Oxford: another fun excursion.

Oxford University claims to be the oldest university in the English-speaking world and has been in continuous operation for over 9 centuries now. With 38% of its students hailing from countries outside the UK and 48% of its staff from other countries, it is a diverse and exciting town to visit. (To make the trip even more exciting, we drove down on Friday night and stayed in a hotel. We ate out for dinner then went back to the hotel room and played games and watched movies).

Our first destination was Oxford's college of music, home to the Bate Collection of musical instruments. The Bate has over 2000 instruments from the Western orchestral music traditions from the renaissance, through the baroque, classical, romantic and up to modern times. More than a thousand instruments are on display, by all the most important makers and from pre-eminent collectors. One of us was really enthusiastic about visiting this display...

Next, we passed by Christ Church college, alma-mater to 13 UK Prime Ministers and a sundry other very important Brits. This is the premier college at Oxford (and a stunningly beautiful building).

A brief walk around campus...

The sign says "The Real Tennis Court." So there you go. After all these years we found it... at Oxford University.

Hmm....







After taking in some of the campus scenery, we headed to the famous covered market in downtown Oxford. We found many, many interesting shops along the way:

Ben's Cookies are amazing. A big thanks to Lisa (Matt's at-work boss) for telling us we ought to stop here. Lisa, we seriously considered buying you a tin of cookies but realized the likelihood of them surviving the weekend in our possession was... non-existant.

We all loved these cookies so much that Amy even decided to stand in line all over again just to say thank you. When she did, the baker-lady was so touched that she gave Amy a free triple chocolate chip cookie. Matt and I were stunned... and jealous... and glad to see our child rewarded for polite manners... but mostly jealous.

While Amy munched on her free bonus cookie, we found a few more interesting shops. The shop pictured below advertised a number of American products that are not commonly available in the UK including Jif peanut butter, Marshmallow Fluff, chocolate chips, root beer, Kraft macaroni and cheese (£2.40 each = about $4.50!!!), Libby's pumpkin pie filling and Betty Crocker cake mixes.

But who needs a Betty Crocker cake mix when you've got the Oxford Cake Shop right next door?! Check out the amazing sugarcraft!

And finally, because we hadn't had enough treats yet (can we ever?) we had to stop at Moo-Moo's where there are over 200 flavours of milkshakes to choose from. Matt went for the special of the day - chocolate chip cookie and raspberry - while the girls and I stuck with fruity favourites - passionfruit and banana. YUM!