Oxford

The other weekend, Laura and I headed off to Joanne's old stomping
ground.  Oxford is about an hour from London, and conveniently
enough, buses leave from Victoria station every 10 minutes.  Which is
handy for those of us who tend not to plan too much.

Oxford is an interesting city.  The university *is* the city, and the
city is the university.  The main squares in the city are made up of
university buildings, and the churches mostly belong to the various
colleges.

Some of the colleges are rather posh..


I think we found Hogwarts!!  This eating hall looks exactly how I
would imaging the dinning room from Harry Potter.


Most of the colleges have their own churches, and they are all quite grand.


The emperor of Japan took a Masters in British Waterways at oxford,
and he lived in this dorm house.

I guess when you're the emperor of Japan, you don't need to learn
practical things.

It's interesting how the college system in Oxford works.  First things
students do is apply to the university, then they have to be accepted
by one of the colleges.  The colleges are actually very elaborate
dormitories or residences.  Thats where you sleep, eat and get
tutoring.  The colleges have one on one tutoring for all of their
members.  Oxfords failure/dropout rate is less than 20%, which is very
low for such a difficult school.

We also saw Oxford Brooks University, which is the university that
Joanne went to when she lived over here while she did her Masters.

Such a pretty place, as you might imagine it's a fairly
academic city and is very University oriented, I'd love to be a
student there.  At least for a little while, they are very strict with
tradition and rules.  Two things I avoid like the plague.

Here are all the pictures.

(little did we know that we'd be *driving* back through Oxford the
next weekend!)