London is Europe’s biggest city, with 6 million people. At any given instant, 11.4 million of them are on busses or subway cars. Brits are, as near as I can tell, chronically discontent, seemingly unhappy where they are and constantly on the move to somewhere else in the city.
The subway trains can be very crowded and along comes another in 3 to 8 minutes – buses run a little farther apart but depending on your destination you might be able to take any of a number of buses, so it would be typical to wait two minutes for your subway in the tube and then wait only 3 or 4 minutes for your bus. And remember – these are double-decker buses. with Brits and tourists stacked on top of each other. Of course if you have 193 steps between the subway and the bus, you might need to add an hour to your travel time even with walls of buses on the street.
I just assumed that Ricky Gervais’s success was at least in part due to his comedic looks. As it turns out, he doesn’t have comedic looks. He’s just British.
Just living in England would be the equivalent of 18 units of history. You can’t escape history any more than you can escape the rain.
The British Library was amazing. We got to see two Bibles from the 300s; the Magna Carta (in various versions); diary entries by Lewis Carroll about meeting Alice and then agreeing to write down the fairy tale (Alice Underground? Or Alice in Elfland?) for her after having told it to her; an untitled song lyric by the irreverent and disenchanted teen John Lennon; a handwritten speech by Freud; and a letter from Darwin apologizing to a religious friend for how upset he was made when reading the draft of his Origin of Species. I was so delighted by the special treasures room that contained all this that I wanted to experience the library more. It turns out, though, that a person needs a reading pass to get into the reading rooms. One can’t just saunter into the racks to see what they have. So, I went into the room where passes are (rather reluctantly as it turns out) granted. What follows is an only slightly exaggerated version of the conversation between me and the man who grants a pass to the reading rooms.
“What do you want to research?”
“I want to go to the social sciences room to read economic books,” I said, pleased that I could think this fast and actually come up with something that struck me as incredibly specific.
“Do you have the title of the work you want to read?”
“What?”
“You’ll have to write down the title you would like to see. And then we’ll think about giving you a reading pass.” With that, he hands me a form to fill out and points me over to their computer terminals linked to their catalog.
“What if I don’t know yet what titles I want to read?”
“You can’t ask for something to read unless you know what it is.”
“Well how would I know what it is if I haven’t yet read it?”
“Don’t be dense.”
Suffice it to say that I did not get into the reading rooms but I have to imagine that it was conversations with British bureaucrats like this that inspired so many of Lewis Carroll’s daft exchanges between Alice and the odd characters she encountered.
Any two items in the British Museum would be enough to make the reputation of a single museum in the States. It’s just an embarrassment of riches – from Rosetta Stone to wonderfully well preserved statutes from 3, 4, and 5 thousand years ago.
I loved Oxford. It’s is wonderfully British. John Locke went to school here, which basically means that if none of the other students learned a thing, whatever the British have invested in Oxford for the last few centuries has more than paid off.
Oxford University owns Oxford Street in London and leases to the many shops along its route (one of best shopping areas). This should mean that Oxford could afford to provide an Oxford-like education to every child north of London.
We stayed in the McDonald Randolph hotel in Oxford. Sandi counted 18 changes in height or direction on the way from reception to our room. It was comical. Imagine that Oxford student Charles Dodgson (as we insiders refer to the man who wrote as Lewis Carroll) had collaborated with the architect for the Winchester Mystery House and you get some idea of its layout.
I have to wonder if the Brits exploration and conquest of the world wasn’t just a search for better-tasting food. It’s not that their food is inadequate. It is, in fact, adequate. Just. But it’s hard to believe that it would hold one’s attention for more than five days, much less five centuries and might be one of the big reasons that they held onto India for so long.
Of course it might just have been the promise of warmer weather that was enough to drive the Brits into ships. It’s wet and cold here. Well, to be fair sometimes it is just cold.
The average Brit seems both shorter and more polite than the average American. Or perhaps they’re just polite to taller Americans.
Our guide around Oxford shared interesting tips like the origin of the term "eaves dropping" (listening to a conversation from an upper story that “dropped” down the eaves) and the fact that there is no difference in wines past the price of £10 because the only purpose of wine is to get a young woman into the arms of a young man or to remind an old man of when he once held a young woman. We subsidized an older man for an hour to opine away as if he were talking back to the TV.
Oxford could be where JK Rowling got the model for Hogwarts. Apparently the Japanese come by the millions to England to pay homage to the other Island Empire and come to Oxford to pay homage to Harry Potter, where scenes from the movie were filmed.
Down the block from our hotel was a thousand year old tower, the oldest building in Oxford. This makes it four times as old as our country, albeit considerably smaller.
It wasn’t just English culture we’ve been exposed to. We grabbed a drink at a little Scottish restaurant - McDonald’s.
We ate a pub where future prime ministers once ate. Or so I assume. The pub was on the river very close to Christ Church, the college at Oxford that’s graduated about a dozen Prime Ministers in the last couple of centuries.
I just assumed that Ricky Gervais’s success was at least in part due to his comedic looks. As it turns out, he doesn’t have comedic looks. He’s just British.
Just living in England would be the equivalent of 18 units of history. You can’t escape history any more than you can escape the rain.
The British Library was amazing. We got to see two Bibles from the 300s; the Magna Carta (in various versions); diary entries by Lewis Carroll about meeting Alice and then agreeing to write down the fairy tale (Alice Underground? Or Alice in Elfland?) for her after having told it to her; an untitled song lyric by the irreverent and disenchanted teen John Lennon; a handwritten speech by Freud; and a letter from Darwin apologizing to a religious friend for how upset he was made when reading the draft of his Origin of Species. I was so delighted by the special treasures room that contained all this that I wanted to experience the library more. It turns out, though, that a person needs a reading pass to get into the reading rooms. One can’t just saunter into the racks to see what they have. So, I went into the room where passes are (rather reluctantly as it turns out) granted. What follows is an only slightly exaggerated version of the conversation between me and the man who grants a pass to the reading rooms.
“What do you want to research?”
“I want to go to the social sciences room to read economic books,” I said, pleased that I could think this fast and actually come up with something that struck me as incredibly specific.
“Do you have the title of the work you want to read?”
“What?”
“You’ll have to write down the title you would like to see. And then we’ll think about giving you a reading pass.” With that, he hands me a form to fill out and points me over to their computer terminals linked to their catalog.
“What if I don’t know yet what titles I want to read?”
“You can’t ask for something to read unless you know what it is.”
“Well how would I know what it is if I haven’t yet read it?”
“Don’t be dense.”
Suffice it to say that I did not get into the reading rooms but I have to imagine that it was conversations with British bureaucrats like this that inspired so many of Lewis Carroll’s daft exchanges between Alice and the odd characters she encountered.
Any two items in the British Museum would be enough to make the reputation of a single museum in the States. It’s just an embarrassment of riches – from Rosetta Stone to wonderfully well preserved statutes from 3, 4, and 5 thousand years ago.
I loved Oxford. It’s is wonderfully British. John Locke went to school here, which basically means that if none of the other students learned a thing, whatever the British have invested in Oxford for the last few centuries has more than paid off.
Oxford University owns Oxford Street in London and leases to the many shops along its route (one of best shopping areas). This should mean that Oxford could afford to provide an Oxford-like education to every child north of London.
We stayed in the McDonald Randolph hotel in Oxford. Sandi counted 18 changes in height or direction on the way from reception to our room. It was comical. Imagine that Oxford student Charles Dodgson (as we insiders refer to the man who wrote as Lewis Carroll) had collaborated with the architect for the Winchester Mystery House and you get some idea of its layout.
I have to wonder if the Brits exploration and conquest of the world wasn’t just a search for better-tasting food. It’s not that their food is inadequate. It is, in fact, adequate. Just. But it’s hard to believe that it would hold one’s attention for more than five days, much less five centuries and might be one of the big reasons that they held onto India for so long.
Of course it might just have been the promise of warmer weather that was enough to drive the Brits into ships. It’s wet and cold here. Well, to be fair sometimes it is just cold.
The average Brit seems both shorter and more polite than the average American. Or perhaps they’re just polite to taller Americans.
Our guide around Oxford shared interesting tips like the origin of the term "eaves dropping" (listening to a conversation from an upper story that “dropped” down the eaves) and the fact that there is no difference in wines past the price of £10 because the only purpose of wine is to get a young woman into the arms of a young man or to remind an old man of when he once held a young woman. We subsidized an older man for an hour to opine away as if he were talking back to the TV.
Oxford could be where JK Rowling got the model for Hogwarts. Apparently the Japanese come by the millions to England to pay homage to the other Island Empire and come to Oxford to pay homage to Harry Potter, where scenes from the movie were filmed.
Down the block from our hotel was a thousand year old tower, the oldest building in Oxford. This makes it four times as old as our country, albeit considerably smaller.
It wasn’t just English culture we’ve been exposed to. We grabbed a drink at a little Scottish restaurant - McDonald’s.
We ate a pub where future prime ministers once ate. Or so I assume. The pub was on the river very close to Christ Church, the college at Oxford that’s graduated about a dozen Prime Ministers in the last couple of centuries.
