DAY 46 SUNDAY MAY 9 - LAST DAY IN OXFORD

At 10am we set off to walk to the Museum of Natural History, and we found lots of people walking to the city centre dressed as though they were going to a wedding.  They were closely followed by a large group of young people wearing academic dress.  Matthew told us yesterday that today is a graduation day.

We spent an enjoyable hour and a half taking in some of the thousands of exhibits, starting with the Dodo, which was a big item of interest.

Oxford was a place where the last of the dodos were kept.  Now there is only a head and two claws remaining (in replica).  You may remember that it featured in Alice in Wonderland, and that was because Lewis Carroll was here.  He liked the dodo because he had a stammer and used to introduce himself as Charles Do-do-dodgson.  He also has his replica here.  Also in replica was Carl Linnaeus of Sweden, carrying his Bible, which he used as a source of botanical information.

We saw some Australian birds and mammals as well as a section on Aboriginal art.

When we walked back into town we found the Graduation in the Bodleian building was over and graduates were emerging.

The next museum for us was the Museum of the History of Science, where many old gadgets and implements were on show. This was the building where Albert Einstein once worked and a blackboard showed his calculus equations that showed that the universe is expanding.

 We needed Sheldon Cooper to explain it to us in simple terms.

In the Covered Market there was a Moo Moo milk bar, which looked very similar to the one in York.

We queued up and Malcolm had Apple Pie flavour milkshake and Lyn had Almond Slice.  They were not as good as York.

Queen's College Music Department put on a free concert at 1:30 in the Shulman Auditorium.  We had to follow signs through a maze of outdoor corridors to find it, but it was a very nice brand new building that held about a hundred people but only about 15 turned up, mostly music students.  It was a free concert but there was a retiring offering basket.

Ellie Bray was a Soprano in her first year and sang four songs accompanied by James Orrell on the piano.  Then James played a long piece without music which used the whole keyboard, and was hard to discern memorisable themes from.  He put a lot of feeling into it.  Overall the concert was lively and intense, but too consistently modern for our tastes.