The Other Shoe

I think a second Oxford (the other shoe... get it??) trip would be good (for the sole?) as we quite enjoyed our two days there.  The second day was a mixture of stuff, old and new, which gets rescaled when you’re in England.

We started out the day with a visit to the Ashmolean Museum, a world class facility.  One could spend days there, but we did kind of a quick tour seeing ancient things

 

And not so ancient things

(this is a cloak that some believe was given to John Smith by Chief Powhatan in 1607 (or so))

Museum fatigue soon set in and we decided to walk around the city some.  One of the things we were drawn to was the famous “Covered Market” it turned out to be a great place with all sorts of little shops with all sorts of foods, cheeses

(just a small section of the “blue” case with Stilton, Oxford Blue, Roquefort and others)

Butcher shops with real people cutting real meat

no comment

Including some cuts we don’t usually see at Giant or SuperFresh

Fish and Shellfish

And we may have missed the soup, but they did have the….

 

Anything you could wish for.. and of course all that food makes you hungry!   England is famous for its various versions of “pies” (remember Hampton Court?) so we picked out a little place that featured same

Clever, eh?

 

 

We had some chicken related thing, and when asked if we wanted gravy, we said yes.  Maybe not a good decision as we got a LOT of gravy, and of course you have to have mushy peas!  Was better than this picture portrays

After lunch the group reassembled at the famous

 

where George and Cecil Calvert (first and second Lord Baltimore) were educated.  While closed to the public we were afforded special access...

Not only that, we were greeted by the President of the college

 

Who talked about the history of the college, what they are currently doing, and then we got to their old library which contained lovely old volumes, including the oldest one they have

And to save your eyes, it was printed about 1481.  Amazing!

After that we saw the great dining hall

Which might look familiar to Harry Potter devotees..

And in one of the side rooms I spied

I have yet to get the story on this, will report..

We finished the day by having tea with the president, which wasn’t quite the elegant production I had envisioned. 

Then back on the coach to the hotel to get ready for our dinner at the Mole Inn, which you have read about and for which we were

DFD