Our duty manager Lala sent us around the corner to the Turl Street Cafe for breakfast with a blank cheque to order whatever we liked as included in our $160 per night charge. Very satisfying.
At 8:45am most tourist events were not operating so we wandered through the old town and University buildings until 11am when a "free" guided walk was scheduled. We walked as far as Magdalen College along High St
and looked down on more punt boats from the bridge over the canal.
We sought relief from the peak hour traffic in the University Botanical Gardens, which were much smaller than the Cambridge ones, but had a more impressive entrance gate. We read later that J.R.R. Tolkien used to sit under a tree here regularly.
A lady was recruiting people for the walk and suggested we wander through the Covered Markets nearby. They reminded us of the Central Markets in Adelaide. There was a room full of people decorating cakes in the Cake shop, with some amazing items being produced.
Our tour guide was called Matthew, and he was about to complete a Masters Degree in Psychology researching "stress". He took us to places, all of which were within 400 meters of our hotel, and told us their history and related them to well known figures, especially those from television and film. He showed us a spot in the middle of the road opposite the Oxfam shop where the Oxford Martyrs were burned to death on order from Queen (Bloody) Mary.
The names of three were engraved on the nearby wall: Latimer, Ridley and Cranmer. The last of these was unpopular with the Queen because he persuaded Henry VIII to divorce her mother. The small Oxfam shop was actually the first one in the world.
We went into Balliol College, which is the oldest one (or not) and sat in the Chapel for a moment.
It was very good but not comparable to King's College Cambridge. The Dining Room for Students was set up and looked very similar to the Hogwart's one which was in another College. There were portraits of Harold Macmillan and Ted Heath on the wall.
He talked about Albert Einstein's time in Oxford while we were outside the Museum of the History of Science.
We saw where the Oxford English Dictionary was established and the hotel where Bill Clinton used to hang out and where Bob Hawke's record of 11 seconds for a yard of ale still stands. Of course all episodes of Morse, Lewis and Endeavour were filmed here and we saw the quadrangle lawn where Morse collapsed with a heart attack in the last episode.
We paid a pound to enter the first lecture room of the University, the School of Divinity, where theological questions were debated in the Middle Ages.
Matthew showed us the most hated room in the University where conflicts between students and locals were adjudicated in the early days with consistent bias in favour of the students.
He told us that the Bodlean Library had 11 million books (maybe more) and 40 sites in Oxford. Most of the books are in the new building which looks like a prison and has six floors of basement. We saw a door which inspired C. S. Lewis to write Narnia and The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Kenneth Graham wrote The Wind in the Willows in Oxford and Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodson) wrote the Alice books based on the daughter of his College Dean.
Matthew related that all graduates take an oath in Latin to send 30 pounds per year donation to eternity. He closed the tour by inviting us to make a donation to the tour operation, which we did. We had lunch at the Queen's Lane Cafe, which was the oldest in Europe. Across the road was Chelsea Clinton's favourite, the Grand, which was the oldest in England. Logic Lane was nearby.
Our last stop of the day was in Blackwell's Bookstore; the biggest in the U.K. This is the basement section.
Back to our garret to prepare for a noisy Friday night rage (by the locals, not us).
top floor next to downpipe is our window
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