June 19, 2022 - London, England

Today’s adventures took me on a small group tour (only 8 of us) to the University of Oxford, the Cotswolds, and Stratford-upon-Avon.  The University of Oxford is the second oldest University in existence, established in 1096AD.  The campus comprises many buildings, but we only toured a few of them.  The library doesn’t really look like a library, and if you were to visit the inside, we were told that you wouldn’t see any books - only reading areas.  The books are all stored in the basement of the building and if you were to stack them end to end, the books would stretch for more than 7 miles.  It is also one of the few libraries where you can’t take any books out.  They will be retrieved for you and you can spend time reading them in the reading room.  The library houses at least one copy of every book published.  The reading room of the library was featured in several of the Harry Potter movies where it served as the Infirmary.  Many famous people have attended Oxford such as; Stephen Hawking, Aldous Huxley, India Gandhi, Sir Walter Raleigh, C.S Lewis, Lewis Carroll, Robert Frost, Jonathan Swift, Albert Einstein, Oscar Wilde, and J.R.R. Tolkien, to name a few.  The first picture is of the library and the others are various buildings on the Oxford campus.

We then went to the Cotswolds, showing the iconic image of village life in England.  There are a number of villages in England that make up the Cotswolds.  We went to Bibury.  It’s like a step back in time and is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The cafe where I had lunch also own a trout farm.  You can see the large trout in the stream by the cafe.

Can you find the baby ducks and the trout?

We then went on to Stratford-upon-Avon, the place of William Shakespeare’s birth.  The area has become very touristy, but it was still great to visit and to see where he grew up.  His father had been a merchant who turned animal skins into leather, made gloves, and dealt in the wool trade.  The story we were told is that each night he’d hang the gloves that were for sale in the window and the next day you could enter the shop to purchase what you’d seen the night before, thus spawning the current trend of “window shopping”.  Anyway, Shakespeare was born in 1564 and has arguably contributed more to literature than any other writer.

Dinner this evening was at Browns at Victoria Station in London.  I think it was my favorite meal since I’ve been in the UK.  London is bursting with cuisine from all over the world, much like NYC.  Tonight’s meal of Roasted Cod, with chorizo sausage, fingerling potatoes, peas, fava beans, pearl onions, and a basil pesto sauce is probably a fusion of many different cuisines.  It was tremendous!