Punting and Zorbing (trying new things is fun!)

I have had my first visitor! My wonderful sister braved the long trek across the Atlantic to come and visit her big bro. Actually, it was only about 4 hours from St. John's to London. Who knew Canada and England were so close together? Laura arrived just in time for the crazy Bank Holiday Weekend. It is like Labour Day back home, but instead of everyone going to cottages, everyone goes to bars and restaurants. We were so busy that we had 4 bartenders working non-stop and there was still a crowd at the bar from noon until 7pm.

Laura got to experience the fun of a staff party on the Tuesday night as we all celebrated the end of the busy season. We closed the pub and then all of the staff started drinking. It was a lot of fun. Larua got to meet the crazy people I work with, like Rupert who has a 22mm hole in his ear (he made it himself) and Dan who looks like Harry Potter. All in all it was a good night, though it left us pretty tired for the trip to Oxford the next day.

I know I said that we would be going to Bath, but that had to get cancelled when we found out there was a railstrike the day we wanted to leave, so we couldn't get out of Weymouth until a day after we had hoped. So instead we went straight for Oxford.

We took the train up to Oxford, stopping for a couple of hours at Wincester on the way. Winester was the ancient capital of England back in the Saxon days and still has many old buildings. We had lunch at a nice little tea house and then headed back to catch the train to Oxford.

We managed to get a nice hostel that wasn't too busy. A big change from the last time Dzido and I were in hostels in Spain where there were always hordes of people. The first night we were there we want to explore the university a bit. In fact, Oxford University basically is the town. Everywhere you go there are university buildings. Oxford is actually made up of 39 colleges that come together to form the university. So it is huge. Each college has its own campus, but they all are so close to one another it hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. I really fell in love with Oxford. Perhaps it is because Weymouth is so lacking in any kind of culture, but I felt really at home in Oxford and it made me miss the university life a little bit.

After some wandering we went to try punting, which is the Oxford answer to the gondelas in Venice (the boats propelled by long poles). You still use a pole to push off the bottom of the river and use it as a rudder, but the boats and the rivers are much smaller than in Venice. It took some practice to get the punting right. Dzido was good from the start, but Laura and I tended to have us going in circles or off to the side of the river. By the time we made our second attempt a day later we had got the hang of it much better. The only bad part was that Laura didn't like the swans that kept coming near our boat.

The next morning we went to actually see Christ Church, one of the most famous colleges at Oxford. It was founded by Henry VIII when he wasn't too busy beheading his wives. Famous grads include 19 Prime Ministers of England, Albert Eistein, Lewis Carroll, John Rawls and John Locke (the philosopher, not the guy from Lost). It is also where they filmed some of the Harry Potter movies, though this is of less significance to me since I have not read the books or seen the movies. But just being around such a prestigous university was a great experience. The dining hall was really neat since it had portaits of some of the famous graduates and was all set up for the evening meal. Here is a picture of me pointing at Christ Church.

We spent the rest of the day wandering the town. We stopped at the natural history museum which had some cool dinosaur bones. But in the end I don't really like natural history museums. There are skeletons of elephants and stuff ostriches. It feels like a zoo after someone vacumed off all of the flesh from the animals. Just not my thing. In the meatime, Dzido and I tried on some bobby hats. I tried to look tough. Dzido looks like he just lost his puppy.



The next day we went down to Salisbury and from there took a tour of Stonehenge. This was really cool. You can actually get pretty close to the stones and we had a great tour guide who really knew his stuff. Even I couldn't complain about his history lessons! There was even what appeared to be a cult religious group there with drums dancing around. A litttle strange, but it added to the experience. Salisbury was another beautiful city. The cathedral there was the 4th tallet spire in Europe and they have an orignal copy of the Magna Carta. The history-nerd in me was very very please with this stop on the trip. That day Laura headed hom, hopefully having caught the travel bug that has kept Dzido and I going for the past 3 months (today is the 3 month aniversary of us leading Canada).

When Dzido and I got back we decided that we had not experiences enough new things and so decided to try Zorbing on our day off with my roomates Ema and Shannon. Zorbing was invented in New Zealand and is actually pretty simple. Take a 3 meter high rubber ball that looks like a hamster ball, throw in 2 people and a couple of buckets of water and then roll it down a hill. It was such fun. Dzido and I were just laughing as we rolled down the hill. Here is the website of the place that we went. If you ever have the chance to try zorbing, do it! We are now officially Zorbonauts and they gave us a printed certifcate to prove it. Here we are after the wet run looking like drowned rats!








And just in case you thought I had forgotten about the signs, I found perhaps my favourite one so far: