While in London, I met Felix, a grad student studying there, and mentioned my plans to visit Oxford. He’d never been and was free that day, so we decided on a whim that he’d come along. All of the rest we didn’t figure out til we were en route:
Turns out, he’s from Dallas.
Turns out, he’s visited Rice several times.
Turns out, we had one friend from Rice in common.
Turned out, that acquaintance was currently doing a PhD… at Oxford.
What are the chances??
Our friend Hrothgar couldn’t meet up with us until evening, so Felix and I stuck with our original plan to see the Oxford Museum of Natural History. I always enjoy visits to Natural History Museums, but this one was particularly spectacular, from the architecture and columns each made from a different marble to the only remaining soft tissue specimen from the extinct Dodo in existance. We followed this by surreptitiously exploring Oxford’s Wyndham College, supposedly closed to the public at the time, followed by seeking out some traditional English fare at a pub. We split a fish pie and a rabbit pie, and both were fantastic, though I was somewhat unexpectedly partial towards the fish pie.
The next pub we visited was the Eagle and Child, which just so happened to be the favorite pub of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis! I must have forgotten that trivia from my Tolkien-obsessed middle school days.
Here we met up with Hrothgar and his flatmate Nikita, who then took us on a tour of their college, Exeter (which, I’d also forgotten, was Tolkien’s college). We crashed-by-invitation a grad student mixer between Exeter and another college and, having left Nikita at Exeter, ventured to a field where wild ponies normally hang out, but it was getting dark and the ponies had retreated to wherever wild ponies go at night. I couldnt help but notice that, if you’d asked a casual observer to identify the current vagabond in our group, I probably would not have been anyone’s guess :). I couldn’t have asked for better company on this day trip and look forward to following their travels this summer and beyond. We parted ways with Felix, who had to get back to London, and Hrothgar graciously put me up for a night to save me having to find a last minute hostel. Sidenote: I am constantly grateful for my time at Rice, but it’s times like these when I am reminded just how lucky I am to have such a great network of connections and friends all over the globe. In many ways, our community of care seems to extend well past graduation.
The next day we went to visit the Museum of the History of Science and Hrothgar’s favorite museum in Oxford, one that I hadn’t even heard of despite it being attached to the Natural History Museum, the Pitt Rivers Museum. It’s an anthropological museum, but instead of having exhibits for different cultures, the displays are organized in categories of items containing items from many different cultures. It is very neat to see the woven baskets, hats, riding saddles, death rituals, trumpets, etc. from lots of cultures spanning many years side by side. We also got to play a traditional Ugandan xylophone with lots of other opportunistic musicians, mostly under the age of eight.
We had lunch before my bus back to London at allegedly the best restaurant in Oxford, a small, unassuming Thai place where you apparently have to make dinner reservations months in advance. I haven’t eaten enough places in Oxford to comment on its rank in the area, but it was definitely some of the best Thai I’ve had, ever.
I left Oxford very glad to have made the journey, headed back to London (passing so many fields of sheep along the way!), and caught a night bus up to Edinburgh, where I had plans to meet my friend Cayt the next day. I’ll save that for my next post, as well as a dissection of some thought provoking things I’d heard about America from a Scottish biker couple over scotch whiskey.
I’m still about a day behind in posts, though, and wrote this up on a bus to Manchester, where I’ll be seeing another old Rice connection, Neil, who as a post doc was my first ever biology research advisor! He’s dived into culinary arts since returning to Manchester and I am excited to sample his creations at one of his monthly Pud Clubs tonight! After Manchester, I head to Ireland!
Kate T. Snyder, Ph.D. 