Oxford Life

Oxford is beautiful--full of medieval buildings, stately old brick and northern hardwoods that are just beginning to change color. Students in plaid skirts and v-neck sweaters lounge around the doors of shops and little old ladies in skirts, hats and slippers pedal furiously down the road and dodge buses like maniacs. A perfect city for pedestrians!

The majority of the city is actually the university itself, spread out in libraries and lecture halls and 27 separate buildings called colleges. Many of the buildings have a coat of arms and a gilded sign out front that declares the name of the college and sometimes what's studied there. The smaller ones resemble churches with statues and stained glass, the larger ones look like castles! In fact, Christ Church, one of the largest of the colleges, has its own cathedral inside and served as the setting for a Harry Potter movie.

The theology faculty library where Nick spends some of his time is an unobtrusive brick building very close to the Eagle and Child, a pub where Lewis and Tolkien and the rest of the "Inklings" use to sit in the Rabbit Room and discuss ideas.

The photos you see are a small piece of the Bodelian library (home to 800,000,000 books! More photos of that soon) and an Anglican church on our way into town.