Food highlights of England

Today we toured the Bodleian Library. We opted for the extensive 90 minute tour and so we were assigned Sue as a guide. I knew it wasn’t going to go well when she revealed she has a PhD in “informatics”, which she got after stints in teaching and nursing. Ron boldly asked what informatics is and she said that it’s a PhD in the study of transferring print material to online material. Is it not enough to be a simple microbiologist or a cultural anthropologist?

And even worse is that Sue was one of those tour guides who likes to ask us A LOT of questions and they’re all based on knowledge of historical facts from over the centuries, and, as you may recall, I have very little of that kind of knowledge. We had two of those over-eager types on the tours, belting out answers like King George and The Lutheran Reformation and one of those people was Ron, which was very personally frustrating for me since we’re just getting started on historical sites and he’s even better at World War II stuff. Where oh where is my moment of glory? Couldn’t there be a tour guide who says Has anyone ever eaten FOUR of those two ounce super sharp English cheddar sticks with their breakfast this morning and I could pipe right up.

Here’s our guide, getting ready for our tour in the 15th century original room of the library. Look at that ceiling! No other interior pictures are allowed but you can Google it.

Here’s the beautiful dining hall for Keble College:

And here’s Grace and Ron, walking out of breakfast this morning to the courtyard of Keble College. There’s 38 colleges that comprise Oxford University and they all seem to have these lovely grounds.

Here are two more: the first one is Worcester College and the second one is Christchurch:

We toured the Bodleian Library, the Sheldonian Theatre and the Ashmolean Museum. The Ashmolean has five stories of stuff, jam-packed in, from Egyptian artifacts to paintings by famous people who paint things. I saw a really cool pair of 500 year old men’s brogues and a pair of tweezers so unwieldy that the only thing they could pull out would be an entire eyeball, if that were somehow your goal.

But the highlight of the day occurred at dinner. I went to the bathroom (my mistake) and when I came back, Ron and Grace had, once again, ordered themselves some alcohol. And these drinks came with these little puffy UFO-looking things on a stick. Once I bit it open, the rice coating disintegrated on my tongue and POOF!, a little bit of Sweet Tart-type powder came out. This is an extraordinary candy, people. I stole one from each of my drinking buddies and then did what any good mother would do: I sent my daughter up to the bar to flirt with the bartender so she could get me some more of that candy. Here’s a picture of my score. We leave for Krakow tomorrow so you’ll hear from me in a day or two, once we’re settled.