England days 4 - 9

Well, we've had just over a week in Oxford and it's still raining... boo hiss.
We have done some sight seeing and Bronson has already gotten himself some fun british cars to play with on the sleek "wood" floor of the kitchen. (This one's a taxi - I find taxi's here very hard to identify, often they don't even have a taxi sign on them, nevermind they're not yellow!)



Here's the view from our kitchen window - all the rain has caused a couple rivers to flood, the Thames being one of them (the one which runs right through Oxford). Alright, so not really through our window, but this is from the Magdalene Bridge, 10 minutes away, this field has totally flooded, if you didn't know better you'd assume it was another river running under the bridge (in fact I did the first time I passed).
Today Bronson and I went to Alice's shop, the Alice in Wonderland store. Lewis Carroll based the sheep shop on this actual store which is right across the road from Christ Church College where he was a student (through, L.C. is his pseudonym - Bronson and I learnt that on the Oxford story ride we took yesterday!)



So we're starting to feel right at home here, Bronson bathes in the kitchen sink and is okay with it. Matthew did a load of laundry for us in the laundry room downstairs and now all of our underwear, socks and most of B's pj's are purple. And I have a regular line-up of game shows to watch in the afternoon on t.v. after we get back from our outings ('Win my wage' and 'Golden Balls') I find Brit gameshows to be more human based, they're all about guessing if someone's lying or not, though they never resort to being rude and after being voted off people congratulate the remaining players on a good game.
On Friday I threw out my back so we took it very slowly on the weekend. On Saturday Matthew got us kicked out of the Museum of History of Science, so we went to the Ashmolean museum which is an art gallery. It was nice, had a great display on egypt, but the art wasn't as extensive as the Norton Simon in Pasadena.
This is Radcliffe Camera aka Rad Cam, it's a library, part of the huge Bodleian library. The rain started as we left the Ashmolean. We found a small restaurant called 'Vaults and garden' in, well, the vaults of a nearby building (I feel like I should call it a castle - buildings around here are far more than just your average run of the mill business building, they're so grand) We had a nice carrot and lentil stew and scones. The garden area had tables and chairs next to grass and graves. That's right. Graves. Eating next to a grave, in North America seems wrong. Here you have little choice. In fact, as I search for places to allow Bronson to roam free, I'm finding that most greenspace is either flooded or grave sites randomly strewn about the city, a few here, a few there. There is a small meridian in a road near Matthew's science building with a few grassy graves and a small fince around it. You see people leaning on the fence, hanging out.

Other things I've noticed:
- It's encouraged that cars park half on the sidewalk, half on the street
- Supermarkets around here do not refrigerate their eggs
- They have weird chip flavours here "prawn cocktail" anyone?
- Although they drive opposite, walking still seems to be a 'keep right' situation
- I feel very safe here, even when I hear people making their way home from the pub at 4 am
- Everyone calls you 'Love' ; at first I thought people just really liked me... but no
- The tellers in supermarkets, etc sit down at the till!
- There are alot of large sizes of clothing in normal trendy stores, which is funny because I think the average american woman is larger than the average brit lady...
- They don't have normal baby food - they have 'Fisherman's catch' and 'spaghetti bolognese' and 'mushroom rissotto' but where's the green beans???!??!
- Bronson is still really cute, even with the exchange rate.