The Beautiful Blenheim Palace

Here goes my long overdue post on Blenheim (pronounced Blen-im) Palace visit. I went there on the first Sunday after coming to Oxford and wanted to write earlier but couldn't make it due to lack of time. But better late than never, so here's all about the beautiful palace.

The palace is situated in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, takes approximately 30 minutes from Oxford campus, and pretty easy to go, the bus will directly drop there. It's actually a monumental country house that was entitled as palace later on and remains one of it's kind as the only non-royal country house in England. The palace was built between 1705-1722 and is one of England's largest houses. It was designed by the architect Sir John Vanbrugh in English Baroque style. Designated as UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987, the palace is a popular tourist destination here.

Palace gate, but this is not used for visitors

Palace exterior 

I personally thought the exterior was not very exquisite as many other palaces but found the interior more beautiful. At this time not all the rooms in palace are open for visit but those we could see were very nicely decorated. Especially the paintings on some ceilings were amazing. Also, the palace covers vast land area with multiple gardens, such as Italian garden, Secret garden, Lavender and butterfly garden and a maze (most fun part!). I found the bird sculptures curved out of shrubs in the Italian garden really cute. It was very windy and rainy that day and those birds were swinging slowly with the wind, which made them look even cuter!

Garden view

Dining hall

The maze with lavender garden and butterfly garden are actually not adjacent to the palace, it's a bit of walk, takes around 30 minutes. Or there's a toy train that takes from palace entrance station to that place and costs 50p one way. The maze was interesting but needless to say I couldn't figure out which way to go for a while (well, I guess it's normal!), and felt like a complete idiot :-/ People like me who have fear of direction loss shouldn't really go to maze, they should look from afar having people fun (-_-) Anyway, I could eventually climb one of the two bridges and took some pictures.

Blenheim Palace Maze

The lavender garden was actually smaller than I expected and couldn't take decent pictures of the butterflies at the butterfly garden but that's alright. It's overall a nice place, even to go for an afternoon/evening walk and I felt it was worth visiting. So, I ended up changing my one-day pass to annual pass thinking if I go there with some other friends by any chance. They just needed people to fill out a form and now I've an annual pass with my picture on it, which I think is pretty cool!

The following Saturday I visited London, so next post will be on my first London visit :)

First week in Oxford

From the title of this post it's pretty obvious that this post was due long time ago. Before coming here I thought I'd write something everyday. I just work till 5, no homework, so should be easy, right? However, in real it went like this- jet lag, settling in the new city and fatigue. So, almost one week is over and here's my first post from Oxford!
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After wrestling with packing and moving all my stuff till the last minute, I finally flew from Chicago on 4th of July (I know it's not the best day to leave U.S. :p) and reached England on Sunday morning. Though I was pretty tired, the journey was rather fun. I met some cool people on my way, we even exchanged contacts.

* Every time I travel somewhere alone, I always get to know some interesting people, that makes me realize that there's something special about everyone, we just need to know the right way to approach them *

Anyway, landed at Heathrow safe and sound but was still a little worried about getting to dorm safely, mainly because of luggage. Usually I try to travel light but this was the first time I had to pack for 6 weeks for going somewhere other than home and it was NOT easy..phew (>.<)

So, the first day was pretty much spent on sleeping and eating. I went out to hunt some food on evening, and because of my "exceptional" sense of direction couldn't make it home straight :-/ But could return eventually, didn't have to sleep on street luckily!

Second day was our orientation day, starting from morning. We met at Oxford e-Research Centre, which is my workplace, followed by lunch and going to meet Bodleian library staff. Meeting around 50 new people can be a bit overwhelming, but my supervisor said I did a great job dealing with that. I give most of the credit to my tiredness though! I guess my senses were getting pretty numb to the level that I couldn't feel anything anymore! But it was nice meeting everyone, especially people at OeRC are really nice and fun to work with.

Campus store at Argos Oxford City Centre

Rest of the week was spent trying to get the grip of my project, understanding and getting familiarized with the dataset, planning, attending meetings and some events, which include launching ceremony of Digital Bodleian and talk by famous HCI scientist and professor Alan Dix.

In the mean time I had to visit the city centre to get few things for survival and made a record of not losing my direction! (Yay! :D) Especially, the weather was really nice on Wednesday, so I took few photos of surroundings as well. Posting few of those.

Radcliffe Camera, landmark of Oxford

One week was well spent but I do miss my friends here and for some reason it feels longer than a week. Five more to go! Tomorrow I'm going to Blenheim Palace! Hope to come back with some good pictures and good memories :)