First Trip to London

London is naturally the most common tourist destination in England and the tour will remain incomplete without visiting this city. So, like everybody else I also set out for London on my second weekend here. Since it was my first trip, I mostly visited the main tourist destinations, couldn't go for anything unusual or nice places that tourists usually don't visit (there's a nice word in Japanese for this - 穴場 (Anaba)).

It felt a bit daunting at first to leave my comfort zone as I don't have a phone connection here and can't look up for routes unless I can luckily find free wifi spot. Also, that was my first journey by train and first time to leave Oxford. As I was meeting a friend of mine there we were little bit worried about finding each other since there was no means to reach me. However, surprisingly it wasn't really that complicated at all. London subway is definitely very well planned and easy to follow. There're train stations close to every tourist spot and definitely there'll be a lot of people everywhere (summer + London = huge number of tourists), so anyone could pretty much go anywhere by following the map and crowd.

Tower Bridge, one of my favorite photos from the trip

Here's one useful information I found about using the subway. It's definitely little cheaper and easy to travel with Oyster card. They require 5 pounds to deposit for the card but the card can be returned anytime after use and they refund the money. You can recharge the card for 10 pounds and I believe after 7 pounds it's usually free. So when I returned my card later at night I got back around 8 pounds.

These are the places I visited on my first trip and my first impressions. Other than British Museum I think I pretty much covered most of the attractions.

Tower of London, World Heritage Site

• Natural History Museum (Great place)
• Buckingham Palace (Not bad but felt bad for the people who live there lol! People keep staring at their house all day long!)
• Big Ben (Really liked the Gothic structure)
• London Eye (It was okay)
• London Bridge (Nothing special)
• Tower Bridge (Liked the most)
• Tower of London (Pretty awesome but also a bit creepy)

So, I started my journey pretty early in morning so that I could cover as many places as possible in one day. I definitely wanted to visit one museum properly, was vacillating between British Museum, Natural History Museum and Madame Tussauds Museum, but ended up going to the NHM as my friend had already visited the British Museum. The museum was architecturally beautiful and had a good collection. The main dinosaur hall reminded me of the movie "Night at the Museum"! Though that was filmed at the American Museum of Natural History, they actually look pretty similar.

First Dino after entering the museum

Spacious dinosaur hall

After visiting the museum my plan was to see as many places as possible by 5. So we started to walk and visited the listed places. I personally liked the Tower Bridge a lot! Luckily that was a beautiful sunny day and the white and blue colors of the bridge blended beautifully with the sky color. I also liked the architectural style of the Big Ben, it looked gorgeous even from far. I thought it'd easily pass for filming Harry Potter movies! Oh, we also passed by the Shard, which is the tallest habitable building in Europe.

Buckingham Palace Gate

Sculpture at the Buckingham Palace

Big Ben

London Eye

Tower Bridge

The Shard

This is pretty much all from my London trip, tried to be selective with posting photos. The following week was Oxford Digital Humanities Summer School, which was a memorable week in many ways and had the most fun time at Oxford. I can probably write another post on that. The weekend after summer school was "Recovery Weekend" as we all were really knackered after having intense workshop and too much fun 5 days in a row. So I decided to explore the places at Oxford instead, which was great.

This weekend I was in Manchester, which was kinda bittersweet experience. There isn't much green around the city but the architecture was great that made it aesthetically pleasing. I can actually write couple of posts on that (only if my time allows!). Next weekend will be my last weekend here and hope it's going to be memorable. Looking forward to it :) 

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 :)