Oly Oly Oxford Free!

Wow okay that was really bad. Anyway, late blog post for Oxford because our hostel did not have computers it only had internet jacks but we had nothing to jack into with so it had to wait. But to be honest we did not really have too much to blog about for Oxford. We sort of spent our time in Oxford doing fairly normal things we would do if we lived there, and all our touristy kind of plans were dashed for various reasons. The first problem with doing things like that was we did not get into Oxford until a little before 4, and as previously stated everything in Europe so far closes around 5/6. And ho-ly crap, Oxford is like bike capital of the world. Seriously, look at that picture! That is the third basically bike parking lot we came across, there were massive amounts of bikes parked everywhere. And people were riding them all around us. We considered renting them but we never really came across a place to do so surprisingly and the hostel guys were not sure where we could, but whatever it was pretty late in the day anyway so we would have had to bring it back quick. So we checked in, dropped our stuff, and then went out on the town. Our hostel is pretty cool, and we had our largest room yet – 18 people. But the room is sort of divided into 2 sections, so all 18 were not in the same area there were 6 in a different area from us. The place was cool though and the guy at the desk was great and we liked it.

So we went out into the city with some things marked off on the map and first decided to head to the nearby covered market. We got there to find all the doors locked but we could still walk around for a few minutes to see in the windows and such and it looked like a real cool market, just happened to miss it. Oh well. As we walked down the main streets of Oxford we stopped into a bunch of stores to look around, including a few book stores (one of which every book inside was £2! Jen and I got a pair of really awesome hillarious books. The picture of the Bush book was a book we found there, it was Yoga instructions using a Bush doll as the model and written in mock-Bush sounding words.) Next on our list we headed over to Christ Church, which is where much of Harry Potter was filmed, including the Hogwarts Dinner Hall (This wizard kid is really dominating our trip lately, eh?) To find that while it was actually not closing for another half an hour, they stopped admitting new guests a half hour prior. So that was a bust. Then we walked some more and everything was closed so we sat down and decided that we would grab some dinner before all the pubs closed and then see a movie, because the cinema was opened until late!
So we ate at a Pub called St. Aldate’s Tavern and I got Fish and Chips, because it was something I just felt I should get in England. It was very good; the home-made tartar sauce was awesome. After that we headed down to the Cinema, Odeon Theaters’, and planned for the girls to see Sex in th City 2 and Dave and I to see Prince of Persia. We found that the theater we were in was only playing Sex in the City and Robin Hood, but that around the corner was another theater playing Prince of Persia so the girls got their tickets and we went around the corner to get ours. The ticket prices are very different here. Cinemas have assigned seating based on your tickets, and 3 available seat types – regular, about £6, premier (what Dave and I got) about £7, and Deluxe Luxury or something like that for £9 (which the girls got, and was not offered in our theater because it was like a quarter the size of their giant one). The regular were normal seats, the three middle rows of our theater (which only had 6 rows and was super tiny) were our premiere. And for the girl’s their luxury seats were in the front 2 rows of the mezzanine (yeah, their theater had a balcony) and were big comfy love seat couches. Crazy. So we saw Prince of Persia and I don’t know if anyone saw it yet but we thought it was awesome. Also British commercials before the movies are really funny, we saw a hilarious A-Team commercial for a cell phone company over here called Orange. Youtube Orange A-team ad its real good.

After the movie we hung out back at the hostel with our roommates who were finally there, Alex and Kate from San Diego, Travis from NY but currently living in Germany, Logan from New Zealand, and this girl from outside Toronto was there for a while but left. We hung out in the room and then the common area for a long time and it was good.

This morning we checked out but checked our bags back in so we could go back out into Oxford to try and make up some of the things we missed, and Travis came with us. We ended up going to a farmers market that was real cool, and a little mall thing including a Gap store which as you can see by the picture Dave was not happy about ha ha. We went to Christ Church and walked through the outer green, and came upon the buildings which were all under heavy renovation. We decided it was not worth it to drop the £4.50 to spend 10 minutes tops walking around and hoping we were able to get into what we wanted too since much of it was closed. So that was a bummer.

So anyway, the next 2 days... London! We are here in the Picadilly Backpackers Hostel just outside Pickadilly Circle and ready to see what we can see! We are hoping to go on the same company's free tour that was so awesome in Edinburgh and I may or may not post again tonight but I may just save it for tomorrow, we shall see.