What could be better?

I am in England. I will probably be here for three years or so for a post-doc in the Biochemistry department at Oxford. I have now been in the country for 5 days. I haven't really met any new people that I expect to see again so this seems like a good time to start documenting my time here... right? Right!

Oxford is a really beautiful town. You really do walk around and think "This is not my beautiful new home town... naaaaah." It has little picturesque alley ways and great grand stone edifices and charming little trees. It seems unreal at times. It seems unreal until you are walking along in the morning and the pile of blankets on the beautiful cobblestone happens to have a guy in it who appears to have slept there all night. It is also (ahem) more real as you get closer to the Hostel side of town near the rail way stations and you find that every morning there are little spots on the side walk where some noob drinker has barfed their dinner or simply spilled their midnight kebab. Now, I could be ungenerous and assume that it is the swarms of teen aged Americans staying at the hostel that are getting into this sort of thing in the middle of the night but I really don't *know* that.


Speaking of the hostel, I am in the process of trying to find an apartment. I have a good lead on a place about 2 miles north of the building where I work. There are buses to and from that go late into the evening and biking there is also very reasonable. I will say no more until I have a commitment but I really liked the place. It is a far cry from the horrid little place I saw on Friday. There was this letting agency that showed me something called a "kitchenette". The neighborhood was dangerous seeming and this little upstairs room was a tiny studio with a sink in the corner and a microwave size combo heating plate and *grill* on the counter-top. I might have shed a tiny tear right there if the agent hadn't been standing right in front of me. I canceled the other appointment after hearing that this dreadful place was the nicest one she was going to show me!

Today I went to the famed the Pitt-Rivers Museum. I think the thing to emphasize here is that I saw Dodo bird remains (OMG COOL) sitting next to a description of Alice Liddell (of Alice in Wonderland fame) along with the *real* Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson). I also saw SHRUNKEN HEADS and a witch that had been put in a bottle. Ok, Ok, all you can really see is the bottle but still... you don't want to let that witch out of there! That is just trouble.

I think the theme of the museum is... weird stuff from around the world. In this way it reminded me a bit of the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe New Mexico. The web sites for these museums do not even touch on the way the actual collections, as presented, strike you. To wander around the Museum of International Folk Art is to wander around a warehouse size room that appears to have been populated entirely by removing the contents of a crazy person's mind and putting them on display. The colors are insane and the gathering of this hodge-podge of different styles and putting them all side by side for comparison can be disorienting. The Pitt-Rivers had this affect on me as well but it has the benefit of the old-guys-in-ties anthropology stamp of approval and that makes Pitt-Rivers seem more like *Science* where the International Folk Art Museum just seems *Insane*.

Wow, I am beat. time to sign off... Here is to dreaming of tiny screams from tiny shrunken heads,
Little Bird