Oxford was the easiest destination - lots to do, plenty neither of us had seen, and not too far from Reading. Russell hadn't ever been to the city, so we tried to walk around a bit, but the weather was not cooperating. After buying an umbrella we fared better, but we were both still anxious to get out of the rain, so we went to the Ashmodean museum.
A funny thing we've noticed about England is that it seems to have a great many of the world's treasures. This is the direct result of colonization, of course, and the most famous of these treasures are in London. There are plenty of amazing artifacts to go around, though, and the English don't seem too keen on returning the items to their rightful owners. At the Ashmodean, for example, there was a fine collection of Roman statues and pottery (more elaborate than what you typically see in history textbooks). They also had everything found in some particular Egyptian tomb, including statues, carved stone paneling, all manner of meaningful gifts and trinkets, canopic jars and the mummy himself with all four layers of his sarcophagus on display. This was all just on the ground floor. The rest of the museum artifacts were by and large of English origin - though parts of the museum were being changed or updated and could not be accessed.
We took a break from museums to go tour Christ Church College, which I had failed to get into when I visited before. It was quite impressive. Its hard to imagine how so much attention to architecture could be lavished on any building, and not a cathedral, but a university. It really is on par with many cathedrals and abbeys I've seen. In the picture you can see the ceiling above the staircase to the Dining Hall. I can't even imagine the time and money that must have gone into it.The Dining Hall was impressive as well. I'm glad I waited to go when it was open. The hall contains three long rows of tables, all set with lamps, silverware, glasses and side plates. They run the full length of the hall to the head table on the far end. The walls are lined with paintings of accomplished graduates of the college; prime ministers, bishops and the like. This building, like the Bodleian Library, was used in the filming of the Harry Potter movies.
Next we went to the Museum of the History of Science. For some reason I had decided this was the museum of Natural History (which had been recommended to us) but I was confused. As it turned out, however, this was an excellent choice both for content and time. It was a smallish museum (three modest floors) but it was absolutely packed with devices used for early mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, medicine - science in general. They had hundreds of astrolabes from all over the world, including the only known spherical astrolabe known to have survived to present times, abicuses, slide rules, microscopes, the old inner workings of a number of local church clocks, telescopes, vacuum bulbs. All manner of things. Some of the highlights included a chalkboard that Einstein had written on when doing a lecture in Oxford (it had been taken down and preserved afterwards) and the containers that were originally used to develop penicillin. The penicillin containers were interesting because of their variety. England was at war, so the university didn't have access to the metal containers they would usually have. Instead they used sheep dip cans, bedpans, biscuit pans, whatever they could get a hold of. They still have the originals, rigged up for scientific experiments.
Our last stop was by far our favorite, so I will devote a special post to it.
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