My Travel Adventures

We spent the last two days of my friend’s visit in and around Oxford, as we had another mutual friend and his boyfriend fly in from the States. As soon as they arrived early in the afternoon, I took them on a tour of the most picturesque colleges in Oxford, but because I did not have enough time to do my research, I had to make up fake histories and interesting facts about them.

Our last proper day trip during my friend’s visit took us to the Midlands. My friend and I took an early train to Leamington Spa to meet my housemate Harry (who, for the purposes of this blog, chose the epithet “Harry the caper-denier” over much more flattering ones, like “Harry the Tall” and “Harry the rugged-chested”). Harry the caper-denier, so-called because he refuses to believe that capers are anything but olive raisins, picked us up in his car and drove us to the half-an-hour-distant Stratford-upon-Avon.

Having taken my friend to London twice, I found that there were still a few important places we had not seen. Thus, I set aside this Tuesday morning for a speed tour of the city, making sure my friend could get back to Oxford in time for his online meetings. We took a six AM train, which was the cheapest option until half past nine, and arrived at Paddington after seven.

Since my friend only took one week off from work, we had to plan around his US work hours during the second week of his visit. Thus, on Monday, I made sure that our excursion to Windsor would not bring us home any later than five o’clock in the afternoon. The itineraries for subsequent days were even more tight.

We arrived in London late in the morning and headed straight for the British Museum. In preparation for the visit, I made myself a short list of iconic things I really wanted to see: the Rosetta Stone, the Parthenon Marbles, the Hoa Hakananai’a Moai, the Benin Bronzes, the double-headed Aztec serpent, the Sutton Hoo Helmet, and of course an obligatory mummy. We managed to see all of them, taking a short break for lunch and returning once more because of the museum’s sheer vastness.

We reached Dover shortly after sunset on Friday and ate momos at a very nice Nepalese restaurant. Our hotel was also very cosy, which more than made up for the fact that my friend and I had to share a bed. He reminisced about the coffee they served in the morning for many days.

The more logistically complex journey I planned for my friend’s stay took us to Kent. We took the Oxford Tube to London on Friday morning, evading the exorbitant railway prices but getting delayed by bad traffic. We got off at Marble Arch and walked through Hyde Park towards Wellington Arch, where I told my friend about the bizarre history of the Wellington statue that once adorned (or, according to some, defaced) it. It was so big that instead of facing the street that ran through the arch, the statue had to be placed perpendicularly to it.

We arrived at the train station in Salisbury in the evening, so we quickly checked in and ate dinner. As my friend had never been to the UK before, I thought it would be a perfect opportunity to immerse him in the local culture: not only did we have dinner at the local Wetherspoons, we stayed the night in the adjoining King’s Head Inn Wetherspoon. Before going to sleep, we made a quick excursion to Salisbury Cathedral, which was beautifully lit up and peaceful (I resisted a few disgruntled calls to be spontaneous and just walk in any direction for an hour).

Our second UK trip took me and my visiting friend, as well two of my housemates, to Southampton. The weather forecast for the day was grim, and the drizzle that started before noon turned into an intermittently violent downpour that only ended at around four o’clock.

The first day trip on which I took my friend was a visit to Bath and Bristol. We arrived in Bath at the sensible hour of nine o’clock, which – come to think of it – happens to explain the absurd amount of money we paid for the train tickets there. I had reserved tickets to the Roman Baths for 10:15, so we spent a little over an hour simply wandering about the awakening town. Just like every proper spa town, it was bustling with retirees. What is remarkable about Bath is its unified appearance: practically every building in the centre is built of Bath stone, a sandy coloured type of limestone, and has the same grey roof.

I spent the latter half of Hilary Term (the second term at Oxford) eagerly planning and awaiting a visit from a college friend. In the spare time between my having to write essays and complete assignments, I was starring places in google maps, searching for connections on trainline, and studying the histories of the places we would visit. I did, however, have time to do other things as well. For example, my housemates and I visited the Pitt Rivers Museum, a major anthropological and archaeological museum in Oxford. The collection was interesting enough, but the lack of any logical geographic or temporal categorisation nearly drove me up the wall.