Oxford Canal. I thought it was just a myth, but people really do go "punting" (a bit confusing for an Australian since punting means something a bit different to us) along the river/canal.
There are lots of lovely buildings all throughout Oxford, unfortunatey you can't see them for the mobs of tourists on walking tours taking photos (and the buses. So many buses!)
All I can say is ... ouch. I had to walk everywhere in the gutters because the olde cobbestoney paths were certainly not designed with faux-converse in mind. (Still, everyone rides bikes in Oxford, so the gutters were the safest place to be)
The good thing is, if you turn down a few sidestreets (and stay away from the big-name colleges) you can find pretty little streets and churches and courtyards everywhere, where you can sit and have your lunch without being run over by a tourist bus, or having people asking you to take photos of them.
And then if you take another turn you end up ...
(I won't knock that shopping centre, though. It might not look pretty, but it had a massive Primark and I bought a lifetime's supply of underwear for 7 pounds).
Or ... Mormons recruiting in front of the bank:
I went to the Oxford Museum of Natural History (University Museum) and Anthropology (Pitt Rivers Museum). They were AMAZING.
The University museum was this huge high-ceilinged room full of skeletons and stuffed animals and all sorts of good fun (I patted an otter. It was lovely).
Least convincing platypus I've ever seen.
(Hero in a half-shell. Unfortunately, everyone else there was either 15+ years younger than me, or 10+ years older than me, so they didn't get the joke when I started singing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (or tortoises I suppose) song to myself).
The Pitts Rivers museum was strange. It was dark and cramped, and there was so much stuff in there that I couldn't really take it all in. I'd need a tourguide and at least a week to even scratch the surface.
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