Volume 2, Days 45-46
There was a pretty decent breakfast spread in the morning included with the price of the bed at my Oxford Backpacker’s Hostel, so I rolled out of bed into a leisurely breakfast while catching up on the news. I still needed to make my own coffee since the provided drink was instant — I’d rather drink tea in that case. I don’t really need to list out all the events of the morning, but there were a few details that stick with me. Firstly, there was a table of one, two, and eventually three Americans–all either college students or recent grads–that got into conversation with each other. As always, the sound of Americans chatting cuts through all the ambient noise to attack my brain like a drill and shatter my attention. It didn’t help that one of them was passing through England on his way home form a mission trip in Kenya and kept making extremely evangelical word choices.
The second notable occurrence of the morning was that someone turned the telly on to the morning news, as provided by RT. It was just a bunch of tabloid garbage and I heard them cycle through the same handful of news stories over an hour or two, e.g. the internet response to flamethrowers on drones and the choice of one Florida community to use “Baby Shark” to make the streets more hostile to the homeless. After checking
After checking out, I hung around the lounge for another hour or two to kill time. I was in no rush to reach Woodstock as my friend might not be back until the afternoon. But, eventually, I bored of eavesdropping on the South African fellow monologue at any woman in earshot, and headed out to catch a local bus. Good lord, the buses are expensive. It is weird in Britain that the bus sits at the stop while the driver processes each passenger in turn like a supermarket checkout, and while I appreciate the ability to pay with cash, I do not appreciate the high price of a ticket, especially when I swear I had seen enough adverts on the sides of buses or at bus stops advertising more reasonable rates.
Woodstock is a tiny hamlet of a town about 12 miles north of Oxford and still located within Oxfordshire. The town is probably most famous for housing Blenheim Palace, which happens to be the birthplace of Sin Winston Churchill and the home of the Duke of Marlborough. Not to be confused with a certain smoking cowboy, the current duke showed up to kiss the ass of a particularly small handed, long tied state visitor not so long ago. Anyways, I took a three minute walk around the triangle of streets that made up downtown Woodstock and parked at a cafe to chill out with my luggage. When I was ordering a 2 pound Americano and a 1.5 pound scone, I somehow got up sold on the set with cream and jam while being assured it was more cost effective. The bill came out to over 6 quid, so I’ll be blimeyed if these country folk know how to add. It was a really tasty afternoon tea, and I had just finished shoving it all into my mouth and shifted my attention to the new book I picked up from the hostel book swap (a knockoff Chinese novel), when I got a message from my mate O that they had returned home.
I dragged my suitcase the 5 minutes over to their lovely house on the corner in a residential neighborhood and rang the doorbell. If these adventure logs ever get novelized, I suppose I should paint the fuller character portraits of my friends, but for the internet here, I need to be circumspect. I know O and his wife from Beijing, but hadn’t seen him much in the past couple years, and had never met is now 3 year old daughter, who was napping on the couch when I arrived. What follows is mostly just catching up with friends, a home visit.
In the afternoon, the whole family headed over to an annual event called the Mock Mayor. A centuries old tradition in Woodstock, the people gather outside a pub where the is music, games, and the election of a mock mayor who is paraded to the town square in a grand procession and ceremoniously dunked in a brook. The event was very family friendly with face painting, carnival games, tug of war contest, and a magician. The pub had its full selection of food and drinks, but there were a few independent food vendors grilling burgers, baking pizzas, and frying up chips and the event organizers were selling bottles of prosecco and buckets of Pimm’s at bargain rates. The only catch was you had to pay a 1 quid deposit per plastic cup and there was no one available to refund the deposits when we wanted to head home (during the parade) for more snacky, bready goodness.
Back home, I may or may not have spent quality time entertaining a child and reading bedtime stories.
| Bus | 3.3 |
| Scone and coffee | 6.5 |
| Charity donation @ Mock Mayor | 1.5 |
| Round (2) of beers | 8 |
| Total: | 19.3 GBP (192.6 RMB) (USD 28) |