Beyond the Oxford Bubble: London and Bath

Oh dear, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? Since I last blogged, I somehow managed to survive the last week of Michaelmas Term, drag my excessively heavy suitcase back to the States, and spent the first week of my Christmas holiday — although the fellows over at Oxford discourage us from using the word holiday, which would imply that we actually get a break from coursework! — doing absolutely nothing related to academia. Since I still have an econometrics essay to write before next term starts, though, I was going through my to-do list and realised that there are still a number of things that I wanted to blog about but never quite got to. Consider this attempt number one to make up for the deficit of updates.

One of the things that I was very much looking forward to about studying at Oxford was the chance to final wander around Europe, which is a continent I have studied quite a bit but never quite seen. Alas, I quickly learned that the nature of the academic calendar at Oxford is such that there aren’t a terribly number of opportunities to just hop on a plane to anywhere on the Continent (well, I’m sure I could have done it, though it would have come at the cost of precious work time!).

During seventh week, however, I was able to journey into London twice in two days’ time. Getting from Oxford to London is quite convenient: it is a little more than an hour by train or two hours by bus, though almost everyone I know prefers the bus because the timetable is far more flexible (as I grew fond of saying, buses between Oxford and London run more frequently than the DC metro on the weekends). On both occasions, I went there for specific purposes, first to see Ingrid Michaelson in concert and then to watch some fantastic tennis at the ATP World Tour Finals (both links, by the way, take you to my personal blog, where you can read much more about it), and so I’ve still not yet been able to visit London for the sole purpose of, well, visiting London! With that said, though, I was able to walk through Westminster in Central London and snap some photos:

To my Oxford eyes, London seemed impossibly big and filled with places to explore, and I cannot wait until I have the chance to do so.

During my last weekend of Michaelmas Term, a good friend of mine and I went to Bath for a short day trip. I was initially reluctant to go on account of some outstanding econometrics essays, but it ended up being one of the highlights of my term! Bath is a little over an hour away from Oxford by train, and it was my first experience with the often maligned British rail system. In its defence, the trip to Bath went just fine, though I suppose that was more than cancelled out by the forty-five minute delay we encountered while returning to Oxford. In any event, Bath is most famous for the ruins of the baths that the Romans constructed when Britannia was under their rule. The history of England is so closely tied to names like Elizabeth, Shakespeare, and Victoria that it is so easy forget that men like the Emperor Hadrian built a very famous wall across the British Isles and that Julius Caesar, during his Gallic Wars, launched two invasions into Britain, and it was a revelation to realise that, at its heart, Bath is a Roman city.

On the outside, though, Bath is so clearly a creation of the Regency Era of the early 1800s. The city centre was absolutely beautiful to stroll through, and, as an Oxford resident, I have rather high standards for that sort of thing!