Oxford Saturday

I posted an image of this location earlier - wondering if anyone recognized it and didn't get any "bites" on my little quiz.  This is the Radcliffe Camera ("camera" = "room" in Italian).  It is currently a reading room for the Bodleian Library - though, sadly, not the reading room I was using.  If you've seen the movie The Golden Compass you've seen it there.  You're probably going to see a lot more of it if you follow my blog because I'm so taken with it that I can't walk past it without taking five or eight photographs, and I walk past it multiple times a day.  Although this is the first day I've seen blue sky here, so I'm also highlighting that in these images, as it is most welcome!

After 17 days on my own, I am still no good at selfies!  Or maybe it's just a function of old age, I don't know.  I'm actually going to go ahead and post my attempt even though it is unflattering and the picture is terrible.  We'll use it as a baseline to see if I improve with time.

Thankfully - as annoying as the crowds can be - there's always someone nearby who can take a photo for me.  Yeah, that's better  .  .  .

Things were really hopping today.  I've been surprised at how crowded Oxford is generally, but people seemed to come out of the woodwork today.  There was a big outdoor market going on, lots of street music in general, and some sort of crazy festival with people wearing bells and feathers and face paint and dancing in the streets.  (As I was filming the first clip I didn't even notice that there was a McDonald's on one side of the street and a Starbucks on the other  .  .  .  hmm  .  .  .) 

I found the street market while looking for the bus station, so I took opportunity to pick up some fresh fruit that will serve as breakfast the next two days.  It isn't worth it to get up for breakfast at the hotel I'm staying in here, so this will allow me to eat a little more healthily and to sleep in a bit - yea!

FYI - the next two pictures are both of two-lane roads - which illustrates part of why driving in the UK was stressful for me.

I got a really late start on the day - only my second chance to do such a thing since having arrived, and I took advantage of it!  Although my pictures may seem to belie this I spent very little time outside my hotel room today, but what time I spent was good.  The sunshine helped.  After heavily medicating myself so that I wouldn't cough and sputter all over the rare documents, I did do a bit more research, but I got to the Bodleian only an hour before it closed, so I couldn't do much. The reading I was able to accomplish was very interesting - more on that in another post.

I had an excellent Italian dinner at Bella Italia (but now I know that "pancetta" means "bacon," so I know what to avoid in the future - am learning a lot of important stuff on this sabbatical journey).  During and following my time in Edinburgh I wanted to read J. K. Rowling.  Now that I'm in Oxford I want to read Lewis, so that was part of my dinner experience tonight as well.

Well, this has been rather a hodge-podge post, so let's just end with another random fact.  As does Cambridge, Oxford also has a "Bridge of Sighs" - must be the thing to do -