On this annually loving day of Valentines, I have a date as well to visit the city of Oxford in the county of Oxfordshire. I would not have visited this interesting historical township if it wasn’t because of the attendance of Ms. Ow planning and initiating the whole itinerary.
Once again, since both of us were not able to contact each other by mobile phone, we merely agreed on a meet-up in front of the biggest rail map at the Oxford station. This is both our first time arriving at the Oxford Station, but providentially we managed to find each other effortlessly despite that the common big rail map wasn’t there as it should be.
We bought the sightseeing bus ticket at £13.00 then only come to realized that the city was rather small and almost all of the attractions were within walking distance. And again...I lost one of my gloves even though I constantly and cautiously reminded myself a few times that morning. Nonetheless I am glad that what I’ve lost was just my gloves while my mobile phones are still in my pocket. Guess the plan to buy a dozen of gloves should really come into action after this third instance.
The Oxford University Museum of Natural History is definitely worth a visit due to the vast collections of interesting items and we both enjoyed the Pitt Rivers Museum the most featuring the Anthropology and World Archaeology. We even find Rumah Minangkabau in there but that would be too common for Malaysians perhaps.
While wandering at the food market hunting for food, we spontaneously spotted this cake house selling small and delicately designed cakes. We were both attracted by the colourful decorations and decided to get ourselves a valentine cake risking the fact that people would have perceived us mistakenly as the same sex couple…lol
While enjoying our cake in the open resting area after our lunch at Pieminister (have had Moo & Blue pie at £4.50), we were being attacked by pigeons trying to get a portion of deal from us and they even flew to our shoulder fiercely. The outward appearance of the cake definitely looks impressive but the content was absolutely disappointing. Guess the £7.50 was spent purely for the atmosphere of valentine and photographing purposes.
Few steps away from the High Street was this legendary Oxford Castle which is deemed to be haunted due to the long standing history dating back to the Norman Conquest more than a thousand years ago. With a fee of £9.25, we enter the castle with a guided tour where “Elizabeth Boswell” led us to explore few of the creepy places explaining to us the past cruelties that happened right in this castle. Before the tour ended, each of us has our photos taken in individual groups and the random outcome of the photo illustrates our convicted crime: “Mugging” and the punishment: “Public Whipping”…lol
It was 4.40pm when we left the castle insisting that we must at least hop-on the tour bus and enjoy one full round of the city tour before the last service at 5.00pm. We managed to get onto one tour bus just immediately after we came out of the castle, and decided to enjoy the breeze on the upper open-air deck despite the rain and wet seats. We no longer regret paying the full-day fare even though we only took a very short ride since the view and the weather was marvellous and thus has worth it all.
Again it is that time of the day to think about dinner and after walking few rounds on the street, we concluded that we have had enough of breads or other western cuisine and hence a Thai restaurant – Angrid Thai Canteen would be a great choice after all. The Khow Ka moo (£6.95) and Suki Yaki (£7.20) dish was excellent but the Tom Yam Kung (£4.50) was expectedly not spicy at all. We even tried looking for Chinese Restaurant in the hope of finding YuShang but this was kinda challenging and we failed to locate any.
Walking round the city after a heavy meal allows us to have great conversations and exchanging of positive ideas which ends our day perfectly. Glad to have spent this weekend with a great friend and together we get to explore somewhere new.
