Oxford

Saturday Mike and I hopped on the Oxford Tube (chartered bus) and headed to Oxford. 1 hour and 30 minutes later we landed right across the street from Christ Church (College...Chapel...)

 
and started wandering along the path that leads to the fields that Alice Liddel aka Alice in Wonderland took walks and played in when she was a little girl. These walks and those fields would inspire Lewis Carroll to later write a wonderful piece of imagination called "Alice in Wonderland"

Alice Liddell was the fourth child of Henry Liddell, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, and his wife Lorina Hanna Liddell. She had two older brothers, Harry (born 1847) and Arthur (born 1850, died of scarlet fever in 1853), and an older sister Lorina (born 1849). She also had six younger siblings, including her sister Edith (born 1854) with whom she was very close.

At the time of her birth, Liddell's father was the Headmaster of Westminster School but was soon after appointed to the deanery of Christ Church, Oxford. The Liddell family moved to Oxford in 1856.

Soon after this move, she met Charles Lutwidge Dodgson aka Lewis Carroll the author of Alice in Wonderland, who encountered the family while he was photographing the cathedral on 25 April 1856. He became a close friend of the Liddell family.

Alice's parents decided as more time had passed that the fondness that Dodgson (L.Carroll) had for Alice (11 years old) was inappropriate. More and more concern grew and later her parents ended any type of relationship Carroll had with Alice and Liddell family.  Alice was born in 1852 and died in 1934 as Alice Hargreaves.

The line was so long to get into Christ Church, the chapel, the college that we ditched it. If we would of went inside (which I have already done once before) we would of seen The Dining Hall that most of you have seen in the Harry Potter films, the chapel where the likes of John Locke is burried (in the floor of course), the Quad, and the campus.

We strolled on over to the Radcliff Camera:

As in John Radliff, physician to William III and Mary II of England. Had this library built after his passing. A man who didn't really care for book learning left a will stating that all his money go towards building a library.  Thats pretty funny... I guess that's how they did it back in the 1714. James Gibb was the Architect. He beat out Christopher Wren on the project.

Then we strolled on over to peek through the gates to look in on All Souls College as you can tell by the prettiest green grass my eyes have ever seen...no one is allowed to EVER walk on it. Just the person who mows it.

Unique to All Souls, all of its members automatically become Fellows, i.e., full members of the College's governing body. It has no undergraduate members, but each year recent graduates of Oxford and other universities compete in "the hardest exam in the world" for Examination Fellowships.
It is one of the wealthiest colleges with a financial endowment of £236m (2007) but because the College's only source of revenue is its endowment, it ranks nineteenth among Oxford colleges with respect to total income.

Heck, Oxford even has their own Bridge of Sighs and they are pretty far from Venice Italy... nonetheless, it's cool to look at.

We strolled by The Grand Cafe which is allegedly the first coffee house in England...

Christopher Wren built this beautiful round building the Sheldonian Theatre. Built from 1664-1668 for music concerts, lectures, university ceremonies, but not for drama.

I loved all the faces/heads on the gate in front of it...Here's one:

 You can even go punting in Oxford in this shallow water.  One day around 100 kids jumped in from the bridge above and 40 of those peeps came out with broken limbs.  Ouch! So note to self: "DO NOT JUMP OFF THE BRIDGE INTO THE SHALLOW WATER"

The Eagle and Child Pub...It has associations with the Inklings writers' group which included J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.

The Inklings was an Oxford writers' group which included C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and Hugo Dyson. From late 1933, they met on Thursday evenings at Lewis's college rooms at Magdalen, where they would read and discuss various material, including their unfinished manuscripts. These meetings were accompanied with more informal lunchtime gatherings at various Oxford pubs which coalesced into a regular meeting held on Mondays or Tuesday lunchtimes at the Eagle and Child, in a private lounge at the back of the pub known as the 'Rabbit Room'.



The formal meetings ended in October 1949 when interest in the readings finally petered out, but the meetings at the Eagle and Child continued, and it was at one of those meetings in June 1950 that C.S. Lewis distributed the proofs for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

The membership of the Inklings changed over the years, Tolkien, for example, drifting away from the meetings in the late 1950s, but Lewis was a central figure until his death in 1963. The Eagle and Child was modernised in 1962, with the pub being extended to the rear. The Rabbit Room's former privacy was inevitably destroyed leading to the group's reluctant change of allegiance to the Lamb & Flag at the other side of St Giles.

We also took a quick look at Oxford Castle...Gaol (jail)...now part of it is a hotel, but we didn't go inside... The outside Castle Mound was pretty cool, but I couldn't get a good picture angle of it to share...sorry... 

 We also checked out the Bodleian Library which is the main research and copyright deposit library of the University of Oxford.

The Bodleian Library houses the largest collection of pre-1500 printed books in a university library, and the fifth largest collection of incunabula in any library in the world: 5623 editions in 6755 copies.

The Bodleian Library is a working library which forms part of the University of Oxford. It is housed in a remarkable group of buildings which form the historic heart of the University, and you can explore the quadrangles of these magnificent structures at no charge. Different ticket options allow you to visit the interior of some of the buildings, such as the University’s oldest teaching and examination room, The Divinity School (built 1427-88). Here you will discover more of the University’s fascinating history. Our guided tours go behind the scenes in the Library, including its oldest research library, The Bodleian, dating from 1602-20.

 After I entered the Quad to snap this picture and the one above of the library entrance I realized that Mike was still standing on the street. I kept waving him in, but he wouldn't budge.  Poor Kid thought he heard the box office guy yelling at me...I guess he didn't know it was free to roam around in there... You only have to pay for certain sections... none of which I planned on visiting at that time.


 








The High Street aka Main Street:

A couple cool houses we spotted along the way:

Yeah I could live here...

Or here...