Eventhough I think that Cambridge is a much more interesting place than Oxford to visit, there are still a few things here that makes Oxford a good place to visit, such as the museums. With the amazing museums that they have here, it's impossible to imagine any English child ever getting bored of science. The History of Science Museum on Broad Street is an example of the great museums they have. Not only is the admission free but it is full of neat and interesting things related to science. Truly amazing. This is a picture of Albert Einstein's blackboard from a lecture he held at Oxford in 1931.
Another world-renown museum in Oxford is the University Museum. It's a natural history museum that contains tons of fossils, bones, bugs, and taxidermed animals; This is the museum that has the stuffed dodo bird Lewis Carroll used for inspiration in his Alice in Wonderland books. The amazing thing about this place is it encourages kids to play with the artifacts and there are a million things to play with. However, there is an even better museum connected to this museum called Pitt Rivers Museum. This museum is dark and dank but contains everything that anyone would ever consider interesting. With the amount of stuff they have, much of the materials are stuffed into shelving units that people are encouraged to pull out and look through. I probably missed a lot of the stuff - there's so much - but I've gotta think that the star attractions of the Pitt Rivers Museum are: the mummy, the tens of shrunken heads, and this little bottle. The rumor goes that this silver bottle houses a witch that was trapped in it in 1915. Even with all of the stuff to see and do in these two museums, the best part of the museum must be the cost. It's free.
Undoubtedly, the most famous museum in Oxford is the Ashmolean Museum. Actually, I've been told that it is one of the great museums in the world and I wouldn't argue against that. It contains so many important pieces concerning English history that there are many that say it is unofficially England's national museum. One of the most interesting things that I saw here was the lamp Guy Fawkes had when he was caught during the "Gunpowder Plot" of November 1605. Guy Fawkes is the person caught with gunpowder in the cellars of Parliment. The story goes that he was going to blow it up and take over the country. he was caught, tortured, and killed on November 5th. November 5th is now a national day in England celebrated with drunken rowdiness and tons of fireworks.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment