Visiting the Inside of a 9-year-old Boy's Head

Today, Alex, Aisha, and I had more quality time with one another! Woohoo! (We've started having girls night/afternoons out and leaving the boys behind, but today they left voluntarily. Yesterday we had sushi and then crashed the guys' room. Anyways...) We had lunch at Magadalen college first, and then left to go to the Pitt Rivers/Natural History Museum at Oxford. After making a huge circle before discovering that everything was right next to the Radcliffe Science Library, which is, surprise surprise, where I've been studying, we enter the building to find this: 

Isn't the inside cool? It's like a combination of the Industrial Age and Gothic architecture. Statues of famous scientists like Darwin line the corridors, and for once the exhibits were arranged in phylogenetic order, not chronological. Pretty cool. AND YOU COULD TOUCH EVERYTHING...you know what that means if you watched the latest episode of "How I Met Your Mother." LEGENDARY.

From the other side.

Anyways, the Pitt Rivers museum lay just beyond the Natural History Museum. The Pitt Rivers museum is essentially a cabinet of curiosities. It contains artifacts from ancient civilizations all over the world, and they cover everything from weaponry to boats to clothes to the archaic, such as shrunken heads and skulls and other symbolic...things? Very cool. Also, every item had very small tags attached that had handwritten descriptions about the object and its origins. Handwritten. How do people have such good handwriting?!

Pitt Rivers. Three Floors. Hella stuff!!!

My personal favorite was this puffer fish lamp in the Asian lamp section. So cute. There were also eskimo clothes made out of seal intestines...you get a sense of the things that were here.

I also realize that I never posted about Edinborough. Honestly, I'm still working through pictures, but I have to say that I wasn't *that* impressed with the city. Yes, it was beautiful, and it reminded me of Lord of the Rings in that the city is layered: they started building at the bottom, ran out of space, and built on top over the old town. You can walk over bridges in the city, and when you look down, instead of seeing a river or something natural, you see another street below you.

Edinborough Waverley Station. Love the colors of the trees.

Edinborough had a lot of typical, spooky graveyards. This was the one we visited on Calton Hill, and we nearly couldn't find the exit out. Apparently, one of the ones closer to town is the one where J. K. Rowling got all her names in Harry Potter, like Tom Riddle. So Voldemort's grave is really in Scotland.

It was also probably the fact that it was damn cold and wet. We were lucky in that it only poured all the time. Usually, there's a gale that blasts through the city at the same time that renders umbrellas utterly useless. It got dark at 4 PM, and there wasn't much to see aside from Edinborough Castle...which after you've seen German castles, really isn't that impressive.

The Highlands were all right, but I really think the highlight of the tour was the Scottish accent of the driver. Having been to China, the mountains weren't quite high enough for my appreciation. Blue skies would've been nice too.

Glencoe. Apparently, there isn't supposed to be snow up there yet...so yet get a sense of how cold it was.

HIGHLAND COOS!!! They can withstand any weather, and they're so cute! The most famous one is named Hamisch (not this one), and I couldn't get a good photo of him because he didn't want to leave the barn. Understandable. He's 17 years old, which makes him 100 years old in human terms, and he's pampered like no other. They give him shampoo baths every so often. 

And of course at Loch Ness, they have a bunch of exhibits on the Loch Ness monster. The lake would've looked a lot better on a good day, because the waters are navy blue because of the high peat content.

Ughhh, I wanted to upload videos of the guide talking for you guys so you could hear the awesome, awesome accent, but Blogger isn't letting me =/

CANTERBURY AND DOVER ON SUNDAY YEAAAAH!