Oxford

So originally we had planned to go to Leeds Castle on Friday... Our coach left at 9am, so we left our flat at 8 to get to Victoria Coach station. Stupid district line didn't have a train in the right direction for like over 10 minutes and it was commuting time so the doors stayed open EXTRA long at each station. Plus, victoria normally takes 30 min + from where we are. So we get off the tube and RUN to the coach station, but we already missed our coach. So we had to pay 3 pounds to change our ticket for saturday. Then we ended up buying tickets to Oxford.
We took the "oxford express" there... it only took an hour, maybe a little more. Oxford doesn't really have THAT much to do there except for the university. There are lots of old buildings everywhere, but most of them are associated with the university. Oxford university consists of i think over 40 "colleges." You have to PAY to get into each of them, so we only went into the most famous one: Christ Church college. This is where scenes from Harry Potter are shot! We couldn't go into the Dining Hall, which is like the "great hall" in harry potter and also has some relation to Alice in Wonderland? But everywhere you go there are students and some portions of the college visitors aren't allowed in.
We had a cornish pasty for lunch (yummy!) and then went to the oxford university National History Museum which had random stuffed animals you could touch, dinosaurs, random skeletons... Then we went to this museum that was attached called Pitt Rivers. It had REALLY weird things, like shrunken heads from So. America, mutilated heads, Japanese drama masks, totem poles, voodoo dolls. weird, but kind of cool. I like how Amy spotted this guy that just graduated from Pacific randomly riding a bike on the street ... i guess he's doing some post-grad work in oxford. RANDOM.
Then we walked over to Oxford castle, which is a newly opened tourist attraction. It was originally built as a castle, then converted to a jail (until 1996) and recently opened to the public. We had a tour guide (who called herself our "warden") who told us random stories about how the castle and prison were used. I learned that a crypt isn't where you bury people, its just where you store them before you bury them... and I learned that the staircases twist in a clockwise way to make it easier to defend the castle and harder for the offense to attack because if they were Right handed the positioning would be off if they tried to use a sword or something. Anyways, we saw some random prison punishments like this stair stepper and this CRANK people had to turn... kind of disturbing.
By then it was around 6, so we got on the bus and back to London.