Christ Church Tower designed
by Christopher Wren

Wednesday:  A day of adventures!  Both my roommate Anna, and I don't have class on Wednesdays, so we took this opportunity to explore.  Destination #1 was the climbing to the top of the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin.  We took some breathtaking pictures of the city from the top of the tower!  Our second stop was the Oxford University Botanic Gardens.  Sadly, the flowers/trees outside of the greenhouses were not yet in bloom, but the gardens on a whole were still beautiful to look at!  They have entire greenhouses dedicated to specific regions of plant-life (palm house, arid house, insectivorous house, etc), which was really interesting to see. I've posted a whole bunch of pictures of the different gardens on facebook, if you want to see more than the limited number I can put up here!  To end our busy morning, we grabbed milkshakes and did some window shopping.  My milkshake tasted exactly like Momma's lemon poke-cake, which made me miss home!  So, it's become a goal of mine to make poke-cake before I leave the UK.  This may prove to be slightly difficult, since JELL-O is not a commonly found brand here, nor is Cool Whip. hahaha :)

The Great Hall from Harry Potter!

After lunch, we met up with others from our programme to tour Christ Church College, the alma mater of our programme director (as well as a lot of really famous brits:  John Locke, Lewis Carroll, Albert Einstein, William Penn, etc.).  This college is also the home of specific Harry Potter filming sites, which we were all very excited to see!  The staircase in the foyer is the one used to lead up to the Great Hall in the first movie, and the dining hall of Christ Church is the filming site of the Great Hall in all eight of the movies.  After our tour, we went out for cream tea, something I've been meaning to do since the beginning of the semester, and it was just as yummy as I'd remembered!  To end this very exciting and busy day, a group of us went over to the Eagle & Child, the favorite pub of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, for dinner! :)

Thursday:  In comparison with the day before, this day was relatively uneventful!  In honor of our last day in Oxford, our programme held a formal dinner in the dining hall of University College.  Everyone got dressed up in their "smart" outfits, and joined our tutors and the staff for dinner!  It was such a wonderful evening - I really enjoyed getting to talk with my tutors outside of class.  And after the formal dinner, we all went down to the University Bar for more mingling and discussion!  This evening was definitely one of the major highlights of the week!

Friday:  Sorry this has become such a long post!  We left Oxford this morning to go to Blenheim Palace, the residence of the 11th Duke of Marlborough, and birthplace to Winston Churchill.  The palace was surrounded by acres of beautiful grounds, the most notable of which are the "pleasure gardens."  These consist of a butterfly garden, a hedge maze, and playgrounds for children.  It was a lovely day to walk around the grounds - such a wonderful way to end our week-long trip!

Blenheim Palace

One of the most pleasant things about this past week was our wonderful weather.  It's been close to 60-degrees all week, and while that may seem a bit chilly to Virginia standards, it was a wonderful blessing to us!  It's starting to feel like spring here - the trees are blooming (and hence, the allergies are also starting....haha), flowers have been planted, and the sun has been out almost every day!  It's been such a nice break from the typical rainy/overcast British day - and we've been enjoying every moment of it!  Looking ahead, I only have one week of class left before Spring Break!  Jessica and Margaret Ann are coming to visit me in Bath on Thursday, and then we all depart for Paris and Rome on Saturday!  It's crazy to think that we're already at spring break - the semester is going by so fast!