No Oxen in Oxford

After leaving Manchester this morning, I’ve been in Oxford, England, for less than half a day so far, but I’d like to start by saying, nice town you’ve got here, Oxford. Nice town. Please don’t disappoint me for the rest of my stay.

I’m here for just two nights, so I have one more full day. I’m already thinking that when I write up the summary tomorrow afternoon, I might mention that I regret not booking longer in Oxford. We’ll see.

Why is the title of this post “No Oxen in Oxford?” Is it solely my penchant for alliteration in the first post from each location I visit? You might think that, but in reality, I had to do a little research to justify the alliteration so that it would, retroactively, become more than only that.

I looked up the Wikipedia entry on Oxford. (Yeah, yeah. I know, Wikipedia can be edited at any time. So it might not say the same thing five minutes from now as it says now. And who knows how much you can trust it?) In the “History” section of the entry, it said, “The name ‘Oxford’ comes from the Old English Oxenaforda, meaning ‘ford of the oxen,’ referring to a shallow crossing in the river where oxen could pass.”

This might be where oxen could pass, but I haven’t seen any oxen so far in Oxford. You laugh. “Joel,” you’re thinking, “there aren’t going to be any oxen still there in this day in age.” Maybe not, but … well, I’ll get to that later on in this post.

After checking into my hotel, I visited the Oxford Botanic Garden and then Oxford University’s Christ Church College.

I don’t think this post will be very long. That’s not because I haven’t got much to say. It’s just that before I had time to type much of this up, I met up with the son of a friend from Canada who’s doing post-doctoral work at Oxford.

We had a drink, he gave me a brief guided tour, we grabbed a quick dinner, he showed me around a bit more, and then we had another drink. The point is, it was late by the time I started writing most of this. And, I’m not much of a drinker, so the alcohol might do more of the talking than I will. Let’s get started and see how it goes, shall we?

Oxford Botanic Garden

The Oxford Botanic Garden is a relatively short walk from my hotel. It’s a mostly refined garden, with carefully laid out flower and plant beds. However, some of the plots are intentionally left fairly dishevelled and natural.

In some of the flower beds, the blooms seemed to be done for the season. In others, they were bursting with colour. Some fruit trees bore fruit that looked ready to harvest. (It’s September 11.)

A couple of small ponds sit in the middle of the gardens. One was a lily pond with lilies that were in bloom.

The Oxford Botanic Garden has a couple of greenhouses, which it calls glasshouses. Each was divided into a few sections. They mostly contained tropical plants. One had cacti.

One of the sections of one of the glasshouses has a lily pond. The lilies aren’t what you likely think of when you hear the term “lily,” or at least they aren’t what used to come to mind for me when I heard “lily.” On one of my trips that was recent enough to be documented in this journal, I think it was when I was in Adelaide, Australia, I went to another botanic garden. There, I saw a type of lily, the Victoria lily, that I don’t think I’d ever seen before then.

On that trip, the Victoria lily fascinated me. The green lily pad was almost perfectly round and flat, but a green vertical extension rose vertically around the entire perimeter of the lily pad. It seemed like such an improbable plant.

In the past few years, I’ve seen more examples of the Victoria lily at botanical gardens, including today in the lily pond in a glasshouse at the Oxford Botanic Garden. Ho, hum. Another amazing Victoria lily.

One side of the botanical garden is bounded by, I don’t know if it’s a small river, a stream, or a canal. I looked on Apple Maps, but no matter how much I zoomed in, it just showed it as an unlabeled, bent blue line. Whatever it is, it was quite peaceful and attractive.

Because this section is short, without a lot of room to cram in pictures, I’ve included a collage of some of the flowers and other trees and bushes I saw, but I posted a separate image of the Victoria lily. I also posted a separate photo of the river/stream/canal.

Christ Church College (Oxford)

In the intro to this entry, I said that I didn’t see any oxen in Oxford, but … and then I left it hanging.

In front of the tourist entrance to Oxford’s Christ Church College, there’s an earth and stone courtyard. On the side of the courtyard away from the college, there’s a simple fence. On the other side of the fence, there’s a large, unmowed grass field. When I was there, there was a small herd of cows, including some long-horned ones. (Are all cows with horns, bulls? If so, some were bulls.)

That’s not something I’d expect to see in a city right next to a college of one of the world’s preeminent universities. Cool.

Tourists have to pay to visit Christ Church College. The price includes the use of an audio guide to provide information about the college, some of its buildings, and points of interest.

Christ Church is beautiful, featuring numerous stately old beige stone buildings, a few grassy quads, cloisters, and a stunning cathedral.

In one of the buildings is the dining hall used by students and I think faculty. This is not your average scuzzy college dining hall. Three long, classic wood tables run most of the length of the hall. The vaulted wood ceiling is elegant. There are fancy table lamps and long-stemmed vases with flowers in them positioned at regular intervals along the tables. Paintings adorn the walls.

It’s a dining hall that looks like it came straight out of a movie. In fact … it might have appeared in a movie. The audio guide mentioned that some scenes of the Harry Potter movies were filmed at Christ Church College. I haven’t seen any of the Harry Potter movies, so I don’t know if the dining hall is one of the locations, but it might be.

The Christ Church Cathedral, also known as Oxford Cathedral, is the star attraction of the college for tourists. I can’t say if that’s true for students as well. I don’t know.

It’s a gorgeous stone building with several arches and lots of amazing stained glass and tinted glass windows. I’ll let the pictures do most of the talking here because the alcohol has chosen this moment to clam up.

Etc.

My friend’s son showed me some beautiful buildings in Oxford. I took pictures of a couple, the Ratcliffe Camera and the Bodleian Old Library. He didn’t know why the Radcliffe Camera is called the Radcliffe Camera, but it is a very attractive building.

I may go back tomorrow and take pictures of some of the other architecture that I didn’t capture images of today.

That’s enough for now. I need some sleep.